SEO and UX: A match made in Heaven

Designing and developing a website is a complex and thought provoking process which encompasses many technical and non-technical elements. Linking these elements together is vital to creating a website; it should be both easy to find and provide an excellent experience for the user.  

Two main elements which are pivotal to establishing a high quality website are SEO and user experience (UX), and these must work alongside each other for each to provide their full potential to help generate and convert leads. There is no point in a site being top of search listings if the user is unable to navigate that site easily and pleasurably when they get to it. And there is even less point in having a wonderfully crafted site with a high class interface if that site cannot be found due to poor SEO tactics.

Ultimately you will be craving for a website which appears at or near the top of organic search results and is easy to use. Here are a couple of areas which you could focus on to get your SEO and UX on the same page:

• Focus on designs which fit SEO principles: when entering the design process, it is important to consider optimising your H1 and H2 titles and menu items. This is because Google looks at them to gather context for your page. Also, it is good to create descriptive Meta descriptions. These are all valuable ways to improve both your SEO and UX. Furthermore, you should use relevant information in your title tags as this will be more likely to get the searcher’s attention as they scan results.
• Focus on high quality UX: While Google still uses traditional ranking factors of links and keywords to determine the quality of a site, UX has been a growing factor in their decision making and refers to:
• Page speed: this is an increasingly important component of designing websites
• Easy navigation: you want visitors to be able to discover exactly what you offer by looking at your navigation alone
• Internal link structure: having a hierarchy on your site allows you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages
• No duplicate content: this can cause issues for search engines as it can be difficult for them to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query
• Relevant and descriptive content: make sure you answer the user’s questions as clearly and informatively as possible
• Page layout: users don’t want to take a lot of time trying to figure out where they are or whether the page they landed on fulfils their needs

It is clear that SEO and UX go hand-in-hand in creating a successful website and that is why BBI Brandboost focuses on them simultaneously during the design process. Combining our technical expertise, industry knowledge and creative content writing skills allows us to keep ahead of the trends, creating and implementing innovative SEO strategies, which help our UX focused websites get found in organic search results.