When we work with a new website, we sit often a big team with everything from key people in the customer project managers, developers, writers, UX designers and SEO specialist. A team where everyone has their “musts” and its recommendations to be reconciled with each other and create a website that is stylish, user-friendly and perhaps above all, that converts.

UX, User Experience, is something that is becoming increasingly important in the development of a new website. UX designers do research on all aspects of user interactions with the product / website to do and think about the user at all stages of the process. This does not necessarily mean that it is the UX designer who will determine what colors and fonts that looks best, but they can give recommendations on which ones would improve the user experience and that can lead to getting the visitor to behave in a certain way. This goes in parallel with the search engine optimisation that is becoming more user-oriented. Therefore it is important that these two work together to create such a user-friendly customer experience possible for the company / organisations’ business goals.

 

Three examples of areas where SEO and UX must sync:

 

  • Purpose / intention of the page – In the SEO work we optimise a landing page for search behaviors and make analysis of the keywords that have high search volume, while the UX designer look more at what is the purpose of the page. Where the customer journey is the customer? What do we want the person to know, feel and do on this page and how we simplify the steps? Here we need to intertwine the two areas and choose keywords along what purpose hand.
  • Bounce rate – a high “bounce rate” means that many visitors who clicked on a page just seen that particular page and not passed on to anyone else. Depending on which side they have ended on a high bounce rate to be more or less relevant to go by. But if the user does not choose to go to other pages even though it is the purpose, and also perhaps have left hand almost immediately, it could be negative from an SEO standpoint. This is because it may indicate that the person is not found what he was looking for. One of the UX designer’s job is to ensure that there is a clear CTA (call to action) and that there is always a logic behind how the pages are constructed.
  • Internal links – To have a search optimised website means that there are several different landing pages that are optimised for various topics / keywords. These pages also need to have a natural, logical structure and provide links to other relevant pages on the site. You need UX designer to come up with recommendations on how the links will look like, which links to display, where the links should be, and how a menu structure is the most logical. This will in turn create strong and accessible landing pages that hopefully ranks well in the search engine, and gives users a pleasant experience, which will then be reflected back to the brand.