SEO’s reputation has evolved in the recent times and improved tremendously over the years. Most of the SEO experts and web designers are aware of the fact that search engine optimisation is a fundamental necessity for a successful website.
If you want a website that gives the optimum result, it is important that you incorporate SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a part of your web development process.
While UX (User Experience) design is viewed as a vital element of a website, many development teams approach SEO as a late addition to a project. Or worse, some of the UX designers merely ensure that a site isn’t doing anything blatantly wrong.
They just incorporate a few title tags and descriptions on content pages, and finish their projects. This is where the developed website falls short of delivering the desired results.
Developing and optimising a site for search engines through a comprehensive approach to SEO is the key for Web development project to reach its full potential.
SEO holds a better chance at being included in these projects as a forethought rather than an afterthought. You just need to find the right ways to partner SEO techniques with UX counterparts.
Here’s how it works.
Make the Differences Work for You
Firstly, you need to recognise that most of the marketing and UX experts find themselves on opposite sides of the conversion fence where one works on user’s needs and another on the goals of a business.
Friction between the two groups is inevitable, but grouping them together to achieve the desired result through healthy competition can improve development.
SEO and digital marketing are increasingly dependent on good user experience, so it’s important to create an atmosphere of collaboration before you even initiate the development of a website.
Establish Unified Site Goals and Refer Them While Making Decisions
UX and SEO experts must have a common understanding of a website’s goals before suggesting ideas for design, content, and marketing strategies. Different perspectives on the common goals can provide strong results if both parties are willing to work together. Creating user and buyer personas together for a business assist in decision-making throughout a project. From keyword research to user flows, decisions shouldn’t be made based on just intuition, but instead, both teams can use their combined expertise, market research, and user feedback to make decisions that will improve your website.
Unanimously the UX and SEO experts should ask these questions if they are struggling to come to a decision together:
- What goal does this enable us to achieve?
- Is this the best way to achieve our goal?
- Will this please the user?
- How will this content or design element impact our user’s decision-making?
- Will this decision drive conversions?
Create content in a well-designed page
You shouldn’t write content without a design in mind and the design should never dictate your content in a poor manner. Determine the best method for developing content for a Web project. Determine a site architecture, which pages need to be created or reworked, a rough length for content, and the types of design elements that should be incorporated.
Why is this important?
A collective effort to determine a content structure for your website will prevent project delays, but most importantly it will make for an improved user experience. Quality content increases the chance of your site users converting the way you want them to. Well-written content without the support of design elements or proper use of white space can get lost on a page. Similarly, quality design with poor content will prevent users from trusting the message a brand wants to deliver.
The design of a website isn’t just appealing to the site visitors. Google is getting wiser about how it evaluates a good design, including using human performance indicators. Performance indicators like quick page load time and low bounce rate indicate to search engines that your site is user-friendly, eventually boosting your authority.
Stay Prepared To Iterate
Most of the UX and SEO agree on the fact about a web development project is that you are never “done” with a project in its true sense. The needs of your users evolve with time, the best practices of the Web evolve, and therefore your website should evolve with it too.
UX and our SEO teams leverage market and user research to serve users’ needs, but we’re also uniquely equipped to ensure that the site’s performance is measured. UX and our SEO professionals test with real-life users and evaluate site performance to make iterative site changes that optimise user experience and conversions.
Improved collaboration between our SEO and a UX team means a positive impact on the outcomes of the projects, from the frontlines of users to the bottom lines of website owners. Consider incorporating SEO into your UX Development process and you will have your website designed for optimum results.
Thanks for sharing this! I was really curious if UX and SEO experts could work together so this was a very interesting find!