The Tug of War between UX and SEO

Lately, I have delved deeper into the SEO world so that I could better understand the conflict between UX and SEO. At the risk of oversimplifying it, the biggest issue is content. SEO relies heavily on more content, whereas UX prefers less content.

More vs. Less

A key to ensuring that a website and its pages rank higher in search engine results is the amount of relevant content they provide. Relevant means content that includes all of the key words and phrases people use when researching a product or service. The more often these keywords are appropriately used on a website, the more relevant that content is deemed to be (again, an oversimplification, but let’s go with it for now).

UX designers, on the other hand, have learned long ago that too much content on a site slows user performance and sometimes kills it, altogether. We’ve all heard it said that no one reads on the web. Users, once they reach a site, are less interested in the content and more interested in solving their specific problem – the functionality of the site.

SEO drives traffic to a site, UX converts visitors to customers

While its true that you want to drive traffic to your site, you also need to convert the visitors into customers. You may only have one chance to convert a visitor to a customer. If they don’t like your site, they have many other choices and may never return to your site.

If your SEO efforts drive 1M more new visitors to your site, you may think that you’ve struck oil. But with a 3% conversion rate (sadly, the norm), you will only earn 30K new customers. Conversely, if you focus solely on an UX-oriented redesign to boost your conversion rate to a more respectable 10%, your SEO program only needs to drive 300K new visitors to your site in order to achieve that same 30K increase.

In a small, local market, you are faced with a limited number of potential customers. You cannot afford to lose too many visitors, so UX is more important than SEO. In a larger market, it may be more cost effective to get more visitors to your site, even at the risk of losing more of them due to a poor UX. Even with only a 3% conversion rate, you can still earn enough sales to profit well. (BTW, that approach is not sustainable and will cost you in the long run, but that’s another blog post.)

Striking a Balance

Every business is different, but each one needs to find the right balance between UX and SEO that best serves their specific objectives.

Some sites succeed because of their content while others lean more towards the functionality side of the equation. For example, boutique or lifestyle product sites typically benefit from more content, which plays into common SEO practices. More focused e-commerce sites, such as KBB.com or Proflowers.com, suffer under the burdened of too much content and profit more from a better UX.

One of my veteran colleagues pointed out that one of his UX-oriented clients moved their UX team to report to the SEO team and their conversion rates and profits suffered dramatically until they separated UX and SEO, again.

Ideally, you should be achieving 10% conversions with 35% retention and an SEO that keeps you on the first page of search results. But that’s not always possible. You need to determine what strategy works better for your business, more visitors or more buyers. If it’s easier to increase the number of visitors, then focus on SEO, but if visitors are harder to come by, then focus on UX to convert the ones you can attract.

Teamwork, Not Tug of War

While it’s not hard to find a good SEO expert, it’s far more difficult to find a good UX expert. Moreover, you need to make sure both can work together and get along with your advertising, marketing, sales and support teams, too.

While I’m not conversant enough in SEO to suggest how to find an expert (they are all experts, to me), I can suggest how to find the right UX expert for your needs. There are varying degrees of UX talent and it can be difficult finding the right one. You should look for two things, 1) can they work well with your SEO and marketing teams and 2) do they have a track record of achieving higher conversion rates.

Many digital agencies boast both SEO and UX design, but are usually better at one over the other. For an SEO-oriented site, you might be happy with a mediocre UX designer, but if your site depends on conversion rates, then look for a UX designer with a track record of 10% conversions. Find an agency with the right mix of SEO and UX for your site’s needs or find good SEO and UX teams. Either way, make sure you have the right balance.

But wait, there’s more…

Today’s average buyer isn’t driven by traditional brand loyalty; so once you’ve developed a successful conversion rate, continuously apply conversion rate optimization practices (A/B testing, etc.) to keep up with changing demands. CRO employs a blend of SEO and UX methods and allows you to quickly respond to shifting trends in your market. Things will change, and your site must constantly adapt to those changes.