How to build a powerful UX/UI website or product
How UX design impacts SEO…
Some people assume that Keywords + Meta Descriptions + Title Tags = Good website ranking.
But NO, the assumption is wrong!
There are 3.5 billion Google searches made each day. Google mines for data with every search which yields a whole lot of data and when it comes to search, Google has 3 critical objectives —
- Provide exact search results based on the query
- Offer users the best possible experience
- List quality websites with good rankings
What is UX?
User Experience (UX) is very critical to the success or failure of a product or website in the market. Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb details that for a good UX you should have elements which are:
- Useful: Is your product or website useful in any way? Your product or website should be original, legit and fulfill a need. The more useful, the better the feel and experience.
- Usable: Is it easy to use with maximum efficiency and minimal error? If it’s too complicated or confusing to use, users will exit it in seconds. Your website should be intuitive and easy to use. It also involves enabling users to effectively and efficiently achieve their goals.
- Desirable: Is it satisfying to use? Does it embody the values and identity of your brand? The overall look of the website, images, branding, colors, and other design elements should evoke emotions, appreciation and embody the values of the brand.
- Findable: Can users easily find your site? Is the search aligned well with your site’s SEO? We must strive to design navigable websites and locatable objects so users can find you easily. Content needs to be navigable and locatable onsite and offsite
- Accessible: Are features, functionalities, and results accessible to people with disabilities? Can users search from different platforms/browsers? Your product or website needs to be accessible to people with disabilities.
- Credible: Does the design inspire trust and credibility? Will users believe the results that your product offers? Users must trust and believe what you tell or give them as results.
- Valuable: Is the UX aligned with the business strategy? What is the value of your product or website? How do all the qualities of the honeycomb interact with each other? Your product or site should deliver value to the end-users. Not just the user experience, user satisfaction should be of utmost importance.
How UX Design affects the SEO of the website?
The equation is —
User Experience Design + Search Engine Optimization= website’s higher rankings
1.Image Tags and Headings — Proper image tags and headings are critical. Image tags provide details when the images do not load correctly and headers help structure page content and improve page readability.
2.Number of words — 650+ words/page is important to ensure it is in-depth and answers user questions with important keywords.
3. Adaptable to different devices — Be it an iPad, desktop or mobile your site should be able to efficiently adapt and give people good user experience. Read here — mobile makes up 52.2 percent of the market share.
4. Page Load and speed — In 2016, Google found that 53% of mobile users gave up if a page took longer than three seconds to load. So, 3 seconds decide everything related to the fate of your website i.e if readers don’t enjoy the website and Google will reflect this by ranking the slow website poorly.
5. Search Results — Relevant search results for the user query on the main page of the search engine.
So UX designers should focus on —
- Improve page speed so that users benefit from agile loading
- Add more keywords to the page — for better SEO.
SEMrush did a study and analyzed 600,000+ keywords to determine the importance of the various ranking factors. The results were —
3. Include navigation design, usability testing, visuals, colors, and content
4. List of key metrics that Google takes into consideration when deciding the ranking of the website — happy users make Google happy
5. Bounce rate and poor rankings
Best Practices — SEO and UX design
1.Keywords
What users are searching for? How many people are searching for it?
Keywords optimization has three-phases — 1. Researching the right keyword 2. Analyzing the given set of keywords 3. Selecting the best keywords
All these phases lead to —
Traffic — Drive more traffic to your website
Popularity of Keywords — Measure traffic potential by analyzing the popularity of keywords
Content — Write effective content by including optimized keywords into your website content which objectively address the needs of your users
Tools and websites you can use find the right set of keywords —
The Free Keyword Tool: discover thousands of profitable long-tail keywords
Keyword Research Guide — Practical guide to researching keywords
Google’s Keyword Tool to identify their search volume and come up with variations that make sense for your business. This tool gives an insight into how often certain words are searched and how those searches have changed over time to help narrow down the options for the exact keywords you want.
SEMRush Keyword tool — This tool shows results in the form of —
- keyword difficulty —
- competitive density
- SERP features
- cost-per-click data
- search volume
The SEMrush algorithm suggests keywords semantically related to your initial search and sorts them into groups by search topic to make sure you find the right set of keywords.
2.Site Navigation
How easy it is to navigate through the pages of the website? Is it intuitive and smooth?
UX designers should want its website users are able to navigate through the site with ease. For this keep below things in your mind —
Purpose and scope of the website — Define the scope of the website really well. A very focused website that offers simplified navigation elements helps the search engines to crawl and index properly.
Site architecture and shallow website structure — It helps the search engines to read and understand the whole website and for easy smooth navigation. The UX experts suggest keeping all content within 4 clicks from the homepage. For Google pages that are high on the website, hierarchy is more important and tend to have more authority.
Organize your website — Consider using links and buttons to make sure anyone can navigate from top pages to bottom pages quite smoothly. So internal links, backlinks and remove the dead links from the page from time to time.
3. Loading Speed
How quickly the page loads? Are you able to load your website in 3 seconds? What are the elements that can help you optimize the load speed of the page?
Fast load times make the user’s happy and improves their user experience whereas slow load times can increase the bounce rate, negatively affecting search rankings and user experience to an extent that users can abandon your website in the first 5 seconds itself.
Optimize images and videos — Large images and videos affect the landing speed of the pages, hinders the navigation and page scrolls. So, resize your images using tools like TinyPNG for images and Handbrake is a software that allows users to optimize their video’s size without decreasing the quality.
Page Layout — A great layout of the page should be one of the top priorities as it affects the loading speed of the page. Remove any unnecessary images, videos, etc which can only slow the page down. The performance of the page depends on the layout and components of the pages.
4. Call to Actions (CTA)
Call to action — To keep the audience engaged and have a conversion from the website page visit we use CTA. It is a command or action phrase generally in the form of a button or hyperlink. It helps to —
- Reduce bounce rate
- Increase the time spent on the site
- Feedback — Create a customer feedback loop
- Build Email listings — Sign up for a newsletter
- Conversion — Turn website visitors into customers
- Download a free giveaway or e-book
A good CTA can do wonders. How to design a great Call to Action (CTA) —
Conversion through actionable text: State the purpose of CTA like Sign up for a newsletter, buy now, Click to learn more, Download text, etc. The text should be short in length and should convey the action message clearly.
User engagement and attention: Use a bright button color that contrasts with the color of the page or an email.
Good Visibility: It should be put on the front page with a font size large enough to make it very visible on the web page.
Best UX/UI tools
1. InVisionApp
This is one of the best I have used. It allows you to create rich interactive prototypes, has a large number of templates and can be integrated with Slack, Jira, etc.
2. Figma
I love this tool. It is a collaborative design tool with a great UI that allows you to work with your team effectively on your design projects. Apart from the main features, it comes with tee Arc tool and Vector Networks.
3. Sketch
Another most popular collaborative design tool which I used to use before moved to Figma.
4. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a powerful, collaborative, easy-to-use platform that helps you and your team create designs for websites, mobile apps, voice interfaces, games, etc which just has the co-editing features for your team to collaborate on a project.
5. Webflow
This is my personal favorite as it’s made for people who are not into web development. It is a platform for a modern-day designer who wants to build responsive websites without code and host them with a single subscription. It’s easy to use and used to build great responsive websites.
