To stay ahead in SEO, it has become essential to focus your strategy on the user. Google wants to provide Internet users with content that meets their specific needs in the smoothest and most engaging way possible. The recent addition of Core Web Vitals metrics to its ranking signals clearly reflects this desire. UX and SEO have more than ever a common approach: Search Experience Optimization (SXO). In short, SEO drives traffic to a page and UX keeps it going.
However, developing this complementarity is not yet natural. It is not always easy to think both in terms of SEO and UX, these two poles are still very divided in the projects of redesign or optimization of a website. We will explore some rules to follow to ensure the effectiveness of this pair.
POOL THE ANALYSIS OF EXISTING DATA / DEFINE A COMMON STRATEGY
The analysis step is essential to identify what needs to be kept and improved on a site. During this phase defining the digital strategy, the customer will receive various audits from his contacts. On the SEO side, we have the analysis of the existing, which makes it possible to take stock of the visibility of the current site, and the semantic audit, which as part of a redesign makes it possible to identify the themes to work. On the UX side, we find the analysis of KPIs, the benchmark, and perhaps A / B tests.
These various audits will lead the client to make internal decisions that can serve one or another of its partners. We strongly recommend that the recommendations between these two poles be shared upstream. The workshop format is interesting because it will allow UX and SEO contacts to justify their recommendations and to discuss constructively to arrive at common recommendations. This exchange time can save a lot of time on the roadmap and allows everyone to get to the same level of information.
CREATE AN INTUITIVE TREE STRUCTURE THAT SERVES SEO ISSUES
The tree structure must allow fluid and intuitive navigation between the different pages of a site and must also serve SEO issues.
As with the definition of the digital strategy, it is essential that SEO and UX experts work together. An SEO-only tree structure will not be considered and a UX tree structure can overlook visibility opportunities.
Here are some examples of situations that can be avoided:
INTEGRATION OF STRATEGIC SEO PAGES BY DEFAULT
If these strategic pages were not taken into account in the construction of the tree structure, it is likely that they will have difficulty finding their place in the structure. Integrated by default, they will be placed in the background. However, if these pages are not sufficiently meshed it will be difficult to make Google understand that they are important. It is therefore necessary to start with a listing of the UX and SEO pages to be prioritized in the new structure.
We have the example of a client in the insurance industry. We had requested the creation of pages dedicated to very specific target requests, the UX / client tree only offered very generic target entries. We could not use these pages as a landing page for identified queries. We have found a compromise by adding these pages at the bottom of the target pages but we will have to compensate for this location by integrating links from other pages
DUPLICATION OF CONTENT
It can happen that a page is relevant in several places in the structure. Take the case of a product page that can be called from a product entry or from a need or target entry. The page cannot be duplicated for SEO performance reasons, it is, therefore, necessary to find the main location for it that it is important to define together. It is important to ask the following question: “What part of the site should we promote? “.
GENERATION OF ORPHAN PAGES
We sometimes see crossroads pages in tree-structure proposals highlighting a selection of pages, generally articles. However, once these pages have been replaced by more recent content, they are no longer attached to the structure and become “orphans”. This status poses a problem in SEO because these are pages on which we can no longer capitalize.
To avoid this, we recommend integrating listing pages in the tree structure, they will ensure that pages that are no longer highlighted have an anchor point to the structure.
THE CREATION OF A FROZEN STRUCTURE
We remind you that the more regular the updates are on a site, the more it will be considered as dynamic and therefore valued by Google. It is important to build an evolving tree structure by anticipating the addition of new content.
DESIGN SEO OPTIMIZED WIREFRAMES
The UX designer should be aware of some SEO recommendations before starting to create wireframes. The SEO expert often arrives in the acceptance phase and the models have most of the time already been visualized by the client. If the latter is projected with a design, it will be difficult to go back to make it evolve.
Here are some rules to anticipate:
INTEGRATE IMAGES YES BUT …
Generally, this subject divides UX and SEO experts. The SEO expert thinks about loading time and textual content while the UX-designer knows that a picture is better than a thousand words. Even if techniques exist to optimize the loading time of images, we recommend reserving certain locations for textual content, especially at the top of the page. Of course, this recommendation is to be applied depending on the sector of activity.
MAKE ROOM FOR SEMANTICS
Clean designs ok but keep in mind that we need places for titles and texts. If the study by the Nielsen Norman group, carried out in April 2020, shows us that Internet users do not read all of the content online and that they tend to scan a page instead. We also note that for some queries, Google displays dense content (+700 words) in its top 5 results. Depending on the pages, more or less dense content is to be expected.
GIVE PREFERENCE (AS FAR AS POSSIBLE) TO TEXTUAL LINKS
In SEO we preach for hypertext links because the optimized anchors allow the semantic enrichment of the targeted page. For this reason, we recommend avoiding uninteresting links such as “Find out more” or image links, even if the ALT attribute is correctly filled in, this type of link has less weight for search engines.
We hear that sometimes it’s complicated to add a multi-word anchor when a button fits better and performs the function very well. For this reason, it is up to us to be less categorical in our recommendation and to assign this request to the link anchors that point to strategic pages.
Still, with the objective of enriching the semantics of a strategic page, we recommend varying the anchors to this page. This request is to be taken into account in the models because it is not the same work for the developers.
We have more interest than ever in developing UX / SEO complementarity for better results. As we have seen, it is quite possible to combine these two areas of expertise as long as it is well prepared in advance. Note that the SEO expert is used to adapting to constraints, it is rare that a redesign project meets 100% of our requirements and that is what is challenging!
