How To Make Use of User Experience for the Best eCommerce SEO
How does an expert ecommerce search engine optimization (SEO) agency grow your business? It combines optimization with user experience (UX) design.
When applied together, these factors drive and sustain organic search rankings and revenue, especially as your business scales. They help you overcome or anticipate challenges to maintain your competitive edge and keep your business resilient.
This article covers the following topics:
- SEO’s and UX’s impact on primary buying factors
- Parts of UX that affect your optimization strategies
- Top UX tips for ecommerce sites
Dig deeper into the topic to learn how these critical digital marketing elements support your business’s growth and survival. Let’s go!
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What Is the Connection Between UX and SEO?
UX and SEO are two distinct but interdependent digital marketing concepts. One of the biggest connections is ranking factors: elements that search engines consider when prioritizing the order or positions of the indexed pages on the search results.
Think of them as part of a checklist. The more boxes you tick, the higher your page rank. Your product pages, for example, might land on the first page. They might even be first on the list or even in the featured snippet.
Why does your position matter? Several studies have shown that higher-ranking pages receive more clicks and traffic. Your rank then contributes to increased brand awareness, engagement, and conversion.
Google and Bing are silent about their ranking factors, but most believe that UX and SEO are among them. If not, they are first on the list because they directly affect many buying factors.
Look at the table below:
| Buying Factor | UX Impact | SEO Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Product discovery | UX design facilitates product discovery through intuitive layout and search functionality, personalized recommendations, and clear categorization. | SEO increases visibility in search engines. It then leads to higher chances of product discovery through optimized product titles, descriptions, and keywords. |
| Information quality | Good UX provides clear, detailed product information and easy access to reviews and comparisons. These elements promote informed decision-making. | Ecommerce optimization ensures that the product information is keyword-rich, relevant, and follows search engine guidelines. |
| Site navigation | UX creates a seamless and logical website flow that makes it easy for users to find information and products. | SEO improves the site structure and URL hierarchy. These help search engines crawl and index the pages more effectively and improve user navigation. |
| Trust signals | UX builds trust through professional design, user reviews, security badges, and transparent customer service information. | SEO enhances business trust and credibility with excellent online visibility and authority from backlinks and up-to-date, accurate content. |
| Visual appeal | UX emphasizes the site’s aesthetic aspect. It uses brand-centric, engaging layouts, images, and color schemes to create a positive first impression. | Although search optimization focuses less on visuals, it considers user engagement a metric. Visual appeal can influence it. |
| Page speed | UX prioritizes fast loading times to reduce bounce rates and improve user satisfaction. | SEO recognizes page speed as a ranking factor, encouraging optimizations that lead to quicker load times and higher search rankings. This is especially true with mobile optimization. |
| Checkout process | Good UX simplifies the checkout process. It reduces steps and friction to minimize cart abandonment. | SEO indirectly affects checkout by ensuring that transactional pages are indexed and loaded quickly. |
Can you promote an ecommerce business with SEO or UX only? You can, but you are losing opportunities. Combining them is the most cost-effective step to scale quickly and even surpass established competitors.
How to Enhance UX Design to Boost Ecommerce SEO
Now that you know how these two concepts interrelate, how do you use UX to enhance ecommerce SEO outcomes? Here are three tips:
1. Make Your Site and Information Architectures Sensible and Simple
Intuitive site and information architectures are foundational for good UX. Ensure you have a clear, logical structure with easy-to-find pages and optimized navigation for user journeys.
This enhances the site’s crawlability and indexability and the bots’ understanding of your content’s relevance to the targeted keywords. They also encourage rich snippets, which leads to higher user satisfaction.
Amazon is one ecommerce site that has mastered customer satisfaction with smart site architecture:
- It organizes products into logical and nested subcategories, allowing users to drill down to find specific items easily. The categories are descriptive and tailored to different shopping verticals.
- Robust filtering options let users refine product results by price, brand, ratings, and other attributes.
- Product and category pages have descriptive URLs with keywords that indicate the content’s focus.
- All product category pages follow a consistent template with images, descriptions, and alternate views for better scanning.
- Product pages use schema markup to identify key attributes.
- Amazon continually tests and optimizes the site’s design based on user behavior data to minimize frustration.
2. Speed up Download Speed and Performance
Fast-loading website designs matter for one good reason: mobile hyper-growth. New 5G networks support up to 100x more in network efficiency and traffic capacity. They also significantly minimize data loss and latency.
This combines with the growing popularity of voice search and mobile optimization. The voice search market alone could achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2% until 2033. It could also hit over $112 billion in revenue by the end of the forecast period.
Lastly—and the most impactful on SEO—is Google’s mobile-first indexing. It implies that your site’s performance on laptops, smartphones, and tablets now directly affects search engine rankings. Slow websites pale among super-fast competitors.
Google strongly recommends maintaining your page load speed to three seconds or less. Anything longer and the bounce rate increases. An ecommerce SEO agency checks this factor with PageSpeed Insights, which scores your speed to 100. Aim for 90 and above and avoid getting below 50.
Other options that SEO teams explore are using edge computing and content delivery networks (CDNs):
| Edge Computing | Content Delivery Networks |
|---|---|
| - Process data locally at edge nodes to speed up dynamic content delivery. - Offload the processing from the origin server to decrease server load and response times. - Distribute computation closer to users to reduce latency. - Manage traffic spikes by distributing loads across edge nodes. - Preprocess content at the edge for device and context optimization, reducing data transfer. - Enhance security by detecting and mitigating threats at the edge. - Scale resources at edge nodes based on demand without affecting the core infrastructure. - Personalize content delivery at the edge based on user location and preferences. |
- Use optimized delivery protocols to speed up content delivery. - Cache static content on servers close to the user to reduce load times. - Distribute content across multiple servers to balance traffic and prevent bottlenecks. - Implement smart caching strategies to serve content efficiently and reduce the server load. - Optimize images and files on CDN servers to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. - Provide DDoS protection and mitigate large-scale attacks by distributing traffic. |
3. Perform UX on Content
UX-friendly content complements a navigable, functional web design. Users feel satisfied when they get the information they need or complete a goal, such as buying a product. It keeps them engaged and retains customers until they become brand advocates.
However, what is UX-friendly content? Google says it should be helpful and reliable. Consider these questions:
- Does the content address common user questions, problems, or needs? Is it solving a user concern or pain point?
- Is the information easy to find and written clearly?
- Is the content organized logically and broken down into scannable sections?
- Is the data accurate, relevant, and updated?
- Did you write it for humans, not search engines?
- Are users likely to share the content or recommend it to friends?
- Are important keywords included naturally and appropriately throughout the content?
- Are visuals, videos, or other media used to complement and enhance the content?
- Does the tone resonate with the target audience and inspire trust?
- Are the hyperlinks useful and relevant?
- Does it reflect your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)?
What about using artificial intelligence (AI) for content? Does it make your content less helpful?
The answer is no; even Google uses Bard to help advertisers create generative copy. AI also helps you get great SEO scores by streamlining repetitive tasks and developing fresh content ideas.
The key is balancing this technology with human creativity and research. For instance, use it for initial content ideation and drafts. Then, have humans review, edit, and finalize the article for accuracy and unique analyses.
Summing Up
Good UX aligns your website with what search engines want to see: engaged users finding relevant, valuable information that fits their intent. Making UX optimization a key component in your ecommerce strategy furthers your business goals while establishing a stronger SEO foundation.
The article shares three effective UX tips to improve your optimization strategies. Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to schedule a free consultation for more advanced, customized solutions. Our award-winning ecommerce SEO agency has already driven over 10 million clicks for our clients. Achieve the same success today.
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