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Investing in a better user experience (UX) for your website is a great way to retain users and improve your site’s SEO performance. With that in mind, you should adopt more UX strategies for your website, and this article will cover a few examples you can try.
1. Create a structured information architecture
A coherent information architecture (IA) is one of the core concepts of a good user experience for your website. Information architecture is how you organize your website’s structure to make navigating and consuming content easier. Your goal is to ensure that the relations and connections between content in your website make sense.
A simple example is if you have a main category page about your products or services, it should include subcategories of your main product types.
Organizing your website’s information architecture is a constant process. It starts with customer research, then a review of your current IA, and then a revision of IA based on customer research.
A sitemap is a significant step to improving your IA. It is a file websites have that indicates the relationships between pages and other content on your site and how they relate. Not only is that a sensible way of structuring the website, but it’s also a helpful SEO step for faster website indexing and crawling.
Some signs that your website might need better IA planning will be if your site has orphaned pages or webpages that users can’t access through other pages on your site. Poor IA can also lead to website search results that are irrelevant to the query. If these happen to your site, it’s time for a change.
2. Ensure clear and intuitive navigation
Part of creating a coherent information architecture is creating straightforward and intuitive navigation that makes your website easier to navigate.
Intuitive navigation is about reducing the number of clicks it takes for your website users to reach their desired destination on your website. Your website users shouldn’t take too long to find what they need.
Different aspects and elements of your website can change how easy it is to use the navigation. For example, the labels for your navigation items should be as simple as possible. This part isn’t the best place to flex your creative muscles too much. Be straight to the point.
Don’t forget to test your website each time you make specific changes. Have users go through your website to see how fast it takes them to get to where they want to be on your website. User testing can make it much easier to figure out which parts of your website are, making your navigation a lot more confusing than it should be.
3. Incorporate calls to action (CTAs)
Your web pages should have at least one highlighted call to action (CTA) to make it easier for your website users to take the action you want. These CTAs are usually buttons that send your users to the right place. Label them accurately so these CTAs don’t feel like they’re misleading your users when they click the buttons.
Having only one CTA is good because it’s easier to curate your web page to make your users click on it, but you can have multiple ones. However, you should create a distinct visual hierarchy between each one and other website elements so that it won’t be confusing.
For example, if the main thing you want your website users to do is to book a call on your contact page, then a Schedule a Call button should be prominent. However, you can also add other ways to contact you that are less compelling and aren’t as big of a button as your Schedule Call button. For example, a simple hyperlink can lead to an email prompt.
That’s one way to balance more than one CTA for a single web page.
Another simple change that can significantly impact your website’s SEO performance and UX strategy more than you’d think would be how you name your URLs.
When creating new web pages on your website, a URL slug is usually automatically assigned, but it’s generally just random letters and numbers. Instead of going with the generic option, it’s better to create URLs that make sense based on the web page’s content.
Let’s say you want to create a URL for a web page that’s your contact page. However, your headline for this web page is “Connect With Us.” Instead of using “yourwebsite.com/connect-with-us” in your web page’s slug, it’s better to use something like “yourwebsite.com/contact-page.”
Ideally, your web page’s primary keyword should be in your URL’s slug.
5. Optimizing website speed and performance
A lot of website users these days expect fast-loading website speeds. A study showed that if your website loads within two seconds, the bounce rate is at 9%, but the moment it hits three seconds, it jumps rapidly until it reaches 38% within five seconds. Given this fact, you should work on speeding up your website’s loading and performance speed.
You can increase your website’s loading speed and performance in different ways:
● Compress images without reducing the quality
● Minify files on your site
● Make the most out of content delivery networks (CDNs)
● Get a reliable website server
These can help your web pages load faster without compromising how your website looks and operates.
6. Create valuable content for your target users
There’s a reason many businesses invest in content marketing: it’s one of the best ways to make your website more discoverable. At the same time, the right kind of content can address your website users’ concerns, making your website more familiar. When users are more familiar, they’re more likely to continue to interact with you.
High-quality content should also be relevant to your target audience. Therefore, your content topics should center around your ideal users and what they’re looking up.
Keyword research will also be helpful because incorporating the right keywords into your web content will ensure that your web pages appear in the right search results.
With the right content, you can also position yourself as an expert in your niche or industry. You can even do guest posts to increase the reach of your blog posts since you can link to your website content through these other guest posts.
7. Optimize for mobile devices
Many web users are browsing the web through their phones. That’s why you should ensure your website can adapt to the web users’ devices. The last thing you want to happen is that you finally reel in a web visitor only for them to live because your website formatting became confusing after the web user viewed your site through a device other than a desktop.
Luckily, there are tons of plugins out there that can automate your website’s mobile optimization.
Visual cues are always helpful in directing your users to the right places. Properly using visuals can create more engaging website content. Depending on your web pages’ goals, you can emphasize, highlight, or hide other parts of the website.
Aside from subtle visual cues, visual media helps make your content more informative and detailed without making your site dull and too heavy on text.
Adding related internal links sprinkled throughout your web pages is a part of creating sensible website navigation and interconnected information architecture.
Each web page on your site should connect to at least one other web page. If you link to an internal page, link the two together. That way, search engines can scan these links and understand that these web pages are relevant and connected.
At the same time, internal links are an excellent way for website users to find relevant content without needing to click through other web pages to see them.
With these UX strategies, you can improve your website’s performance and create a better experience for any website user while contributing to your overall SEO strategy. Apply these strategies to your website to enjoy these benefits and create a pleasant website.
Author bio:
Kenneth Sytian is the Owner and CEO of Sytian Productions Web Developer Philippines. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is the driving force behind the company and influencer in the industry of web design and development in the Philippines.
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