How to Use UX Testing to Improve Your SEO

How to Use UX Testing to Improve Your SEO

UX or user experience testing is a powerful marketing tool to increase conversions. SEO, or search engine optimization, is another marketing tool and technique to drive traffic and increase conversions.

How are these two connected? Can they amplify each other? In particular, how can we use UX testing to improve SEO?

In the following few pages, we’ll attempt to provide detailed answers to these questions. For a starter, let’s explore the UX SEO relationship and how they fit into a bigger marketing picture.

The Connection Between UX and SEO

UX is one of the key factors and a popular marketing technique that influences how users perceive one’s website. It directly impacts user engagement and satisfaction through site navigation, page loading times, absence of errors, relevance, timeliness and completeness of information, and similar parameters.

SEO is a no less popular and effective marketing technique used to increase website visibility and ranking in SERPs. It directly impacts user acquisition and retention (by the way, UX best practices also help achieve that) and contributes to several key marketing indicators, including click-through and organic conversion rate. Effective SEO also involves clear and impactful writing, delivering easily understood and accessible information for users.

The latest trends show that UX and SEO complement each other, similar to the tandem of user acquisition and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). However, UX is more about internal marketing activities or tasks marketers perform on their websites, while SEO is both an inward and outward-looking practice.

Modern search engines assess websites’ optimization based on their UX performance. So, if your website shines in usability and experience domains, it will likely rank higher in SERPs.

That should explain our interest in UX testing methods to help enhance your SEO.

Common Usability Testing Methods for Enhanced SEO

Marketers use a variety of methods to test and improve user experiences. Let us focus and explore those with the most articulated impact on enhanced SEO.

  • A/B testing. Commonly refers to testing two different elements: conditional A and conditional B. These could be buttons, pictures, CTAs, words, layout elements, etc. A/B testing is a repetitive process where various similar elements can be continuously tested to identify the one that better serves a particular purpose (e.g., conversion, user engagement, etc.).
  • A highly visually descriptive and intuitive (different colors display different results) analysis of how users behave on a website or app. Using UX for SEO design via heatmaps helps identify areas that drive user engagement and conversions.
  • Page speed testing. In a time when user attention span is only 3–8 seconds (some even claim that Generation Z can only focus attention for 1 second), optimizing page loading times becomes critically important. A webpage with fast page loading times ranks significantly higher in search results, thereby helping SEO.
  • Mobile UX compatibility. Mobile usage sets particular demands on UX webpage performance. SEO specialists use mobile UX compatibility to optimize web designs and layouts for mobile users. The result is a higher ranking in Google and other engines.
  • Session recordings. For in-depth SEO insights, marketers use session recordings to record user behavior in real-time and pinpoint technical errors and UX bottlenecks. The result is often reduced bounce rate and increased dwell time – metrics that search engines appreciate and “reward” with higher rankings in search results.
  • Eye-tracking studies. Help reveal user interaction patterns with a website or its elements, such as buttons, fonts, CTAs, content placement, etc. It’s also a real-time testing method that relies on web cameras to record eye movement.

Other frequently used UX testing methods include user journey mapping, surveys and feedback forms, accessibility, and clickstream testing.

SEO Metrics That UX Testing Helps to Improve

All UX testing methods mentioned serve similar purposes – identifying and fixing usability bottlenecks to improve various SEO metrics:

  • Click-through rate (CTR);
  • Bounce rate;
  • Dwell time;
  • Conversion rate (CR);
  • Pages per session;
  • Average session duration;
  • Return visitors rate.

Search engines deploy the so-called crawlers, spiders, or bots that continuously “crawl” the web through billions of web pages, assessing them by the metrics mentioned above and similar. This silent and never-ending testing ranks web pages in search results based on their performance.

Feedback Loops to Enhance UX for SEO Improvements

SEO experts continuously test different ideas to capture users’ attention and keep them on their websites (dwell time) for as long as needed for conversion. These may include SEO storytelling, interactive quizzes, polls, infographics, and internal links to keep users engaged.

However, one technique is particularly effective for continuous improvements – feedback loops. These are iterative data collection, analysis, and implementation processes that form a loop or a cycle. In the optimized user experience and SEO world, feedback loops aim to align user needs with search engine requirements.

Let’s explore several application scenarios of feedback loops in UX and SEO.

User Behavior Data Loops

These include heatmaps, session recordings, real-time interaction patterns, and click paths. User behavior data loops allow monitoring and improving SEO metrics like click-through rates, bounce rates, pages per session, and average session duration. The result is a better search engine ranking and improved user engagement and satisfaction.

User Feedback Surveys

By conducting user surveys, marketers can collect detailed feedback on the performance of various UX elements like navigation elements, content utility, color schemes, etc. You can run periodic surveys (e.g., yearly or monthly) or more frequent pulse surveys to ensure a continuous flow of ideas and insights.

Surveys enhance user motivation and involvement, even more so when you come back to responders with the information on the improvements made.

Customer Support and Reviews

Monitoring and acting on customer reviews is also an example of UX feedback loops. Although slower and less structured than the previous methods, reviews provide real-life experiences with the product or service. Customer support service can then use the obtained information and send it to the development teams to utilize enhanced UX for SEO improvements.

If you doubt the effectiveness of feedback loops in bringing significant improvements over time, look back at what Elon Musk did with his Starship project. Do you remember how many failed attempts his team had before the launchpad finally started to work as intended – 5, 10, or perhaps closer to 15 times? With each attempt, they collected data and fed it back into the development cycle.

The Starship project displays the power of feedback loops and incremental improvements. A case study waiting to be documented.

Wrapping It All Up

In business, UX and SEO work hand-in-hand, strengthening each other. Furthermore, improvements in UX trigger search engine algorithms to rank your pages higher in search results – a win-win situation for the customer and your business.

In practical terms, UX testing helps improve key SEO metrics, including but not limited to dwell time, bounce rate, click-through rate, average session duration, and return visitor rate.

At the same time, better SEO drives customers to web pages, closing the loop, but only temporarily. The new feedback cycle starts, and optimized user experience further improves SEO.

 

 

An original article about How to Use UX Testing to Improve Your SEO by kossi · Published in Resources

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