What is UX design? Is it a ranking factor in Google? And just how important is the overall ‘usability’ of your website?

Whether you are building a brand-new website from scratch or you are thinking of giving yours a good overhaul, this is the article for you. We’re going to talk about the importance of providing your website visitors with a positive on-page experience in 2023.

What is UX design?

UX design stands for “user-experience”. In other words, it is the process of designing a website not purely for aesthetic purposes, but to ensure that every website visitor has a positive on-page experience.

It’s all very well having a pretty looking website but if it is practically unusable and your website visitors don’t have a positive experience, you are completely wasting your time.

Here’s a handful of a few UX principles: 

• How quickly does the website load?
• How easy is it to navigate?
• Can visitors locate the information they need quickly?
• Do the visuals compliment the marketing message?
• Is the website itself accessible to everyone?
• Is it mobile responsive?
• Is the overall design and tone consistent with the brand? 

Is UX design a ranking factor in Google?

Google has indeed announced that their ranking algorithm will now measure the quality of a webpage’s overall UX as a ranking factor.

So, if the algorithm deems that your website visitors are having a poor experience, they will downgrade your rankings as a result.

But why?

Why is the overall usability of your website so important?

Gone are the days where stuffing as many keywords onto a website as possible and building lots of backlinks is enough to beat the algorithm and achieve #1 rankings.

Today, Google is all about rewarding businesses who are dedicated to providing their users with the most positive experience possible, from start to finish.

This means:

• Understanding keyword intent and meeting expectations.
• Providing high-value content that was written for people (and not Google).
• Having an intuitive internal linking structure.
• Offering a positive on-page experience.

Put it this way: the internet is littered with crap websites (literally billions) filled with walls of half-arsed content providing very little value for anyone. And in an attempt to essentially ‘clean up’ the internet, Google has decided in their recent ‘people-first’ update that they would only reward websites who go above and beyond to provide genuine value with greater visibility. 

Conclusion: “Build it and they will come!”

Yes, keyword research is important, quality content creation is important, and link-building remains very much important as well. However, if people arrive on your website and then have no idea what steps to take next, or find walls of text with very little in the way of structure, then they will invariably abandon your website for one of your competitors.

Today, modern marketing should be all about creating the path of least resistance. Making every single word count!

So, if you want the best results through your website, you better invest in quality UX design!

Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t know where to begin? There’s an agency that offers SEO services in Sydney that can help you make the most of your website.

Put your best foot forward and find the perfect balance of UX and SEO; provide your prospective customers with a seamless on-page experience and you’ll be rewarded not only with a higher conversion rate, but more ‘ready to spend’ traffic as well.