The role of SEO goes beyond simply making your content “appear” in your audience’s searches. Google is smart. It can clearly distinguish between sites that are overpacked with keywords for the sake of cajoling the traffic in and sites that offer purely helpful content.
A high-performing site and killer content combination is undeniably one of the best content marketing strategies in 2023. Let’s explore how you can align your site’s user experience with its SEO performance.
Start with the User Interface
A great UI is critical to ensure your audience has a worthwhile experience while navigating your site. What’s more, it is directly linked to your SEO score.
If your site is difficult to explore (either due to poor design or linking), your audience won’t stick around for long. This causes your session duration to stoop and your bounce rate to spike. The shorter your session, the lower your SEO score goes.
To avoid this UI fiasco, make sure your service pages are effortless to navigate and carry a heavy dose of valuable information for your audience.
Use visual assets – images, videos, and infographics – to catch their attention. Improve the readability by breaking pages into clear headers and subheaders. Insert relevant keywords into these headers to improve keyword rankings. Lastly, don’t forget to include metadata along with internal and external links.
Quality Content Always Wins
Aside from being priceless for your SEO strategy, great (and informative) content plays a massive role in helping your audience make purchase decisions. Analyze the search queries your customers make and align your content with them to boost SEO rankings.
When your content addresses your audience’s pain points, answers their questions, and gives them a ton of valuable information, you end up offering them a great user experience.
To ensure your readers interact with your content, ask yourself:
· Does the message you’re trying to convey resonate with them?
· Is the formatting done in a way that captures and retains their attention?
· Can they find exactly what they’re looking for?
Make sure your content in 2023 offers high readability by using short sentences and paragraphs while getting the message across. 73% of people only skim blog posts. Unless your content is very well structured and full of information, chances are, your audience will abandon it before diving into it. Lastly, make your content highly interactive – using interactive infographics, images, polls, and surveys – to ensure they engage with it from start to end.
Optimize Your Page Load Speed
We live in a world where everyone wants things now. If you think it’s all right for your website to take 10 seconds to load, you're simply risking higher bounce rates and several other problems with your site.
Your load speed may be slow due to unoptimized images, poor coding, or issues with the web host. Regardless of the reason, load speed is a problem you cannot ignore.
Run a web audit to detect the exact issue with your site’s load speed. If the issue lies in the coding, take the help of an expert web developer to mend the code, boost its stability, and bring the SEO back on track.
When your site loads faster, your customers will naturally have a good experience and you’ll notice an improvement in your sales.
Make your Website Mobile-Friendly
92.3% of people access the internet using their mobile phones.
In the age of mobile phone internet users, what happens when your audience is forced to zoom in and zoom out just to navigate your site on their phones? They abandon your website.
Deploy responsive design to ensure your website automatically takes on the device screen size a user is using. Make sure there is minimal horizontal scrolling and don’t let flash elements interfere with your website content.
Optimize Your Site’s Architecture
Your site’s architecture has a direct impact on both your customer experience and search engine optimization. Google’s web crawlers are always at work, examining your website for factors such as internal site links.
Eventually, internal links will improve the rankings of the pages that are linked because your audience would click through and spend their time exploring those pages. This adds to a great user experience because your customers will find more value than they could in a single post.
Make sure you link your focus and funnel content strategically to boost your SEO performance and craft customer experiences directed toward conversions.
User Experience Still Matters in 2023
Moral of the story: SEO and customer experience must be interlinked for your content marketing to become a success story. At Iris Marketing Solution, we cater to all your content needs and put your site up for success. Our human-written content ensures your brand resonates with your audience while ranking high in Google searches.