Keeping User Experience (UX) AND Search Bots ‘Top-of-Mind’
Like any other skill set or field of practice, there is a right way and a wrong way to execute search engine optimization (SEO). Most business owners know how vital an SEO strategy is in order to reach their key performance indicator (KPI) goals. As this process of putting a strategy together takes place, it's often difficult to find a starting point. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, understanding how Google and other search engines discover content on the internet and determining its relevance are important factors when developing a unique SEO strategy for your business's website. Before you're off to the races in reaching your goal of making your website the number one ranking site on a search engine results page (SERP), take a look at these two ideas for SEO best practices.
What Are Users Experiencing on Your Website? (UX)
The way users are accessing information is continuing to change. Some examples of this would be desktop search, voice search, and mobile search. According to a case study done by Merkle Inc in 2019, 63% of organic searches done in the United States are done on mobile. Voice search is also on the rise and some expect this search avenue to account for the largest majority of searches in the future. Google’s intelligent searches are going to change as the search queries continue evolving. Google’s goal is to bring searchers what they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible. The algorithmic changes they are making are being done with the user in mind. As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, an important aspect of SEO is UX. A few key thoughts to have about your website’s UX is internal linking and responsive design.
Internal Linking
When someone visits your website, are they able to navigate it in a way that is progressive, or is it just a bunch of overwhelming information they don’t have the time to sort through? If they are able to click from one step in the discovery process to the next, it's likely they will spend more time on the website, giving the best opportunity for the user to reach the last step in the buying cycle. Something Google pays attention to in regards to SEO is a term known as bounce rate. A bounce rate is calculated by a user's initial session on a page divided by any additional sessions from additional pages on the website. Depending on what happens when a user goes to a website and what pages they do or don’t access while visiting the website in its entirety will impact the bounce rate and the website’s SEO as a whole.
Responsive Design
If a majority of people are making searches and spending time on their mobile devices, then it seems important for website designs to adapt accordingly. A website design should be programmed to fit the screen of whatever device is trying to go to its domain. As Google crawls a website, it is able to read whether or not this is happening. A website’s responsiveness to the device of the user will therefore impact the website’s SEO.
Who Is Searching On Your Behalf? (Search Bots)
As the marketplace journey’s further into the digital world, Google and other search engines are becoming more intelligent regarding SEO. One reference to this intelligent technology is called search bots. Search bots are part of the programming that marketers and content creators now refer to as ‘the algorithm’. Search bots are doing the work to match searches with what they are looking for. If you are trying to improve your website’s SEO, don’t you want to know the in’s and out’s of how these bots are going about their business so you may tailor your strategy around their programming?
Search bots are using keywords and phrases to organize content in different clusters of information they can pull from to get information to searchers more efficiently. When a bot places information into one of these clusters, it is referred to as indexing. Bots also want to discover more content and place it in these clusters to get the best and most accurate information to users. This is an action referred to as crawling.
The more bots crawl the web for information, and the more they index the information into clusters, the more accessible the content is for them to retrieve and place in front of searchers (which is where website SEO comes in). However, as mentioned before, the algorithm is created for bots to crawl and index content a particular way. The algorithm gives bots their direction as they enter the web based on how a website is designed, developed, structured, and how authoritative the website SEO is.
If you want to learn more about how this works, contact one of our SEO experts at Image Management. We work with businesses in the Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Chicago areas on their website SEO and website development. We’re happy to help you understand how UX and search bots are key to improving your website’s visibility.
Published on July 14, 2022