How Does UX/UI Design Affect SEO?
Several years ago, rated sites were purely ranked by keywords. Today, user engagement variables have come to be a crucial component for increasing your website’s SEO rankings.
These engagement variables consist of time spent on sites and individual pages visited by users.
Google now recognises real human behaviour when regulating which websites should lead in search rankings.
This means that both user experience and user interface design have become significantly more relevant to your SEO rankings.
To assist you with knowing which areas of UX and UI design you should consider for your online platform, here is an outline of how UX and UI design effects SEO.
UI Design & SEO
Essentially, the more alluring and engaging your website is, the more visitors you will get. All the same there is no point having an aesthetically pleasing platform if the fundamentals behind it are not functioning to supply the best experience.
If you wish to create a first-rate user interface design and do not have access to professional web design, a digital strategy, branding and development, you should certainly consider hiring a professional UX/UI design agency (such as ourselves).
Nevertheless, whether you take experts on board or go it alone, there are three processes in which the user interface effects SEO rankings.
1. Simple Navigation
At the forefront of quality UI design is a well-developed user interface. Your UI should predict your visitor’s needs, allowing them to find what they want quickly and with ease. When your website framework and site navigation are fully optimised it can generate site links appearing in the results on search engines, such as Google.
2. Clean Code
It’s crucial your website uses clean code so that it can be crawled easily by search engines. If your code is hard to read your website rankings will be extremely low on sites like Google.
Additionally, if you do not have clean code, your website’s output will be slow. This will be unappealing to visitors, alongside creating a negative score for SEO.
3. Responsive Design
Were you aware that Google now consider your mobile website to be your main website? It’s crucial to know, as it means you have to manage your responsive design more than before. If your website is not optimised for a mobile (or other screen sizes) it will limit SEO performance enormously.
4. Headings
Headings are often unheeded with regards to how UI design effects SEO. However, if you do not use correct headings, search engines will not be able to understand the point of your website.
When headings are used properly, search engine indexers can understand what your website is about and rank you appropriately. Nevertheless, while it is vital to use well defined headings, it is also essential you do not use to many of them. As with everything there needs to be balance between optimisation and user experience.
UX Design and SEO
UX design stands for user experience. Unlike UI which is more about the functionality of the site underneath the surface, UX deals with the more aesthetic elements and user flows. Although, not as important to your rankings as UI design, UX design does contribute to the ranking performance of your site.
Search engines use metrics to suggest the quality of your website. These metrics can then affect your rankings. There are many metrics that are closely related to UX design. See below 3 elements that contribute to more advanced SEO.
1. Meta Tags
When you insert meta tags and define both the meta title and meta description, your pages are optimised to attract click throughs. Search engines will discover your content more easily and raise you up the SEO rankings.
2. Bounce Rate
If you produce a good looking and functional website it is inevitable that users will spend more time on your site. It is also more likely that they will land on your site and click on more than 1 or 2 pages.
By decreasing your visitor bounce rate, you will improve your website rankings. It is important to create a visually pleasing and useful website that is optimised to your visitor’s needs.
3. Inbound Links
When people link to your pages, value is added to your website. Additionally, when backlinks are used it can advance your SEO performance, so you should obtain as many links as possible.
4. URL Structure
A fundamental part of an effective user experience strategy is the structure of URLs. When you utilise URL structures effectively, you improve the hierarchy of your site and make things easier to find.
In general, the URL helps communicate quickly what the individual web page is about.
When you use inadequate URL structures, users will get the opposite effect, and obtain no insight of the hierarchical nature of the website or the connotations of the web page.
Take notice of the keywords you use in your URLs; this is because search engines such as Google use words in a URL to index your web pages.
Try to focus on logical and clean URLs that both search engine crawlers and website visitors can easily understand.
Final Thoughts
It should now be clear how important both UX design and UI design are in enhancing your SEO.
Great UI design ensures your website is easily operable using clean code, executing a responsive design, and including suitable headings.
Great UX design requires inserting carefully phrased meta tags, considering bounce rates, implementing inbound and outbound links, and most importantly using the correct URL structures.
SEO and website optimisation demands a lot of testing and analysing, technical skills and feedback from users.
If you are not an expert, it is vital that you hire a professional to ensure your website is optimised for SEO.
It is a worthwhile investment and will ensure your website gains more visitors over time and complies with search engine regulations.
If you would be interested in an audit of your current website, please get in touch with us today!