What role does user experience play in on-page optimization?

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SEO isn’t just about keyword optimization and backlinks anymore.

The experience someone has after landing on your site matters a lot.

If your site doesn’t offer a great UX, you may be missing out on leads and customers.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the SEO benefits of making your website user-friendly.

You’ll also learn ways to use UX best practices to boost your on-page SEO results.

Let’s get started.

Understanding User Experience

User experience refers to the overall feeling and satisfaction a visitor gets after landing on your site.

It includes everything from how your website looks to how easy it is to navigate to how fast it loads.

Good UX is defined by how easily and quickly visitors can access the information they need.

And, all UX best practices revolve around achieving that goal.

The following website elements make up your site’s UX:

Site speed
Navigation
Interface design
Menu functionality
Content
Page interaction

The whole purpose of UX optimization is to establish an effective communication channel with the visitor and give them what they came for.

Role of User Experience in On-Page Optimization

A major role of search engine optimization is to make your website appealing to search engines.

And, how do you do that? By making your website user-friendly!

The content, navigation, design, speed, and other UX factors all influence how your website ranks in search results.

Great user experience:

Increases the time spent on your site, which signals to search engines that your content addresses visitor’s problems
Increases returning visitors, which helps your conversion rate

Let’s dive into different user experience elements and how they impact on-page optimization.

User Intent

One of the first things you should know before creating content on a keyword is the intent behind that keyword.

In other words, get into the mind of your searcher and understand their goal with the search query.

For instance, someone searching for “Best budget smartphones” is in the buying mode.

And, someone searching for “How does a smartphone work” is just looking for information.

The nature of content for both these keywords should be entirely different.

How does it relate to on-page optimization?

By addressing user intent, you automatically enhance user experience, which is a crucial on-page optimization factor.

Architecture and Navigation

This refers to how pages on your website are structured and linked with each other.

From an SEO perspective, an optimized architecture makes it easy for search engines to crawl, understand, and index your web pages.

From a user experience standpoint, it allows visitors to find the information they need easily.

An important aspect of website structure is the number of clicks it takes to reach the desired page, also known as click depth.

For instance, you can access Legiit freelance categories in one click.

This means the click depth for service category pages is 1.

Keeping this click depth to the minimum helps search engines access important pages easily.

By implementing this SEO best practice, you’ll naturally make your content easily accessible for users as well.

Layout and Design

A well-designed page layout helps users find relevant information easily, improving the user experience.

Website design isn’t just about eye-catching graphics. It’s also about structuring your content for easier consumption.

We recommend using heading tags to structure your content.

Heading tags can help in two ways:

They improve your content’s readability. Dividing your content into headings can help its engagement
They tell search engines which sections of your website are more important. Among all the heading tags, the H1 heading carries the most weight in the eyes of search engines

Every page on your site should have a single H1 tag. Any more than that will just confuse the search engines about your content’s focus.

Website Loading Speed and Core Web Vitals

If your website is taking a long time to present the required information, it’s not offering an optimal user experience.

The longer it takes to load, the more visitors you're likely to lose. Ideally, you want your website to load within the first 2.5 seconds of someone landing on it.

According to Google, longer website loading times on mobile leads to an increased bounce rate.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that bounce back without interacting with your site.

A higher bounce rate means a lowered time on site, which is a negative ranking signal.

But, if your website isn’t fast enough, how do you know what elements are dragging it down?

By looking at its core web vitals (CWV).

Google now estimates page speed based on its core web vitals.

You can check your site’s CWV with Google’s free tool PageSpeed Insights.

It will tell you if your site isn’t fast enough.

Plus, you get actionable suggestions on how you can improve these metrics and pass the test.

You can also get a quick analysis of your website’s speed on the Legiit Dashboard.

Mobile-Friendliness

Did you know mobile devices account for more than half of the world’s web traffic?

The rest of the traffic comes mainly from laptops/desktops and tablets.

Website owners need to make sure their site is responsive to all popular screen sizes.

This means your website’s content should be easy to access irrespective of the device someone views it on.

From an SEO standpoint, designing a mobile-friendly site ensures a good user experience.

Importantly, it’s an official Google ranking factor; this means the search engine prefers mobile-friendly sites.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Your website’s conversion rate reflects your content’s ability to convert visitors into leads or customers.

Conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing the UX for more conversions.

All CRO best practices also help you put together an SEO-friendly web page.

For instance, using a responsive design and clear navigation is a CRO best practice.

But, these practices also help your dwell time (time spent on site) and reduce the bounce rate.

This means when you’re optimizing your site for CRO, you’re also enhancing its on-page SEO.

On the flip side, CRO mistakes like an unclear website structure can negatively impact your conversion rate and on-page optimization.

Internal Linking

With effective internal linking, you can not only improve the overall user experience but can also rank higher on Google.

How different pages on your site connect with each other impacts how users perceive and interact with your content.

Internal links, when used correctly, help visitors navigate to relevant pages on your site and get all the information they need easily.

The more time visitors spend on your site, the better it is for two key factors:

Your site’s dwell time
Conversions

In addition, proper internal linking helps search engine bots understand the relationships between different pages on your site.

This makes it easy for them to index and rank your content for relevant queries.

Key User Experience Metrics to Track

When implementing user experience best practices, how do you know you’re moving in the right direction?

By developing an effective tracking system. Here are the most important user experience metrics you should track.

Dwell Time (Time Spent On-Site)

This is the time someone spends on your site after landing it from the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Dwell time helps you evaluate your page’s relevance to the search query. It tells you if an average visitor is satisfied with the content.

You can get an idea about your site’s dwell time with the “Average Session Duration” metric inside your Google Analytics dashboard.

Bounce Rate

The second important user experience metric to track is the bounce rate.

It refers to the number of people who landed on your website but did not navigate to another page.

Note that the bounce rate doesn’t always reflect user experience. A sales page would be a perfect example where internal navigation doesn’t help your sales pipeline.

You can track your site’s bounce rate with Google Analytics.

Internal Linking

A page with multiple internal links pointing to it becomes more valuable.

On the other hand, Google considers pages with no internal links as orphan pages.

These pages have a minimum chance of getting indexed on search engines.

It’s important to conduct an internal link analysis and make sure there are no orphan pages on your site.

Page Depth

Click depth reflects the time or effort it takes a user to access the desired information on your site.

It’s the number of clicks from the homepage to the desired URL.

Your most important pages should be as close to the homepage as possible. Don’t let your site’s click depth exceed 4.

Core Web Vitals

These are the metrics that can help you measure your site’s performance.

With CWV, you can track a set of metrics including:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures perceived loading speed
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the visual stability of a web page
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Assess page responsiveness

Leverage A/B Testing

You can test two variations of a website element and identify the better-performing one with an A/B test.

For instance, you can test two different calls to action on a web page and identify the one that’s generating more clicks.

Or, you can test two different layouts to land on a more user-friendly variation.

How do you run an A/B test on a web page? Simply split your traffic between the two variations and track your results in a tool like Crazy Egg and Microsoft Clarity.