How To Combine SEO and UX To Improve Your WordPress Website

Competing with other sites for search engine rankings is by no means an easy task these days. What’s more, getting Google to like you is not the only thing that’s relevant — you need the audience to like you as well. So if you want your website to perform well, you need to compete for the affection of both the search engine and the target audience. That’s why both search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) are important for your WordPress site.

How Are SEO and UX Connected?

You may think of SEO and UX as two completely separate entities, but in reality, they are intricately connected.

In layman’s terms, SEO is all about getting the attention of search engines and consequently, ranking high in the search results for the relevant queries.

On the other hand, UX targets the website visitor and aims to make their stay comfortable and useful.

If your site ranks relatively high, but your visitors tend to bounce before they even look around, you have not accomplished much. What’s more, when the search engine figures out that your bounce rate is through the roof, your rankings will go down again.

Moreover, your website could be a dream-come-true to your target audience, but if you’re not in the top results in the SERPs, they won’t find you.

So here are some tips to help you improve both aspects of your WordPress website.

Speed Up

According to Google, the probability of your visitors bouncing goes up by 32% as the load time goes from one to three seconds. It’s the famous three-second rule, according to which your website needs to load within that time frame, or else you’ve lost many potential visitors.

Working on the speed of your website is crucial both for your SEO and UX, and the faster your site is, the better it will perform on both fronts.

There are numerous ways to increase loading speed, such as the following:

• Optimizing your image size
• Reducing the number of plugins
• Using caching
• Reducing the use of web fonts, etc.

Simplify Navigation

Your visitors want to see what they came to see, and they want it now! So you need to make sure they can find anything with ease, or you’ve lost them again.

Instead of creating granular, highly specific pages within pages within pages, display all your content in simple navigation. What’s more, make navigation available on every page since you never know where your visitors are going to land.

Consider adding a search option for an even faster way of finding the desired content on your site.

Another great thing about having well-organized and simple navigation is that Google will be able to crawl every page with ease and even show your menu directly in the search results.

Be Mobile-Friendly

Today, it might be more important to have a responsive mobile design than that for desktop browsing. As web traffic is slowly tipping the scale in favor of mobile use (with 55% of all traffic coming from mobile devices), you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential visitors if you ignore this fact.

So when you make your site available to smartphone, tablet, and other mobile users, you’re tapping into a very important pool of users. If they try to enter your site and find it unoptimized for their device, they won’t hesitate to leave and try the competitor.

If it makes sense for what you do, you might also consider creating a dedicated mobile app (great for eCommerce stores).

Have Quality Content

Quality content needs to be on point, easy to digest, and relevant. Keep in mind what your visitors want and need from each piece of content and make sure you deliver them just that.

Be mindful not to stun your visitors with never-ending blocks of text. For example, your website copy needs to be short and sweet in order to capture attention but not bore the user.

Make sure to structure it so that it’s easy on the eye and doesn’t require exceptional focus to take in. You can use bullets, lists, headings, and images to break it all down into more digestible units.

Find Opportunities for Visuals

This is the era of Instagram and TikTok, i.e., it’s the golden age of visuals! Both Google and internet users love visuals, and they are known to boost time on page.

Some of the reasons everyone loves them are that they help the reader go through lengthy content more smoothly, summarize it for them, offer visual examples, and much more.

So don’t hesitate to use any visual media that can help, including:

• Images
• Videos
• Infographics
• Gifs
• Screenshots, etc.

However, make sure to optimize your visuals so that they don’t impede the performance of your site. Reduce image size, choose the right format (e.g. JPEG), and embed videos instead of uploading them directly.

Use Calls to Action Liberally

If you want your visitors to stay as long as possible and increase their chances of conversion, use calls to action everywhere. These can be in the form of hypertext or a banner inviting users to perform an action.

No matter how you incorporate your CTAs, make sure that they state exactly what users can expect if they click through (e.g., “Buy Now,” “Sign Up,” “Learn More,” etc.).

The goal is to facilitate the visitors’ journey through your site, help them find what they need, and ultimately, make them convert.

Use Headings Wisely

It’s immensely important to use the proper headings on your site. They act as guides through your pages, both for search engines and visitors.

You should only have one heading one (H1) per page, and it should state the primary focus of that page. Keep it near the top and make sure it contains a relevant keyword. This way, crawlers will index it properly, and users will understand what the page is about.

Use other headings (H2, H3, and others) to structure your content logically. Again, these headings will allow both the algorithm and people to understand how the content is organized and skim through it for overall meaning before deciding whether to plunge into it.

Do Keyword Research

Keyword research can tell you a lot about what people are searching for in the context of your site and help you give them solutions to their problems. You’ll find out which keywords are easy to rank for and which are worth trying.

You may opt for something more specific to you. For example, you can utilize your location and add it to keywords.

What’s more, you can create different landing pages with different keywords for different types of visitors. Build these words into your content as well as into meta tags and image alt tags.

So keywords are a search engine optimized way to find out what your users want and cater to that.

Match Search Intent

However, performing keyword research is not enough. You’ll see what people search for, but you also need to understand their intent, i.e., what they want to achieve through their search.

For example, two people searching for “mojitos” might have entirely different intentions — the first one wants to learn how they’re made and the second one is looking for nearby bars that serve them. So the former’s intent is informational, while we can say that the second one’s is navigational.

You can learn more about your searchers’ intent by looking into long-tail keywords or going through the SERPs. Just make sure you match it correctly; otherwise, you might bring in the wrong crowd.

Greet the Visitor

If you want to meet your visitors halfway and help them out immediately instead of leaving them to roam around themselves, you can have AI-based chatbots greet them. These smart bots are becoming increasingly popular because they progress quickly and learn from experience.

They can greet your visitors as soon as they land on your site and offer assistance. This way, they can direct them to the right page, give them information, assist them with buying your products or signing up, and much more.

Users will appreciate this proactive approach and will be much more likely to stay and convert.

Test Your Site Often

Ultimately, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not if you don’t test your site performance often. Check your analytics regularly to see if visitors are bouncing or staying, what captures their attention, and how high your pages are ranking.

Furthermore, every time you make any UX-related changes, look at the data to see if the changes are effective or not, or if they’re even detrimental. In the latter case, you can reverse them as soon as you notice the negative trends.

Sometimes, you can even test the prototype during the development phases to see how people respond to it and whether they like it before you implement it.

So if you follow these tips you’ll be able to improve your WordPress site beyond your initial beliefs. The good thing is that the search engine and users are acquiring similar tastes, and you can cater to both simultaneously.

About the Author:

Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.