Search Engine algorithms rate the relevance of your keywords on pages and metadata not only in relation to a user’s search terms but after the evaluation of information such as the duration stay of visitors on your site, bounce rate, broken links, pages viewed, inbound and outbound links and much more.
Improving the user experience and usability of your website can get users to stay on your site and interact with your content. This will boost your website’s ranking. However, you also need to consider other factors equally that affect search engine ranking.
20 elements that not only improve the usability of your site but also help boost your SEO ranking have been discussed here:
1. Publishing useful and relevant Content
When you provide some useful and relevant content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website. This greatly affects your SEO ranking. Also, if your content is useful, visitors will bookmark it on Chrome and your Google ranking will be automatically boosted.
2. Regular updating of the content
Regularly updated content is considered to be one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy. Hence, it becomes very important to keep your content updated and fresh for the search engines to crawl your website.
3. Confirm your Rankings
You can start searching for the phrases in Google to confirm your site’s rankings. Sometimes, you may see that your site holds an average position while sometimes your site may rank higher than the report suggests. At times you may not see your site at all. However, there is nothing to be worried about because there is no such thing as an entirely neutral search. This is the reason A/B testing for Google rankings is impossible.
4. Metadata
Metadata are the search phrases that people type to find a particular page or content. It summarizes the basic information about your content, making it easily searchable in the search engines.
5. Set an advanced filter
The advanced filter feature on your site will help you find just the phrases for which you rank high but not too high. These are those phrases that already rank in Google but need improvement as they help you rank on page 2 and not 1.
6. Deeper Keyword research
The various SEO tools available in the market can help you identify the keywords your competitor is ranking for. This will make it easy for you to plan a set of keywords that are most searched for and will produce organic results in terms of your site’s SEO.
7. Social sharing
Installing social sharing buttons on your website not only makes it easy for users to share your content but also improve user experience and help you rank higher on searches by influencing the SEO rankings.
8. Mobile optimization
Google penalizes the sites that are not mobile optimized and brings down their search engine ranking. Also, about 77% of the users browse sites and search for products through their mobile devices. Hence, if your site is not mobile optimized, it will not only affect the user experience but also the number of users visiting your site dramatically.
9. Queries report
This report shows you all the phrases you rank for, the number of times you’ve appeared in Google, the number of times your pages have been visited from these phrases and how high you rank for the phrase. This is the reason you need to keep a track on the Queries Report to know your position in Google Analytics on a frequent basis.
10. Page load speed
Both Google and Bing take page-loading speed into account in their ranking algorithm. Also, users may leave your site if they have to wait even just an extra few seconds for each page to load. This will increase your bounce rate and reduce the number of pages viewed, thus hurting your SEO ranking.
11. Image optimization
Using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description and caption prove to be useful on the SEO front as they establish the relevancy of your content.
12. Site architecture and navigation
Well-structured site architecture with clear navigation facilitates visitors in finding the content of their need and makes them visit the site time and again. This immensely boosts your site’s SEO ranking besides working for good user experience.
13. Contact us page
According to a Google document, websites with sufficient contact information are considered to be more trustworthy and may rank higher on the search engines. A Contact Us page can help you earn Google juice, increases user participation in your company’s online presence, generates new business opportunities, captures new leads, improves customer service and much more.
14. Use alt tags
Using alt tags or alternative text descriptions for visual and video media are a must since they allow search engines to locate your page and are especially important for people who use text-only browsers.
15. Header tags
Proper use of header tags can help you divide the content into sections that are easy to read and understand. This not only enhances the user experience of your website immensely but also makes the readers willing to spend time on your website and even come back for more. Thus, the SEO ranking of your site gets automatically boosted.
16. Internal linking architecture
Internal links are hyperlinks on a webpage to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. These links facilitate good website navigation besides allowing search engines to crawl or spider websites.
17. Outbound links
Linking your content to the authority sites increase the relevancy of your content and enable readers to spend more time on your site. It also improves your site’s SEO ranking since your content is considered to be more in-depth and trustworthy by Google.
18. Adding multimedia
Images, videos, slideshows and audio enrich the user experience of your site and make your content look good and interactive. They also act as a sign of quality content to the search engines and help you deliver information in the most suitable manner possible to the ideal visitors.
19. Layout and formatting
Proper formatting and a user-friendly layout tremendously boost a site’s usability by making your content easy to read and understandable to the site visitors. This enhances the user experience and the readers tend to spend more time on your site improving your sites’ SEO ranking.
20. Run a website audit
Running a website audit will help you know your site’s strength and the areas that need improvement. You can then use this data to find out the reason for your site’s lower ranking that may be caused due to spammy links you need to remove, broken links within your content, a page speed load-time issue, a bounce rate you want lower or any other problem.
Traffic from SEO may give you higher numbers in the short term, but better user experience can often result in higher conversions for the long term.
When visitors can’t find what they need on a website right away, they are most likely to leave the site immediately. This will result in high bounce rate, low dwell time and low number of pages viewed.
SEO ranking improves when visitors stay on your site longer, view more pages, and repeat their visits. Therefore, the more user-friendly your site is, the more likely it is that your ranking will get boosted.
