User Experience
User experience is an important factor for SEO, ensuring visitors have a positive experience when they view a website creates positive brand awareness, while also helping with a site’s authority in search. Within our Hangout Notes we cover recommendations and insights from Google to ensure your site provides a positive user experience.
Use URLs That Make Sense From User Perspective
Choose URLs based on what works best for your users. Sometimes people include English words in the URL because they, wrongly, think that search engines will understand it better. However, this may be confusing for users to see English words in the URL but not in the content, so it might be better to use the local language and characters.
Disputed Ads in Ad Experience Report Can be Flagged in Help Forum
If you think an ad has been wrongly flagged in the ad experience report, you can post about this in the dedicated help forum.
Infinite Scroll Sites Should Have Distinct URLs and Pagination
Sites using infinite scroll should make sure URLs are changed so that they remain valid URLs and can be accessed and crawled directly. John also recommends having pagination links so even if a search engine doesn’t support infinite scroll they can still crawl through those pages.
Content Less Than 3 Clicks From Homepage is Good Practice But Not Required
Keeping content no more than 3 clicks from the homepage is good practice but not a requirement for Google.
Test Navigation Models to Reduce Click Depth & Improve UX
Consider testing out different navigation models on your site to improve user experience and reduce click depth to important products/pages on your site.
Site Speed More Important for UX Than SEO
Google only differentiates between slow sites and those in the normal range. However, looking outside Google’s algorithms, speed is very important for user experience, especially on eCommerce sites where a couple of hundred milliseconds can make a difference.
Noindex or Roll up Empty Search Pages to Avoid Poor User Experience
John recommends noindexing empty search pages on your site to avoid users landing on page with no entries or results e.g. a location specific service with no entries for that specific location. Alternatively, you might want to consider rolling these empty pages up to a higher level category.
Conduct User Studies to Improve Page Quality and UX
If all efforts have been made to improve page quality then John suggests running a user study to get people to run through common tasks. From that feedback, you can learn where users struggle on a specific page and how you can fix it.
Add Links to Site Footer That Are Useful for Users Not Google
John suggests ten as an ok number of links to have in a site footer. There is no absolute number but it is worth looking at how these links are used to make sure they are for the user’s benefit and not search engine’s. Long anchor text for these links could look like keyword stuffing.
Google Doesn’t Directly Measure Site’s Customer Satisfaction
Google doesn’t directly measure customer satisfaction of different sites but will see if no one is recommending and infer that maybe it isn’t that relevant for related search queries.