There is an on-going battle between UX and SEO best practices. UX or user experience basically means when someone lands on your website, you want them to have a good experience.
But at the same token, you may want to increase your exposure in the search engines. So there’s a way to balance them and it’s also very possible for one to overpower the other.
How to Balance User Experience & SEO
Really, a good user experience is a very simple website, one where the navigation is simple and clean and not overwhelming and you know the minimal amount of content on the site because people typically tend to scroll and scan versus read a lot of dense content, so having not a lot of content on your website can improve the user experience as well.
And that’s actually sometimes at odds with SEO because oftentimes or at least what most people think is Google wants to see a certain amount of words or certain amount of content per page.
1. Utilize a Blog & Content Strategy
Some of the best ways to kind of strike that balance between keeping your content simple and clean while at the same time improving your SEO is to use the content strategically. Some of a couple ideas that we like to encourage our clients are, one of which, is to use your blog.
A blog is a great mechanism for like archiving a lot of content and if you want to improve your SEO, you should have a very active content marketing strategy using your blog.
2. Bury Dense Content on Web Pages
Another really good way to increase the number of content on your website, without overwhelming the visitor, is to put the content maybe lower down in the page. If someone is scrolling through, usually the highest priority part of the page is the most important part of the page.
You may want to have your messaging be more succinct and be easier to read at the top, and then as someone scrolls down the page, you might have more dense content that’s really designed to appeal to the search engines.
3.Use FAQ Accordions to Organize Content
Another way is to oftentimes use hidden ways of slightly hiding the content like FAQ accordion so you have a question, then an answer. That content is buried so it makes the page look kind of clean without again without overwhelming the user.
You may have seen this before. You can click a little read more button and the content will drop down and appear as well. That’s another good way to keep your content streamlined without overwhelming your visitor.
4. Review the Mobile User Experience
Lastly, I want to mention that you should be aware of your mobile viewing as well. Because your desktop, as you can imagine, it’s a big screen, there’s a lot of space. As it’s simplified for mobile viewing, if you have the same amount of content and you have a lot of content, it’ll be extra overwhelming on a mobile view.
If you’re tracking your visitors through analytics, you may notice they have a fair amount of mobile viewing, so it’s important that you’re looking to keep a clean streamlined site both on mobile and desktop. The mobile UX design is also important for SEO as search engines pay attention to the mobile experience and page load time.
So if you have any more questions on how to balance SEO and user experience, definitely give us a call.
