Ways to improve the customer experience with SEO

If your website isn’t showing up in search engine rankings, it’s a sign that it’s time to improve the customer experience. Strengthening your SEO strategies is one of the best ways to do this.

But what exactly is SEO? 

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, encompasses all the efforts—whether back-end, front-end, on-page, or off-page—focused on developing a website that search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo find consistent, relevant, and user-friendly.

These massive information catalogs serve millions of users, offering content that adds value to their lives, which in turn helps them grow their customer base and generate conversions for the websites they index.

It’s a continuous cycle of attraction and conversion that keeps search engines profitable. After all, they rely on the collaboration of companies like yours to keep their users engaged. So, we’re here to explain how SEO practices can enhance the experience for your users and potential customers, ultimately leading to a better ranking in search engines.

This leads to greater visibility and a wider reach for your target audience. If your website or e-commerce delivers on its promises, it will naturally result in many conversions.

So, how does SEO relate to customer experience? 

There are several aspects of SEO that can enhance the user journey on your website, such as:

Usability and accessibility 

Usability refers to the quality of your website’s navigation—how intuitive and fast it is. Is there a logical flow from one step to the next? Is the information clear and guiding the user in the right direction? If a user makes an undesired action, does the website offer tools and instructions to help them correct it?

How can SEO enhance usability, then?

There are many ways to practice SEO, and technical SEO is one of the key tools for improving your website’s usability by optimizing its technical elements, including:

• Loading speed: Optimize by reducing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, and compressing images.
• Responsive design for mobile devices: Ensure that the layout, screen adaptation, and file sizes are proportional to the loading capacity and display on mobile apps.
• Site architecture: Make it easier for both search engines and users to navigate by using short, descriptive URLs, creating internal links between pages to relate content, and developing a sitemap (XML sitemap).
• Site security: Use the HTTPS protocol, an encrypted version of HTTP, to ensure that data is securely provided to users.
• Error and broken link correction: Directing users to non-existent pages erodes trust and may discourage further browsing. Regular audits are essential to identify and fix errors, and if necessary, use a 404 page to redirect to the main page or a 301 redirect to guide users to a new or updated URL.

Accessibility, on the other hand, is about making usability universal. People have different needs when using digital tools, and promoting accessibility means ensuring that users with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities can fully access your site.

How can SEO improve the customer experience with accessibility? 

Certain SEO practices, like on-page SEO and voice SEO, focus on using keywords (terms searched by users) to create a more accessible and inclusive experience, for example:

• Optimizing alternative text: Also known as Alt Text, alternative text is used by screen readers to describe images to visually impaired users. Incorporating keywords related to the content’s theme not only helps search engines rank your page as relevant but also enhances the reader’s understanding.
• Structured headers: Using H1, H2, H3, and H4 headers, like those in this article, makes reading easier for visually and cognitively impaired users and also improves site architecture.
• Color contrast and readability: While design isn’t directly tied to SEO, it plays a crucial role in the user experience (UX), which, in turn, supports search engine optimization.
• Reducing pop-ups: Excessive pop-ups can be intrusive, disrupting the user experience and impacting search engine analysis, which influences your site’s ranking on search results pages.
• Voice SEO: Voice search becomes more effective with conversational keywords, creating a natural dialogue with the reader and crafting content with direct questions and answers.

Content aligned with the user’s search intent

In addition to providing consistent and intuitive information architecture, it’s essential to deliver exactly what the user is looking for, and ideally, even more. This approach makes your site more competitive, especially given the abundance of information available on search engines.

The strategy for creating relevant content falls under the realm of on-page SEO, which, as you’ve seen, is built around terms and topics that are frequently searched by your target audience.

For this strategy to be effective, it needs to be supported by multiple content pillars that interconnect, forming a comprehensive hub or flowchart of information that establishes your site’s authority. When we talk about authority, we mean deep knowledge of the industry or niche your company operates in.

The more articles and information you provide on a given topic, the greater the value you offer to visitors. In turn, this improves how search engines perceive your site, as they can quickly map all your pages and understand their relevance, leading to better rankings in search results. It’s truly a cycle!

International SEO 

When it comes to content, international SEO can also play a crucial role by considering the terms your audiences in other countries use for the same topics. To make this work, it’s essential to implement hreflang tags, localize the content to fit the consumption habits and language of each country, and use regional domains (ccTLDs).

User engagement with your website

A positive customer experience isn’t just about delivering the content they’re searching for—it’s also about how they engage with it. Metrics like time spent on the site, bounce rate, and page clicks are valuable indicators of whether your communication strategy is resonating with both potential customers and search engines.

Core Web Vitals 

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to assess the quality of a user’s experience on a page. These metrics focus on aspects like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, all of which can be enhanced through technical SEO in collaboration with experience and interface design.

When we translate these elements into specific metrics, we have:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures the speed at which the main content of the page loads, ideally in under 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID): This metric assesses how quickly the site responds to a user’s action, with a target of no more than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This evaluates the stability of the page layout, as any inconsistency can disrupt user actions or hinder information capture. A CLS score should be less than 0.1.

Encourage user feedback:

Beyond metrics, gathering user feedback on their experience is vital for identifying areas for improvement. Positive reviews can also boost your site’s visibility, enhancing its ranking on search engine results pages.

Improve the customer experience with local SEO:

In the previous section, we discussed international SEO as a tool for creating relevant content tailored to different countries, which is crucial for global companies with a broad reach.

On the other hand, local SEO targets smaller, more specific regions and allows for a deeper focus on local dialects, slang, and terms. This approach is also essential if your company operates in multiple locations, such as offices, physical stores, factories, or warehouses, where the speed of delivering products or services is a key factor.

To support customized experiences, Google offers various features that encourage local SEO practices. The primary tool is Google My Business, a profile that appears in the upper right corner of the page when users search for an establishment, company, or brand.

Through this profile, you can provide a synopsis of your business, receive and respond to reviews and comments, answer questions, publish updates, and offer multiple points of contact for users. Additionally, you can incorporate local keywords that reflect your audience’s geographical location.

This is just the start of the customer journey

There are many other factors to consider when it comes to attracting and retaining users on your site. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to visit our blog or reach out to us.