SEO and User Experience: Mutual Elevation Backbone of Best 2019 Practises

User experience has been found to be a major facet of SEO. See experts have realised that while they do things directed by the search engines, the end kahuna is the user. Regardless of how aggressive the SEO efforts are, if user experience is not enhanced then there is a great risk of failure. Experts have predicted that user experience will be widely used as a guideline for SEO in 2019. 

However, there is a bit of a problem. Most of the efforts in 2018 took a single line approach to SEO and user experience. This means that most efforts assumed that all users enter the websites through the homepage. The truth is that a large percentage enter through other avenues. It is predicted by experts that due to this realisation, UX efforts in 2019 will be forked. They will take into account the many pathways into the website. 

A study found that 79% of people who are dissatisfied with a website never return. This is a display of what user experience can do despite employing SEO. To demonstrate the relationship between UX and SEO, here are four exercises and their impact. 

Site Speed

This is about how much time it takes for a site to load. To fully understand this concept, one should have a look at two things. DOM and full page load. These can both be complicated by issues like difficult images to third party files. Redirect links might also affect the load time. 

Low site speed will bring about what is known as a high bounce rate. Bouncing is where a visitor leaves the site without exploring the first page. They leave before the little circle at the top has finished a cycle. Research has found that speed has the most impact. Another study found that a website that took more than three seconds to load lost almost half the potentials. This right here is a measure of the impact of site speed to user experience. 

Site speed is an easy problem to fix. The web host can help. You might also want to look into a dedicated server. 

Mobile Friendliness

In 2018, it is estimated that about 52% of online traffic was from mobile devices. This was up from 50% in 2017. A brief look at the graph at this particular source, one will note an obvious exponential rise in mobile traffic. It is therefore safe to say that there will be more mobile traffic in 2019. That people should prepare for user experience targeted mobile site designs. 

Maybe do shorter menus and words in general. Make it easier to get back to the home page. Make it easier to dismiss promos. Make common tasks easily available. SEO experts should be prepared to enhance user experience in mobile site in 2019. This will ensure that what could be the single biggest driver of SEO success does not become unmanageable. 

Ease of Navigation

This is all about usability. Ease of navigation is aimed towards making sure the user can move around freely within the site without getting frustrated. Someone put it rather clearly and said that people react to websites the way that they react to other human beings. If a person is difficult to deal with, you will find that you want little to do with them regardless of what they have to say. Does a website leave you feeling discombobulated and frustrated from having to go back and forth? Never finding what you are looking for? You will probably not go back or even recommend it to anyone. 

Go for simplicity. Go for consistency in design. Studies have found that consistency teaches the user how to navigate the site quicker. Like they can almost predict the next move they need to make to move on. Provide multiple navigation menus and make the homepage accessible from any page on the site. Like link it to the logo, for example. This is expected and standard. 

Structured Content

Content strategy has almost become an art. There is so much meticulous planning now. You can no longer just throw keywords haphazardly on the website and expect to get away with it. Structured content is an aspect of SEO that involves independent bits of the material. That makes it easier for the content to be reused or reapplied. It makes it easier to link particular keywords. It makes it real easy to search for things on the site. It also makes the whole SEO effort easier. 

See there is something called machine readability. Machines are only as smart as human beings make them. The material they have to work with need to make logical sense. So if the material is a lump of words, first that site will be nowhere on the first page. Second, users will have trouble sifting through it find whatever they need. If they do find the site to begin with. 

As said before, SEO is about the people. As much as you are looking to manipulate the search engine, your end game is to get to the people. To have the people elevate your site. The relationship between SEO and user experience is synergistic. SEO is done well, it enhances user experience. User experience is enhanced, SEO efforts are strengthened.