Clicks to Conversions: Why UI and UX Are the Secret Ingredients to SEO Success

Ensuring a good site’s UI and UX is no longer just a suggestion or “added value.” It’s become a must-have if you want to stay on top of your competitors.

SEO has also become more than just keywords and backlinks, with the experience a user has on your site taking the central stage – naturally, both UI and UX are a big part of that. But how exactly do they impact a site’s SEO? Let’s explore. 

UX and UI – What Are They? 

First things first, let’s talk about UX and UI from a more technical perspective.

If you’ve been going through white label SEO reviews, you might have noticed that one of the most commonly offered services is UX and UI – and for good reason.

Any reputable SEO agency knows that while not a direct ranking factor in itself, having good UX and UI on your site can still make a world of difference for your position on Google. 

So, what are they? What do they involve? And what is the difference between them? 

UI vs. UX: Key Differences & Similarities

UI stands for user interface and refers to how your website looks. It involves any visual elements, including buttons, images, fonts, and more. 

UX, on the other hand, stands for user experience and is more about the technical aspects of your website – its speed, navigation menu, icons, etc. There’s UX and mobile UX, which focuses on how your website operates on mobile devices. 

Think about it this way – UI is the restaurant’s menu, while UX is the whole dining experience. UI is how the building looks, but UX is how easy you can navigate in it, how cozy it is, and whether its purpose has been met. Much clearer now, isn’t it? 

Sometimes used interchangeably (although incorrectly), they work together to ensure your user has the best possible experience. One doesn’t work without the other, as even if you have a beautiful website but it is hard to navigate, people will not stay around for long, as they’d get frustrated with how unintuitive it is to use. Similarly, if the website is easily navigated but lacks visual appeal, many will abandon it in search of another that has both. 

How UX and UI Impact SEO 

As we mentioned, you cannot optimize one without the other, as, to put it bluntly, it’s pointless and won’t bring you noticeable results. Focusing on both, however, can improve your SEO statistics, and there are several reasons behind it: 

• Aesthetic website design can make people stay longer on your website. According to the latest data, more than 90% of customers will form an opinion about your website based on how it looks. If they don’t like it, they will move on – with so many at their disposal, they don’t have to stick with something they don’t like.

  If a user leaves the website quickly, it sends a signal to Google that something on the site prevents the user from having a good experience or that the content does not provide relevant information.

• It increases the number of returning users. If a customer knows that they feel comfortable navigating your website and its design is pleasant enough for them, they most likely won’t try to look for other sites, increasing the chances of them returning to you. This is especially important for e-commerce sites, although there, UI and UX are just a part of the whole shopping experience that goes beyond the web. 
• User-friendly mobile design can impact your rankings. Google prioritizes websites that provide their users with a seamless experience, and that also includes how your website performs on mobile devices. If your site is great, but its mobile version severely lacks good mobile UX, chances are that Google will prioritize other websites that have both. 
• A well-designed website makes it easier to index your content. If your website has easy navigation from page to page, it will be easier for Google to crawl them. Think about it this way – for crawlers to index your pages, they need to reach them somehow – they do it using internal links that act like ropes connecting different parts of your website to each other. If a page cannot be easily reached (has no rope), the crawlers will have a hard time reaching it and oftentimes won’t be able to index it properly no matter how well-written the content on it is. 

Image Reference: LINK 

• Websites with good UX and UI are more likely to be shared, driving organic traffic. Good UI and UX combined with great and useful content can improve organic traffic, as they’re more likely to be shared on social media. A good example is Facebook, where you can often find specific pages dedicated to sharing articles found on the web. 

These are just a few ways in which proper UX and UI can affect your search rankings – however, they are the ones you should focus on when doing technical SEO. 

The Solution: SXO 

The impact of how the user experiences the website being a determining factor for its search rankings led to the birth of something called SXO (search experience optimization), which as some say, is the marriage between SEO and UX. 

It combines SEO and UX strategies to improve search visibility as well as user engagement, effectively turning leads into conversions. It makes sure that the user is not only able to find the website but also has a good time navigating through it. 

SEO and SXO – What’s the Difference 

Based on what we already provided, you should be able to easily understand the difference between SEO and SXO – but if not, don’t worry, we’ll talk about it. 

The main difference between them is that SXO is much broader than SEO. While SEO is about improving your website’s visibility in the search engines, SXO is about both that and making sure the user has a good time on your site. It’s about the overall experience, from the moment the user inserts the keyword into the search engine to the moment they check out. 

Example of Approach in Both SEO and SXO 

It’s always better to learn from examples, so let’s do just that – let’s take as an example a clothing store exclusively selling dresses and see how their strategies would change depending on whether they’re focusing on SEO or SXO. 

SEO 

If the clothing store were to focus only on SEO, it would start by conducting comprehensive keyword research and identifying the best opportunities to rank, e.g., ‘best summer dresses,’ ‘best wedding guest dresses,’ ‘best cocktail dresses,’ etc. 

Then, once they have the list of search terms, they would optimize their product and category pages to incorporate them. At the same time, they would make sure that the images they use have good alt text. 

Additional things they would do in this case include improving the site’s speed and its performance on mobile devices, creating an XML sitemap, and sending it to search engines for more accurate indexing, as well as creating content that includes the keywords the shop singled out during keyword research. They will also focus on building the website’s backlink profile by 

SXO 

When it comes to SXO, a lot of the steps will look the same as in the first case. However, the checklist will be further expanded by things like: 

• Performing further analysis to make sure that they’re meeting the search intent of their users and determining whether buying guides or review pages will be more effective.
• Creating interactive elements, such as quizzes, that help users make better choices in terms of which product to choose. 
• Making sure that the layout of the website is clear and easy to navigate and that clear calls to action help guide the user when they’re on the website. 
• Adding personalization measures such as personal recommendations based on the user’s browsing history on the site. 
• Ensuring that the checkout process is streamlined for fast transactions. 
• Implementing retargeting strategies, especially email reminders about abandoned carts. 
• Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions to help users and Google understand what your page is about. 

UX Factors Affecting Ranking 

There are several UX elements that affect how your website is ranking, including: 

Site Architecture and Navigation 

A website that is hard to navigate and unorganized will not perform as well as one that is in order. Having good site architecture ensures that Google will be able to scan all of your pages, and users are able to quickly get to the page they need. 

Ideally, it should take the users no longer than 4 clicks from the homepage to find it – although it’s understandable that larger websites might require a bit more than that. The point is, however, that it shouldn’t be difficult for them to find what they need.

Best practices: 

• Creating a transparent structure with categories. 
• Designing a menu that showcases topics and subtopics one can find on the website. 
• Crafting a well-optimized link structure for easier indexation. 

Layout and Design

As mentioned before, the website needs to be well-designed to retain the user’s attention, and one way of doing that is to use the correct headings structure and make use of visual elements rather than content being just a block of text. 

Best practices: 

• Using only one H1 heading per page, even if you can use more. 
• Following the hierarchy of headings. 

Image Reference: LINK

• Making sure that the visual elements have appropriate alt texts and that they fit the overall look and vibe of your website. 

Page Speed and Core Web Vitals 

Humans are impatient creatures – that’s no secret. That’s why, if you want to keep your visitors happy, you need to make sure your page loads quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, especially when it comes to pages that contain a lot of images. 

A metric you should take into account here is CWV, which measures first screen loading time, ease of interaction, and visual stability. The higher the score the better, as websites with low scores tend to experience higher numbers of leaving customers. Google also evaluates this metric when deciding how to rank pages. 

Best practices: 

• Regular checking of your website’s page speed (pages should load in under 2.5 seconds). 
• Compression of large images to improve loading times. 

Mobile Responsiveness 

Finally, you also should take into account how your website performs on mobile devices, especially phones. Nowadays, more people than ever use their phones to research or make purchases, so it’s only natural that your website needs to be well-optimized for that. 

Best practices: 

• Creating a well-responsive layout that adapts based on what device the user is accessing the website from. 
• Optimizing the page speed for different devices. 

Metrics to Pay Attention To 

If you want to know whether your strategy worked, you need to pay attention to a number of metrics, including: 

• Dwell time – The amount of time the user spends on the page from the moment they leave search results until they return to it. 
• Bounce rate – The percentage of users that visit your website but leave before going to other pages. 
• Average engagement time – The average time your website remains in the browser’s focus. The higher the engagement rate, the longer the user stays interested in your website. 
• Internal links distribution – This is a page-specific metric, as it measures how many internal links point to a specific page. Make sure that you always have at least one link pointing to each page. 
• Click depth – Also known as click distance, this is another page-specific metric that measures how many clicks are required to reach the page from the homepage.
• Click-through rate – This metric tells you how many people clicked the link to your page on the Google result page.  
• Conversion rate – Thanks to this metric, you can find out how many users who visited your website completed a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a survey. 

A good idea to determine the best way to proceed as far as SXO strategy goes is to use A/B testing. Its premise is just as it sounds – you create several versions of posts and pages, and see which one performs the best. 

The Bottom Line 

Getting the users to visit your page is just the first step in increasing conversions – what happens after they’re already on your website is just as important, and it all comes down to a good UX/UI. Without them, even if you rank high on Google results, chances are the potential customers will leave your page before they even take a step forward due to unattractive design or slow performance. 

Providing your customers with a great experience is not a suggestion – in today’s world, where customers have an abundance of pages to choose from, it’s a necessity. Taking the right approach to it will surely reward you in several ways.