If you’re looking to increase your website’s conversion rate and SEO ranking, you first need to consider the User Experience (UX) as an extremely important factor in your overall strategy. If your website design is poor or confusing, visitors won’t be able to use it effectively and may choose to leave instead of submitting a lead form or making a purchase.
User Experience can include multiple elements but it essentially means; how people interact with and feel about your product. When a website is designed well, it will generally have high-performing UX. If a website is five years old or hasn’t been designed by a professional, there’s a good chance it’s running with low-performing UX. UX doesn’t just affect how people behave when they’re on your website, it’s also a fundamental factor as to whether or not they will find it in the first place.
In this blog, we’ll explain what Usability means, how UX affects SEO and why it’s so all crucial for your website.
Usability
‘Usability’ refers to the level of ease people have as they interact with a website. Website Usability has been around for years but it’s only more recently that marketeers have truly started to consider how users might behave as they scroll a website. You need to ask yourself these questions:
- Can they quickly get around my website without difficulty?
- How long does it take them to find what they want?
- What obstacles are preventing them from converting?
If a website design is difficult to navigate, this will definitely reflect negatively on your website’s performance. One of the biggest factors of Usability that you need to be concerned with is device-responsiveness. All good websites need to work responsively on desktop, mobile and tablet devices. If a website isn’t mobile-friendly in 2022, you can safely assume your usability and overall UX is suffering for it.
sPEED
Put yourself in the position of a potential customer; would you have the patience to wait 10 seconds for your product page to load? We recommend you test out your own website on GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights. If you’re really interested in fixing this problem, make sure to also pay close attention to your mobile speed performance. Best of luck!
How Does UX Affect SEO?
When it comes to search engine optimisation, website performance matters a lot. Google places a heavy emphasis on User Experience now more than ever before. So don’t just assume that your website will rank on page one just because you include the right keywords. Those days are over. While content still remains an integral element of SEO, Google will penalise your ranking if the website doesn’t function well for users.
We have mentioned how poor Usability and Speed will stagnate your sales and leads, but these same elements will also get you noticed by Google for all the wrong reasons. If your on-page experience is confusing for your users, if your website moves at a snail’s pace, or if it isn’t designed to work on mobile, your SERP ranking will be affected. We recommend that if you’re not ranking on page one, check out your competitor’s website and see how their UX is doing. It’s possible that, with a very old domain, some sites may still rank high in search results for now, but this is quite rare and Google’s changing algorithms may not afford this luxury forever. This means that if your website is old but currently ranks on page one, this may not always be the case.
How Does UX Affect Sales?
If you’re an online store that relies on consumers finding your website in a Google search, it’s clear how UX affects sales. People may not be able to find you in the first place due to a low SERP ranking but even if they do, your low usability will discourage them from completing a sale or form submission. Users have much lower tolerance and will take their business elsewhere, even if you’ve got the best product on the market!
However, there are other ways that poor User Experience particularly impacts the success of e-commerce websites. A good example of this is whether or not your site has a shopping cart abandonment feature. In 2015, 48% of shopping carts were abandoned before checkout because the process was too complicated for the consumer. You can forget about quarter-by-quarter sales growth if your UX isn’t meeting the expectations of customers.
Key Takeaways
User Experience is a must for business owners 2022 and it’s not going to change any time soon. In order to ensure that a website has a high level of UX, web designers must have extensive knowledge in areas such as colour and visual layout, as well as programming languages.
Our in-house creative design team has been building websites for companies in Ireland and abroad since 2013. If you think you need a fresh new website to get your business booming online, contact ITM Digital today to set up a consultation.
You can also learn more about the wide range of SEO services we offer by clicking here.
Call us at 045 409984 email info@wordpress-834370-3148838.cloudwaysapps.com.
