Be Google-able: Improving your page rankings through UX

Google’s Mobilegeddon has already started its job of weeding out the mobile-friendly sites from the ones that aren’t, but there is more to Google’s algorithm than meets the eye. The usual SEO stuff—title tags, meta descriptions, quality content, and non-spammy social media marketing—all contribute to higher search visibility, rankings, and organic search traffics on your site, but there are other lesser-known factors that can also influence how Google sees your site.

These things have something to do with user experience (UX), an emerging practice with a human-centric approach to understanding how people engage with technology and how to build the best web experiences possible. Improving UX not only benefits the overall experience of the user, but also creates a significant, measurable ROI for your brand, as consumers want to interact repeatedly with pleasingly designed and navigation-friendly websites. Hence, UX plays a major role in determining your rankings in Google.

One of these essential factors is site speed. The speed at which your page loads plays an essential role in whether or not a user feels satisfied with his chosen result, and Google takes note of that. In optimizing site speed especially for mobile devices, it is important to take some time to regularly clean up your site and run speed tests. Installing a good caching plugin plus deleting any unused drafts or images can also help make your site speedier. Site security is also important, even if your website isn’t an e-commerce platform. Google currently gives a small ranking boost to sites with SSL encryption, those with an “s” in their “https” URL.

No user experience would be complete without the ease of site navigation. Your site should be logically organized in an intelligently structured system of menus and submenus. Google analyzes these and tracks user activity to determine how easy your site is to use. Running user experience tests can improve your site structure and provide the best layout that works for your visitors.

Internal linking is also part of site navigation, as Google also counts the number of clicks that it takes for a user to get to any page on your site. The fewer the clicks, the better. Any page that requires more than three clicks could be a strike to your site’s UX. Google might also deem that page to be unimportant and undeserving of exposure in Google search results. To ensure that your site is tightly interlinked, use internal links in your own articles and pages.

Finally, bounce rates are also taken into account by Google when it comes to search visibility. If a user visits your site through Google and leaves right away by clicking the ‘back’ button, Google takes it as a subjective sign that your site didn’t offer relevant information or good UX. Both entertainment value and web design play a part in lowering one’s bounce rates.

Having a trusted and experienced web developer is key to helping your site achieve all these things. An example of such is IT Craft, which provides software programming services to over 30 active clients from 16 countries. It has also garnered 15 years of experience in empowering businesses with innovative web and mobile application technologies. With web developers like IT Craft, it is easier to optimize your site and achieve the greatest possible UX that you can offer to your patrons.

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