If you frequently work in the online marketing sphere, you’re almost certainly familiar with SEO and UX. For those who maybe aren’t as immersed in that world and aren’t familiar, SEO stands for search engine optimization, while UX is an abbreviation for user experience.

Not only do both of these affect the other, but there are also many crossovers in the ways we evaluate and approach them. Let’s take a look at how they’re unified, where they’re distinct, and how to make the most out of both:

Basics of SEO and UX

It may be self-explanatory, but in case it’s not, UX is defined as the overall experience someone has while using a product — in this case a site or computer app — in terms of how easy and pleasant it is to use. You know those times you’ve been using a site that’s just been a cluster and made you want to pull your hair out due to frustration, annoyance, and just general terribleness? Yeah — that’s bad UX.

When it comes to your business’ site, your goal is that people can easily navigate it, find the information they need, and just generally do whatever it is that site purports to offer.

SEO, on the other hand, is the process of crafting your website so that search engines judge it to be as good as possible and thus rank it highly — optimized for a search engine, if you will.

SEO focuses on organic traffic rather than paid advertising and will not just increase your traffic, but increase the quality of your traffic, too.

As far as where the two overlap, good UX includes good design and helpful, engaging content, all of which are components that — directly or through proxy — search engines take into account when ranking sites. Good UX will also keep people on your site longer, make them more likely to return, and increase conversions — also something search engines consider in your ranking.

Now, while Google can’t go ask everyone who’s used your site “how was their site,” it can infer the quality of users’ experience based on a handful of proxy metrics. These include:

• Click-through-rate
• Return visits
• Dwell time, which is how long someone “dwells” on your site after clicking on it from Google’s results page
• General time on site

SEO and UX are funny because they’re so related but also distinct. Both must be nurtured! Despite their overlaps, focusing your efforts too myopically on one could negatively impact the other (which in turn will then negatively impact the first piece you were trying to improve.

This is one of the philosophies for why we always advise people that they can’t “cut corners” with the SEO for their business’ site — often, doing so will result in a worse UX, which is measured through various proxies by Google, which Google then will then use to rank your site lower.

More on how UX impacts SEO and vice versa

Because of how they affect each other, the UX and SEO of a site tend to either perpetuate the others’ strengths or compound their failures.

Like we discussed above, good or bad UX can be implied by proxy metrics that Google incorporates into site rankings, although some traits — loading time, for example — can be measured directly. As far as what contributes to UX, Google “cares” the most about factors such as:

• Page experience: Loading speed, smooth interactivity, etc.
• Navigation and site architecture: Can users access all pages, or is it a disorganized mess?
• Mobile responsiveness: Is your site mobile-friendly?
• Quality content: User-friendly formatting and writing for actual humans, not just what you think a search engine wants.

The reason UX and SEO are interconnected is because Google’s constantly working to improve their algorithms’ accuracy by better understanding user intent, context, and more. Essentially, Google is trying to take people to the site that will be the most useful — in other words, give them the best experience.

Hence, it makes sense that UX implications are extremely important in SEO rankings; in a perfect world with a perfect algorithm, the most optimized site for a search engine would be the site that most fulfills what a user wants from their search. (It’s that gap between perfect and reality that’s where UX and SEO are distinct.) Obviously, Google’s results aren’t perfect, but they’re constantly trying to get closer to this.

In practice, this means that some of the key factor crossovers between UX and SEO are:

• User intent
• Site speed
• Usability and navigability of site
• Quality content

How you can make SEO and UX work together

If there’s one overriding philosophy here, it’s that search engines are trying to bring users to the site that best serves their needs (i.e. brings users the best experiences), so in theory the most optimized site is the one that has the best UX.

In practice, search engines are fallible creatures, hence why there’s a difference in SEO and UX instead of them being unified into one concept.

Yet still, because their goal is in theory the same, that’s why there’s so much overlap. By understanding their key disciplines, you can clearly think about where they diverge — and how, in these cases, you’ll have to approach them separately — and where they’re unified and subsequently integrated.

In general, we tell people to be more customer-focused instead of product-focused. After all, it’s the customer who’s experiencing your site. Even though much if not most of your site will be about your product(s), that content is still for the customer; everything you write should come back to that. Always consider their point of view when crafting your site. What makes this experience as pleasant and helpful for them as possible?

And of course, just like with everything we discuss, test thoroughly and often! If you’ve read our posts before, we probably sound like a broken record on this, but setting and forgetting your work will just mean you put in a lot of effort and are getting less out of it than you should. By testing different variables often, you’ll learn more about what you’re doing well, what you’re doing less well, and how to get better!