This is kind of obvious - but underrated.

In 1956 George A. Miller, a luminary in the cognitive psychology field introduced the Principle of Chunking.

In his paper, Miller asserted that human memory is limited to around 7 (plus or minus 2) pieces of information and suggested breaking down or organizing different kinds of information into chunks for people to remember what they see quickly.

In UX design, designers break up content into small and distinct chunks. This results in benefits like;

• A user interface (UI) that is easily organized, creates a good first impression.
• An overall good UX that leaves users feeling satisfied as they have found what they were looking for.

UX Signals for SEO

Organic CTR [ Click-Through Rate ] is highly influenced by the ranking of the position of your SEO content with other factors like; title tags, description, URL, and presence of snippets.

“But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling was the ‘short clicks’ where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. ‘If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy […] If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy.‘”

This is termed Pogo Sticking

Google interprets this as a bad experience for the user. Some of the best practices to keep readers on your site longer from exiting would include;

• Add internal links above the fold
• Update tables of content
• Add tables of content
• Go in-depth on your content coverage.

Dwell Time is the amount of time that a Google searcher spends on a page from the search results before returning back to the SERPs.

If you can't hook your readers to stick to your content longer, then your dwell time will drop. Here is the formula.

Text Formating for SEO

Your SEO content can't be written like a whitepaper- long paragraphs and too many repetitions.

For better UX, following Goerge Miller's research findings, format your content texts with the following elements.

• Subheadings?tell readers what’s next, help them?navigate through long texts, and quickly find the most relevant pieces of information.
• Bulleted lists?help you break text into small chunks that highlight key points and make it easy for the reader to remember information.
• Numbered lists?show the sequence of actions that you suggest your readers follow.
• Blockquotes?set off small parts of a text to highlight important facts, add social proof, or appeal to readers’ emotions.
• Bolding, italics, and underlining—if not overused—attract readers’ eyes to the most important words or terms they may want to find on the page.

Resources

1. User Experience Signals [ blog ]
2. 17 UX design elements that impact your website’s SEO success [ blog ]
3. UX and Microcopy [ Past newsletter ]

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