As a UX designer it’s easy to be siloed away from SEO, but in reality they have a shared goal; making users happy.

UX and SEO have formed a symbiotic relationship. Good UX improves search rankings, good search rankings drive good traffic and good experience converts that traffic.

My colleague Joe Ford, Head of Natural Search at The Organic Agency, recently wrote a series of articles about the challenges of UX and SEO working together to create meaningful change, and in the run up to writing the article I introduced Joe to Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Joe used these UX principles to demonstrate the close relationship between SEO (his field) and UX (my field).

In this article I’m going to discuss the partnership between the two disciplines from the perspective of a typical UX project. From analysis through to design and evaluation and pick out some key moments when UX and SEO really work well together.

A typical project

We do a lot of website projects at Organic and many of our clients have an existing website that needs replacing. Projects like this are all different, but as a rule there are three stages that we often employ and each of these stages has a role for SEO.

Research and Analysis

This part of the project is all about understanding our users, I won’t go into loads of detail (I’ve done that before), but to summarise, it’s about building a clear understanding of, and empathy with, our users. So we’ll be doing things like stakeholder interviews & workshops, customer interviews, surveys and desktop research.

Part of the first stage is to analyse what already exists. From a UX standpoint we audit information architecture, navigation, journeys, user interface and content. To do this we get into dialogue principles and heuristics evaluations (e.g. using the principles Joe referenced in his article), observed user interaction and usability testing on the current site (and even competitors sites) and usability evaluations.

The role of SEO in research and analysis

Data and insight provided by the SEO team help us understand our customers journey before they arrive at the website and understand their intent when searching for relevant information. Once we understand our customers and their needs we can audit the relevance of our content in relation to our users needs at each stage of the buying journey and understand if we are relevant to their needs before they arrive at the website.

The SEO team also audit information architecture, navigation and accessibility, I’ll talk a bit more about that in the design section below. 

Design

For the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the structural design (information architecture), navigation, accessibility and content (the information, labelling, signposting etc.). These are all good examples of key moments when UX and SEO really work well together.

SEO and site structure

From an experience point of view we want to create a flat structure that users can easily understand and move around. We want to have a smaller amount of focused pages that allow users to find and utilize the rich content to help them achieve their goals. 

We also need to remember that people won’t always arrive at the home page so the navigation, structure and language needs to be clear. To reference the first usability heuristic, Visibility of System Status, users should be able to understand what they are looking at and where they are at any given point.

Using search data to inform the architecture we can group information at a section and page level, creating a user and SEO friendly structure.

By planning clear page titles and headings, a useful URL and simple breadcrumb system with the SEO team we’re able to benefit both users and search. 

Taxonomy and structure of the site can affect SEO, things like naming conventions for categories and categorisation, how deep we want a page (i.e the closer to homepage the better it could perform) and how the structure links to each area are all elements that the SEO team input into and steer.

SEO and navigation

One of the biggest areas to link from, links will exist on every single page on the site so it’s one of the main ways to communicate to search engines that the pages are our main or most important pages.

By simplifying navigation and using clear user focused terms that we know from search data that people are using, we are again creating a navigation that works for our users by using language they themselves use and understand.

SEO and accessibility

There’s often crossover between people with disabilities and other cohorts, for example older web users have similar considerations; vision (reduced contrast sensitivity, color perception, and near-focus), physical ability (reduced dexterity and fine motor control, hearing (difficulty hearing higher-pitched sounds) and cognitive ability (reduced short-term memory, difficulty concentrating, and being easily distracted).

Google bot falls into a similar category, treating it like a user with special accessibility needs will help Google to understand and get around the site. So not just being good design practice, making your site accessible, and working with your SEO team to understand Google’s accessibility requirements, means that Google will take this into consideration when ‘judging’ the site.

The role of SEO in content

Using the insight from SEO research helps us create content that is relevant to our users needs when they are searching, before they even arrive at the website. This goes back to the symbiotic relationship I mentioned at the start. By using terms, language and subject matter that we know our users are searching for we create content that improves search rankings, that in turn drives good quality traffic to content that is relevant and therefore aids in their conversion.

Evaluation

This is where we test that what we’ve designed meets the user needs, which doesn’t have any real input from SEO. But once the site is live we like to continue evaluation through a cycle of continuous improvement and this often involves A/B testing. It’s at this point where SEO comes into play, ensuring that Google can see the correct version of the A/B test, avoiding any issues with Google confusing them or assuming there are two versions of the same page. Having SEO involved in setting up testing correctly avoids this also.

Summary

Working closely with SEO, a UX team can learn, and improve their output. Working with the SEO team increases empathy and understanding, it aids better design and helps us understand if what we have designed meets our users needs.