Importance of user experience and web content in digital marketing

Getting your website to rank on the first ten pages of Google is one of the hardest nuts to crack. Online marketing strategist constantly and consistently try new strategies to keep up with Google’s best practices to make sure website owners can rank their websites on top of Google and other search engines in order to drive substantial sales. Website usability, web content and user experience are one of the core elements that significantly contribute towards search engine ranking. Let’s look into user experience and website usability in detail to understand their impact on search engine ranking.

UX encompasses both business needs and customer needs

Significance of website usability and user experience

The first question that pops into every online marketer’s head while understanding search engine ranking is undoubtedly “what works and what doesn’t work?”

Unfortunately, search engine marketing is influenced by dozens of factors that are consistently evolving, which makes it hard to answer that question. However, one of the most definite elements that guarantee a significant contribution towards the best possible rank is user experience; the way your user interacts with your website.

The following image shows the various elements that contribute towards a good UX design:

The easy it is for the user to navigate and search content on your website, the more chances you have to retain visitors, which increases your traffic for increased indexing.

Attributes of search engine acceptable user experience and usability include:

• Easy-to-navigate web pages with professional design
• High quality, 100% original content
• Actionable information related to user queries

Peruse the UX design heuristics for a better understanding of its components:

Creating Google approved user experience

In order to create search engine approved user experience, it is important to remember a couple of things. Peruse below:

Importance of web content

Web content and user experience go hand-in-hand when it comes to creating a high impact user-experience. Content is one of the key ingredients of digital marketing that derive traffic towards your website for increased user base that can convert to lead and sales. Peruse content management lifecycle for web content below:

Quality Metrics for content

Good content allows you to create “long clicks”, which significantly improve your search engine rank. Search engines utilize algorithmic measures to analyze pages and their importance, the longer a user stays on the page after clicking the first link the better your chances are for a higher rank. One way to ensure “long clicks” is through content quality. Peruse below:

Machine Learning:

Google’s Panda update is an addition to its current ranking algorithm that significantly changed the way the search engine analyzes content for quality. Therefore, it is important to consider Google’s Panda update while creating content for your website; it essentially equips you to create content that have 2x chances of getting indexed by the search engine.

Page-Linking Patterns:

External links strengthen the core of your site by linking external sites to your website. Search engine tends to index websites with strong linking higher as compared to sites that have insignificant number of peers. Link-building allows you to build proper links that direct back to your website and enhance your site’s popularity.

The combined effect on search engine rank

The UX design, usability and content offer a combined effect that helps you optimize your website for high search engine rank that ultimately translates to better traffic with potential customers. Here’s a simple illustration to help you understand the overall effect of these 3 important components, we content, usability, and web UX.

Do not neglect the importance of web UX design and web content and build a strong online marketing strategy that drives results!