SEO wears many hats, including content, optimization, and more. One of its most prominent hats is user experience (or “UX”). UX has been around for a while, with even the earliest PCs incorporating it in some capacity (think of the first-ever user interfaces). Nowadays, we’re so accustomed to UX that once-novel features (OS, file managers, etc.) are now routine expectations.
As you might have guessed, UX is wide-ranging in practice. Today, a primary focus in UX is websites. Google factors UX elements directly into your rankings; Core Web Vitals, such as page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability, count as direct ranking signals. Meaning a clunky site doesn’t just annoy visitors; it holds back your search visibility and your bottom line.
But what constitutes a “good” site UX, and is it worth investing in?
How to Improve Website UX: The Fundamentals
Picture this: you click on a company’s website for the first time because you want to learn more about what they do, but you’re not sure where to start—the navigation doesn’t point you anywhere useful. After clicking around, you’re only left feeling more lost. Nothing about the site makes sense, so you give up and bounce (leave the site).
That’s bad site UX in a nutshell: When you, the user, have a negative experience trying to use a website because it is hard to navigate or fails to function (or even load) properly.
Another common example of bad UX occurs when developers focus too much on making a site visually pleasing. Sure, aesthetic aspects of a website certainly contribute to a user’s experience; the visual aspects of branding do a lot to attract and keep prospective customers on your site. Still, looks don’t directly help you use the site.
The best practices in site UX primarily focus on a site’s functionality, navigation, and accessibility, and whether it helps the user reach their intended goal.
The stakes have only increased over time. These days, 94% of consumers rank easy navigation as the most important website feature, and 88% say they won’t come back after one bad experience.
Even load time matters, and it matters more than you’d think: Pages that load in one second convert up to 2.5 times better than ones that take five. That’s another reason to avoid prioritizing visuals over other factors of UX—because a lot of the time, an abundance of large image files with flashy graphics takes up a lot of space on your site and can make load times reeeeealllly sloooooow.
Key Principles for Better Website UX
If you want to actually improve your site’s UX, start with these proven areas:
What’s the Purpose of Your Website?
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s worth mentioning anyway: Your site’s purpose is super important. Is your site an e-commerce site? Then it will need to be designed to help users quickly and easily view products, shop how they want, and buy without hassle (and to prevent “cart abandonment”).
If you’re a service-oriented business, you’ll want your website to let potential clients learn about you and your services and easily contact you.
Who’s Your Audience?
Who your audience is drives almost everything you do with your marketing, including SEO and site UX. You’ll want to design (or enable) your site with your intended customers in mind. This means naming your audience up front, tailoring content to them, and building your site in a way that speaks best to them. Again, you want to be intentional here. Lay out your pages logically and use proven advertising methods to talk directly with your intended audience.
Another critical move you can make for high ROI: Conducting user research. Testing your site and getting feedback from just five real users can reveal up to 85% of your usability issues.
How’s Your Mobile-Version UX?
Mobile-first design isn’t optional anymore. Smartphones now drive over 60% of global web traffic, and sites that skip mobile optimization lose 5 times as many potential customers as those that implement it correctly. That means including responsive layouts, touch-screen-friendly buttons (minimum size 44x44px), text people can still read on smaller devices, simplified navigation, and a fast loading experience.
Are Your Features Gimmicky and Annoying or Useful and Convenient?
The latest and greatest site features are all too often overblown. If your features deter your audience from achieving their goal, it’s best to leave them out; for example, your choice of where to place a video on the site. As long as it doesn’t interfere with navigation or load speed, a video (that doesn’t auto-play) on a front-page header wouldn’t bother anyone. However, an obstructive pop-up video that bars users from seeing content on a contact (or other high-traffic) page can easily be annoying enough to make them bounce within their first 10 seconds on the site.
It’s best to learn which features stick or resonate with users and use them (that’s where user research comes in). Another example: If your website has a ton of pages, a search bar function or feature may help your audience quickly and easily find the ones relevant to them. As a general rule, prioritize your audience’s goals and convenience over “cutting-edge” gimmicks.
Is Your Site Accessible?
Accessibility is also a must. It has become the standard, and you don’t want to alienate a portion of your prospective customers by not including it. With 94% of the top 1 million websites still having accessibility issues, ensuring your website is accessible can boost traffic by 23% while helping your SEO rankings, too. Meeting Web Content Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) Standards—think 4.5:1 contrast for normal text, full keyboard navigation, and semantic HTML—is not optional.
How Fast Does Your Site Load?
Yes, we’re back to this, because it’s really important.
Over time, speed optimization has become increasingly technical. Google Core Web Vitals now measure three specific metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (under 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (under 200ms), and Cumulative Layout Shift (below 0.2). If you want to make sure you hit those marks, you can try compressing your images, switching to WebP or AVIF formats, trimming unnecessary scripts, enabling browser caching, and using a CDN.
What Do Your Customers Need?
This essential question to consider follows a similar line of thought to the one about your site’s features. Throughout your site, you should discern what your customers need to have and what they can do without in order to best utilize the key screen real estate you have.
In practice, that means your layout should match expectations, follow a logical pattern, and be simple and easy to interact with. You don’t want your customers to have to jump through hoops to find the content they’re looking for. This does a disservice to them and to you—in retention, conversions, and ROI. When it comes to a good site UX, simple is best, and less is usually more.
Why Website UX Matters for Your Business
Now, for the question probably at the top of your mind: Does my site UX actually matter that much? And our answer is: Yes, it most certainly does.
Site UX can affect your intended customers’ interaction with your site, your users’ bounce rate, and your ROI. If you think of your site as your organization’s or business’s online face (which you probably should), that should help clue you in to how important site UX really is.
Think about it: If someone has a bad experience on your site, how do you think that reflects on your company as a whole? Websites are very much the online counterpart to your in-person entity—if not your whole brand identity (we’re looking at you, e-commerce sites). Site UX also plays a big part in potential ROI. For instance, poor UX can cause a drop in form fills or conversion clicks, which leads to a decrease in new business for you.
And the ROI case is hard to argue with. For example, fixing checkout UX specifically can improve conversions by 35%. UX is often users’ first impression of you, and sometimes the only one you get. So you’ve got to make it count.
So, yes, all this to say that a good site UX matters. But how do you go about assessing and even addressing your site UX? Uptick Marketing provides the SEO expertise to do just that. Reach out to us today to get an expert’s analysis of your site and an insightful, plain-English report on its UX, SEO, and more!
