Enterprise UX Design: Why It Really Matters For Your SEO

Enterprise SEO is difficult because it is big and complex, taking time and resources to master and keep current. Avoid the complexity and work with a reliable user experience (UX) agency.

This article explains how UX design helps businesses grow by solving digital marketing problems. Some long-standing benefits of UX strategies include:

• Breaking silos between teams
• Simplifying a complex site architecture
• Getting buy-ins
• Tracking effectiveness
• Improving page speed

Read below to learn more about the advantages of enterprise UX design. Let’s go!

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1. Break Silos Between Teams to Develop a Cohesive SEO Plan

Large enterprise websites often involve many internal teams, including marketing, product, information technology, and content. These departments need to be able to function independently and communicate interdependently. Their specific focuses often lead to fragmentation and misalignment unless this is carefully managed. 

Consider a product group that prioritizes detailed pages featuring technical specifications and capabilities. Meanwhile, the marketing department owns campaign landing pages for promotions or lead-generation offers. The goal is to persuade visitors to fill out forms or buy products.

What happens now? Their underlying approaches diverge because of their tight focus areas:

• Dense technical details, extensive feature comparison charts, and specification sheets fail to convert. 
• The conversion pages highlight the benefits with catchy headlines and attractive visuals. However, they lack enough technical information to relate the advantages to the features.
• Visitors face disjointed transitions as they move across various pages. The tone, content style, and design do not align. Worse, the content is duplicated or contradictory.

Enterprise UX design agencies help drop internal silos by considering the entire customer journey. The designers act as the glue between teams. They promote collaboration through workshops, shared documentation, and unified design frameworks. 

UX design also aligns priorities around overarching goals. These include conversion rates, user engagement metrics, and satisfaction scores. This shared vision keeps teams consistent and helps visitors understand the site better.

The end result is a business website that connects sales and marketing efforts. It leads to better organic visibility through superior findability, accessibility, and usability.

2. Simplify a Complex Site Architecture to Enhance Discoverability

Big business websites can become complicated – with a lot to discuss, pages multiply and information hierarchy grows muddy and nested. This is a common issue across products, solutions, industries, and resources.

The labyrinthine site architecture makes SEO difficult and hinders discoverability: 

• The website hides important pages. Search engines have trouble finding and indexing them correctly. 
• Convoluted site navigation leads to high bounce rates. The site structure is confusing, making it difficult for users to find what they need.
• Tracking performance is difficult because the metrics are spread out. Running experiments or tracking changes at scale is also challenging.

Enterprise UX design provides clarity by streamlining complex site architectures. Analyzing the information structure and site mapping helps users find and understand content. It simplifies navigation and menus to focus on key tasks and customer journeys.

The site structure becomes easy to use; important pages are easy to find. Both improve discoverability and SEO while lowering bounce rates through simplified navigation. It further enables easier optimization, testing, and analytics at an enterprise scale.

3. Get Buy-Ins to Support SEO Campaigns

Global advertising spending will grow massively by the end of 2023. However, digital advertising is not expected to share a large piece of this pie. Growth is expected to downshift due to the maturity of the advertising space.   

This makes getting leadership buy-in for SEO challenging. Stakeholders need evidence that it affects profits, especially when they have to balance ad spend for all platforms. 

Show C-suite leaders the value of optimization in business using these points:

• Improving user engagement metrics. UX identifies and fixes pain points across the customer journey. It reduces friction and creates more seamless, satisfying experiences. More engaged people are likely to buy, stay, be happy, and be loyal.
• Optimizing calls-to-action (CTAs). UX design ensures that CTAs are easy to see, are convincing, and match what users want. In turn, they increase conversion rates for sales, registration, downloads, and other goals. 
• Reducing bounce rates. The bounce rate is important to search engines. It informs Google and other search engines that your site gives users what they are looking for. UX design reduces bounce through better information architecture, content, and navigation.
• Speeding up conversion rates. UX design streamlines and simplifies conversion paths to reduce friction. Greater conversion efficiency improves SEO metrics and increases sales or marketing outcomes.
• Enhancing mobile optimization. Most website traffic comes from mobile devices. UX focuses on responsive design for easier use. 
• Tapping into underserved markets. The user-first approach is one of UX design’s guiding principles. It promotes inclusivity, helping you reach underserved groups. These include people with disabilities or limited internet access. 

UX design’s impact is broad and ties directly to core business key performance indicators. Stakeholders are more likely to support your SEO plans when data shows their value.

4. Track Effectiveness to Know and Manage Returns

Tracking the effectiveness of enterprise SEO is difficult but necessary, as it influences returns forecasting and management. Search optimization delivers indirect business value not quickly measurable through conversions on a long timeline. This means that a direct, short-term impact is difficult to isolate and demonstrate. 

Many factors affect conversions, and users now interact with brands across many channels. Consider Starbucks buyers: 

• Customers visit the Starbucks website to check the menu. They also use the website to find store locations, join rewards programs, and buy products.
• Frequent Starbucks buyers use the app to customize drinks and pay. They also earn rewards and order ahead for pickup. 
• The coffee retail giant expands its physical locations, allowing customers to engage with baristas.
• Starbucks engages its potential and existing market on social media platforms. It promotes new drinks, community initiatives, contests, and deals. 
• The business sends promotions, exclusive offers, and loyalty programs through email and text messages. 
• Customers use Google search to find nearby store locations, check operating hours, research menu options, and look up nutritional information. The buyers often check the company’s Yelp pages and Google reviews to gauge customer satisfaction before visiting.
• Starbucks runs ads in newspapers, on TV, in magazines, on billboards, and on transit displays to drive brand awareness and sales.

The sheer variety of customer journeys makes it challenging to prove the value of your SEO efforts. Enterprise UX design helps overcome these challenges in a few ways:

• Bringing together disparate data sources into an integrated analytics and optimization approach
• Taking a cross-channel view focused on optimizing end-to-end customer journeys
• Tracking broad engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty metrics beyond conversions
• Enabling continual A/B and multivariate testing to prove incremental gains

The integrated, customer-centric approach positions UX as one of the solutions to enterprise SEO’s tracking challenges. 

5. Improve Page Speed to Avoid Bloat

Large enterprise websites often accumulate significant technical debt from legacy systems, integrations, and fragmented technology stacks. This leads to bloated, inefficient code and assets that slow down page loading.

Slow pages hurt both UX and SEO visibility. Users get frustrated with laggy, janky page loading and bounces from the site. As mentioned, bounce rate signals low relevance to search engines.

Further, non-optimized sites drop significantly in mobile rankings. This leaves money on the table because of lost organic traffic.

A UX agency creates lightweight, streamlined page experiences optimized for performance with these techniques: 

• Technical SEO audits help identify and eliminate bloat or unnecessary assets. 
• Promote technical best practices. Examples are code minification, compression, caching, and lazy loading. 
• Follow the mobile-first and responsive principles to ensure speedy, consistent experiences across devices.
• Apply new tactics and innovation such as edge computing and content delivery networks.
• Run analytics, such as Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights, to pinpoint slow page-load causes and solutions.

UX design helps enterprises overcome years of technical debt weighing down their sites. Users enjoy smooth, fast page loading, while the business reaps SEO gains from much higher perceived relevance and authority.

Summing Up

Overall, these benefits show that excellent UX leads to organic traffic and conversions. In turn, it helps you achieve business goals and growth. 

Building robust internal UX teams is practical, but outsourcing allows the experts to handle the shifting digital market. External consultants offer cost-effective flexibility in talent, bandwidth, and expertise.

Outsourced UX contractors provide access to on-demand senior specialists. They handle overflow work or stealth projects. They also bring unbiased perspectives and the latest techniques that in-house teams lack.

Are you looking for an award-winning UX agency? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) today to schedule a free consultation.