UX vs SEO | Can Work Together In Harmony
There's been a division amongst User Experience designers and SEO teams at times, and it's generally hard to move past a 'us vs them' attitude. But as someone who has and does work on both sides of the fence now, I can tell you that both should and can work together to build a better internet together!
The SEO team has an almost religious like obligation to stay unendingly on top of up and coming changes with how Google calculations function, all of the tech that goes into this side I didn’t pay as much mind too until I had to start doing it myself. Seeing the other side of the job, it’s important to make sure as UX designers we make sure to listen to their feelings, ideas and input regardless of the sacrifice to design they might lead to. After all who doesn’t love a bit more of a challenge to overcome?
Luckily, SEO and UX are slowly merging into the same thing, which is good news for users and will be a learning curve for some on both sides of the fence behind the scenes.
Guests get a better website or application to work with, organizations will see better results in the rankings, and agencies won’t have to hear the back and forth between algorithm vs design functions.
There are a few ways that UX and SEO are already coming together, and working from this standpoint a lot can be worked out up front to avoid some of the unneeded headaches sometimes caused by the changes needed to make google’s algorithm happy or sacrifices needed to make the user happy over google.
- Site guest measurements help UX
These days, the employment of SEOs is revolved around understanding as much about Google and how it works to make the right choices moving forward to get great rankings. But the numbers the SEO team are looking at can be a huge help to a UX Designer and a lot of designers and SEO teams don’t even notice the overlap!
Information on social interactions will include looking in Google for common measurements, for example, crowd demographics, client ventures, well known page content, what clients are scanning for on your webpage, to what extent a client will stay on substance, how rapidly a site burdens and how far a client looks down a page.
This information is critical for UX as it helps the designer make a design, format and focus on building substance that will help them lock in and be able to see what is already working and give and lead to a great jumping on point to start the user research.
At the end of the day, SEO teams find the sort of experiences clients need and UX Designers actualize it.
- Examining Google positioning positions to spot zones for UX change
Knowing where pages on your site rank is imperative, particularly amid the exploration stage.
To a designer, a SEO team gathering Google rankings won't help their configuration procedure since it has all the earmarks of being even more a showcasing action than a UX one. In any case, understanding where pages on your site rank/don't rank will make a SEO team question the pages on the site and research specialized issues, substance and contenders that are positioning great.
From their examination, a SEO team can ensure architects are supplied with information all the more fitting to clients' needs and desires. This data can be incorporated into the site. SEO teams can likewise cover any specialized issues to consider issues or perks to the site that are already helping or hurting it, for example, popups and inward connecting. If the SEO team see’s every time a pop-up hits the screen you have a 80% drop rate, that’s a good bit of detail for a UX designer to consider as the audience clearly doesn’t like pop-ups so that is an issue that will need to be worked around.
The more a UX designer knows about how people act on the site, how they react to things, where they fall off, and what happens on the pages they fall off at the better the plan can be, the more actionable the first round of data and designs can be, and every client loves seeing design choices backed up by data and real numbers!
This is the place SEOs can offer assistance.
A good SEO team will have funneled, channels, and conversion points of the current site or application mapped out and be able to give the UX designer some great raw data to work with. Putting the mind of an SEO team together with a UX designer can lead to some innovative and great ways to enhance a website that both sides can be happy with. Getting on the same page, getting the right data, and enriching a client’s website is the goal of both teams. It’s just a matter of learning what you can gather from the other team in order to enhance the experience for the users, boost sales, and drive ranking.