SEO and customer experience have always been considered related but in many ways separate. SEO is what a site does to communicate with and appeal to machines (i.e., search engines), much of which goes on behind the scenes and out of the eye of site visitors. If you are looking for a professional agency to help you with any or all of these things and more, a simple search of “SEO Brisbane” will turn up reputable SEO companies that will stand behind their work.
While there are undoubtedly some SEO-related considerations that are not immediately felt by the visitor, the most important SEO metrics certainly are. Below are some of the most important ways SEO impacts your customer experience.
User Interface Impact
SEO and user interface are highly correlated. If you have a bad user interface, it will be reflected in your site’s SEO score. This is because sites that are not easy to navigate, either because of bad internal linking and/or design, are likely not going to hold a visitor’s attention for very long. This is why it is of the utmost importance to get your on-page SEO right.
There are plenty of things you can do to your on-page SEO in order to give your customers a better experience while browsing your site and, in turn, make it more likely that they will spend more time there and come back in the future. By optimizing the URLs of each page on your site, for instance, you make it easier for visitors to know where they are going.
Another way to make your site more pleasurable to use and navigate for visitors is to ensure good use of alt text throughout. These are the short (no more than 100 characters) descriptions of images that people see when they hover over them. Lastly, make sure your colour scheme is consistent throughout and have your main header menu clear and uncluttered.
Link Policy Impact
Your link policy also has a marked impact on how your customers perceive their experience on your site. Your link policy refers to a couple of things. First, it concerns how you link the internal pages of your website so that every page is essentially navigable from every other page. There should not be any orphaned content on your site, meaning that there should be no page from which here is no hyperlinked exit. An example of an orphaned page might be a blog article or a service page that does not link to another page on your–another blog article, a contact page, an about us page, etcetera.
Your link policy also refers to how many and how often you include outbound links in your content. There are many theories on outbound links, including how many you should use, the kinds of links you should use, when and when not to use “rel=nofollow” links and when to use dofollow. There are also some well-established best practices that you should keep in mind whenever you are including an outbound link in an article.
Also important is the impact they will have on your visitors. Does your outbound link back up a point you are trying to make or a statistic you are referring to that might help a visitor make a purchasing decision on your site? In such a case, having a relevant and thoughtful outbound link would undoubtedly be considered a part of the customer experience.
Content Policy Impact
Long gone are the days when simply keyword stuffing an article and making it as long as possible were enough to game the PageRank algorithm and find your content near the top of the results page. While long-form content is preferred, the objective of any piece of content should always be quality above quantity and SEO best practices with respect to keyword use and volume.
In fact, Google’s current content policy, known by the acronym EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trust), is what you should always have in mind when writing content. Google has made it abundantly clear that observing these guidelines is of the utmost importance for a good SEO score. In this way, your SEO policy directly and how you view the goals and purpose of your content directly impacts your customer experience.
Page Load Time Impact
Page load time is another way SEO and customer experience are interconnected. Your average website visitor has very little patience for slow page loads and will leave within a couple of seconds, especially if they don’t already know about your business. Poor coding, images that are too big or too many images, too many plugins and even server issues impact how fast a page loads, and you should attend to them for both SEO and customer service reasons.
A high-speed site improves customer experience by giving time-strapped and, admittedly, impatient people the ability to get where and what they want quickly. While the end result of this dedication to site speed ultimately results in shorter session duration, if sales increase, then you are doing your job.
Conclusion
SEO and customer experience cannot be separated. From the way your user interface is set up to the link policy you observe to how you write your content and how long it takes your site and its pages to load, it is all interconnected. It makes sense, therefore, to keep the above SEO considerations in mind as part of your dedication to customer experience.
