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User experience: are you putting your customers first?

Fay Roe

SEO is essential to help customers find your business online; however, website SEO relies on more than just relevant keywords and backlinks. User experience is another key metric Google uses to help calculate who is worthy of those valuable top spots on its results pages.

What do we mean by user experience? User experience is how your visitors interact with your website and whether their experience is positive or negative.

How does Google measure user experience?

There are a number of ways Google evaluates how useful and relevant your website is to searchers:

Page loading speed: your website may visually be a thing of great beauty, but if it takes too long to load people will not stick around to see it and click away. Remember, Google’s priorities are to provide top notch answers to queries and the best possible browsing experience for searchers from the first click.
Mobile friendly website: when over 50% of internet searches are made on a mobile device, a responsive website design is a necessity, and if it isn’t? Google will penalise you and down the ranks you will fall.
How long visitors stay on your website: if visitors only stay on a website for a cursory glance before leaving, this tells Google you are not providing a good user experience. The longer they remain, Google understands your site is providing quality and relevant content of real value to the searcher.

How do you know your website provides a poor user experience?

It is incredibly hard to subjectively review your own website when you have spilt blood, sweat and tears creating it, but here are some tell-tale symptoms of poor user experience.

a) Your website does not generate new leads or sales.

b) Visitors do not stay on your website (high bounce rate).

c) The bounce rate is higher on mobile devices.

d) Your competitors’ websites are better!

e) Your search log reveals people are searching for similar phrases – revealing a gap in information.

f) Your employees don’t feel it supports their roles.

g) Customers phone you rather than use the website.

h) The tweaks you make to the website have little or no effect on its performance.

Ouch. It hurts. If you can relate to any of the above, it’s time to take action.

a man is holding a tablet in front of a wall with smiley faces on it .

How to improve your website’s user experience

Review your website content

Content and information must be presented in a way that is relevant to the visitor. Consider the following:

Who are your visitors?
What problem do they need your help to solve?
At what stage of their thought process do they access your site?
How do they use the information your website provides?

Understanding how and why your website content is consumed is important. The answers to these questions will help you to understand the information architecture your website needs and inform the best performing SEO website content, design and navigation (see below).

Great content keeps visitors on your website for longer. Different mediums such as a short film or animation is a fantastic way to keep visitors engaged and boost the time they spend on web pages. You can learn more about the benefits of video production by clicking here. It’s best practice to have your video short placed near the top of the page – users typically only invest 15 seconds to assess how relevant your website is, so if you can gain their attention as soon as they access it, you are on to a winner!

Publishing content that satisfies the consumer’s needs, means you also gain Google’s appreciation and SEO gold stars. Google is a champion of quality content; its mantra of E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) rewards websites that prioritise its users.

Revisit your web design

Business website design and user experience are not different concepts; they are intrinsically linked. Website design is key to controlling the user experience and the resulting customer journey.

The more user friendly your website design is, the more likely you can convert a visitor into consumer and retain them as customers. Anticipate their needs and provide solution by marrying content and design.

How did your visitor arrive at your site and where are they going next? An optimised design helps to create an intuitive and natural flow to exploit the profitable browsing behaviour of the visitor and lead them to checkout. How do you do that? Strong calls to action, internal links and intuitive navigation.

Most consumer journeys begin via a mobile device so making sure your website mobile responsive is business critical – do not think of it as being optional!

Designing and optimising the layout and content for multiple screen sizes is complex and takes time. Digital Presence’s website design (Christchurch based) team consider the needs and limitations of mobile devices from the start of the creative web design process, so our sites provide a responsive and optimised experience across all devices.

Every detail in your website design should help the visitor purchase from you; from audience targeted SEO and user-friendly URL slugs through to the image names and sizes – a website designer incorporates fast-loading technical tweaks to help visitors and Google alike.

What next?

If you feel your website is not providing a great user experience and underperforming, get in touch.

At Digital Presence we have all kinds of technical wizardry to identify where user experience is blocking conversions. For example, we use heat maps to discover where visitors are spending time on the website and where you are losing them in the process. Sometimes the content is confusing or it’s not clear about where you want visitors to go; or perhaps there is disparity between your Google Ads and the reality of the products and services you offer.

Digital Presence provides specialist web design services and web marketing Christchurch and beyond. We look at your website design and digital marketing holistically; using analytics and research we collaborate with you to create a more streamlined and successful user experience to generate more sales. Get in touch today for a free no-obligation chat about how we can help your business reach its full potential.

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Based in Christchurch NZ

User experience: are you putting your customers first?

How does Google measure user experience?

How do you know your website provides a poor user experience?