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.
Google Doesn’t Use Direct Traffic as a Ranking Signal
Both John Mueller and Matt Cutts recommend building sites that users want to return to directly and recommend on their own. However, Google doesn’t explicitly look for these behaviours through various signals.
UX Improvements Have an Indirect Effect on Rankings
Google doesn’t have a user-experience ranking factor, but indirectly Google may pick up additional links and signals.
Balance Content and Functionality With Site Speed
It’s a mistake to remove content and functionality to improve page speed. They both need to be balanced to provide the overall best experience.
Pages Can Differ for Non-Google Visits
Google wants users to see the same content as visitors referred from Google, but for any other referral sources, the pages can be different.
HTML Errors Might Impact User Engagement, Structured Data and Meta Tags
HTML errors don’t directly impact crawling and ranking, but could have an effect on rankings if the page is broken and the user experience is poor, or if the structured data can’t be correctly picked up. If the head section of the page is broken, some of the meta tags might not be seen.
Consistent Traffic Patterns Are Probably User Behaviour
If you see spikes in traffic referred from Google during certain times of day and week, it’s probably caused by user behaviour rather than Google.
Large Viewstate Code Blocks Can Be an Issue
Large viewstate code blocks which are sometimes included in web pages, probably won’t prevent indexing unless they are many MBs in size, but may cause usability issues.