User experience is the foundation of a website’s usability and is an aspect of on-page SEO that many people overlook.

If your site lacks the positive user experience and ease of use that end users need to navigate your site, you are pushing visitors to your competitors.

In this guide, you’ll learn what user experience (UX) entails, the types of experiences, the difference between UI and UX, and why it’s important for SEO.

What is User Experience (UX)?

UX is how people interact with your website.

You’ll also use this term for products, but we’re only focusing on websites for now.

If you have an intuitive user interface design, users will find it easier to navigate your website and find the information they need.

If you have a digital product, e.g. B. a SaaS solution, this interaction also takes place on your digital product.

The user experience elicits a few things:

In short, user experience can provide a positive experience with your website – or it can lead to user frustration.

note: Usability is not UX design. It’s a component of UX that works with design to create the experience your users want.

What are the types of user experience?

User experience evaluation must address the three types of UX design to best understand the end user’s needs.

The three types of UX include:

• information: One aspect of content strategy that gets overlooked is information architecture. Time must be spent on how information is organized and presented on a website. User flows and navigation must be considered for all types of information you present.
• interaction: Your website has an interaction design pattern – or a specific way users interact with the website. The components of a website that fall under the interaction UX type include buttons, interfaces, and menus.
• visual design: Look and feel are important for the end user. You want your website to have cohesion between color, typography, and images. User interface (UI) falls under this type of UX, but it’s important to note that UI is not interchangeable with UX.

What is the difference between UI and UX?

Speaking of UX and UI, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of the difference between the two in order to better understand the user experience.

user interface

UI design is the visual elements of your website, including:

Visual elements on your website are part of the user interface.

UI definitely overlaps with UX to some degree, but they are not the same.

Steve Krug also has a great book on usability called Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. It was first published in 2000 and the book is now a #1 bestseller.

Steve’s insight from over 20 years ago (although we are now at the 3rd edition of the book) provides usability guidelines that include:

• Desk.
• mobile phone, mobile phone.
• User friendliness.
• floor plans.
• Everything UX.

If this book will teach you anything about usability, it’s the focus on intuitive navigation. Frustrating website users are the polar opposite of a good user experience.

user experience

UX works on the user interface and how the user:

• Interact with your website.
• Feel while interacting.

Think about Google for a moment.

A simple landing page that is visually appealing but spartan is the face of the internet. In terms of UX, Google is one of the best websites in the world, although it lacks a spectacular user interface.

In fact, the UI needs to be functional and appealing, but the UX will stand out the most.

Imagine you tried to do a search on Google and got the wrong results or a query took a minute to execute. In this case, even the most beautiful UI would not compensate for the bad UX.

Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb is one of the best examples of going beyond simple usability and focusing on UX in new, exciting ways.

The honeycomb contains multiple points, all of which combine to maximize the user experience. These facets are:

• Accessible.
• credible.
• Desirable.
• discoverable.
• Usable.
• Useful.
• Valuable.

If you focus on all these elements, you will greatly improve the user experience.

Why user experience is important for SEO

At this point, you understand that UX is very important to your website visitors and audience.

A lot of time, analysis and refinement has to go into the UX design. However, there’s another reason to draw your attention to user experience: SEO.

Google Page Experience update

When Google’s Page Experience Update was fully rolled out, it impacted websites that offered a poor user experience.

The Page Experience update is slowly rolling out to desktop now. It will be completed by the end of March 2022. Learn more about the update: https://t.co/FQvMx3Ymaf

— Google Search Center (@googlesearchc) February 22, 2022

Several aspects of UX are part of the update’s ranking factors, including:

• Intrusive advertising.
• Core Web Vitals.
• HTTPS security.

You can run a Core Web Vitals report here and apply fixes to meet these requirements. Also, you should know if your website contains intrusive advertisements that irritate users and if your website lacks HTTPS.

Page performance improves your SEO. Google research shows that focusing on UX can:

• Reduce website abandonment by up to 24%.
• Improve web conversions.
• Increase average page views per session by up to 15%.
• Increase ad revenue by 18% or more.

When you spend time improving your website’s UX, you’ll benefit from higher rankings, fewer page breaks, improved conversions, and even more sales.

Also, many of the practices to improve UX are also crucial components of a website’s on-page SEO, such as:

• Proper header usage.
• Adding lists to your content.
• Use of Images.
• Optimizing images for faster loading times.
• Fill in the gaps in the content with useful information.
• Reduce “content fluff”.
• use graphs.
• Testing the usability on all devices.

When you improve UX, you create a positive experience for users while improving many of your site’s on-page SEO fundamentals.

last comments

Customer experience needs to go beyond simple responsive web design.

Hick’s law dictates that when you give users more choices, it takes longer to make a decision. You’ve probably seen this for yourself when you’ve shopped online and found hundreds of options.

When users land on your site, they’re looking for answers or knowledge—not confusion.

User research, usability testing, and user experience design overhaul often help you meet the design’s SEO requirements while making your visitors (or customers) happier.

More resources:

Featured Image: NicoElNino/Shutterstock