The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Optimizing the User Experience to Improve SEO

There are many reasons to address the user experience on your site, including conversion optimization and customer retention. As we saw in the sections on User Engagement as a Measure of Search Quality and Document Analysis, SEO is also affected by the perceived user experience with a site. Measuring your site’s performance on these types of metrics can be a great start to improving the SEO performance of a website.

However, it is important to consider a broader question: what do your visitors want? If you are selling left-handed golf clubs, and you create a web page to rank on the search phrase lefty ping putters, what do you offer the visitors who come to that page from search? Reviews? Images? Videos? Putting tips? The ecommerce catalog front and center?

This is the most important part of optimizing a user experience: creating a direct connection between the visitors arriving at your site and what it is they are looking for. If you fail to do this, metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and repeat visits will all suffer. If you do it well, all of these metrics will improve.

One strategy for doing this is to survey your site visitors. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, consider using a PPC campaign to bring in a number of visitors and then getting them to take the survey. The following sections outline a three-step process to create a survey to find out from people what they are looking for from your site.

Step 1: Build a Survey

Start ...