With the digital age hitting its peak, the success of businesses increasingly depends on their online presence. A major factor determining this success is how high they rank on Google search results. While most new bloggers and site owners are aware of SEO, many might not realize the significant role user experience plays in ranking a website. In fact, the challenge for businesses now is to not only create an SEO-friendly website but also to ensure that it is user-friendly.
The journey to becoming an SEO specialist goes beyond long-tail keywords and meta tags. A crucial part of this journey involves mastering the art of creating a website with easy navigation for users, which in turn boosts search engine rankings. Here are ten essential tips to guide you through this process.
1. Regularly Assess Your Website’s Health
Before restructuring your website completely, it’s wise to conduct a thorough assessment of your site’s analytics. This will highlight what’s working well and what needs improvement. This involves analyzing how users find, engage with, and interact with your website.
Start by identifying traffic trends and pain points in the customer journey throughout your website to optimize user experience. Fortunately, there are several free tools available for this purpose, such as GTmetrix, Pingdom, and Google Pagespeed.
These tools not only measure your site’s health but also pinpoint elements causing poor site navigation and performance. They even provide actionable steps to rectify these issues.
2. Strategize Your Site Structure
Planning your content hierarchy is an essential step in creating a user-and SEO-friendly navigation. A well-organized site structure improves user experience and facilitates easier navigation for search engine crawlers.
To avoid confusing your visitors with a convoluted site, consider using a standard horizontal navigation menu at the top or a vertical one on the left side of the webpage. Group your website content by topics, making it simpler for search engines to identify the ranking and importance of your site’s pages.
Before reorganizing your site, sketch out a plan of the site structure to avoid missing or breaking anything or making drastic changes.
To further enhance your content hierarchy, use descriptive page URLs. For instance, an online store’s product page URL could be structured like this: https://onlinestore.com/category/product. This format makes URLs easy to understand for both users and search engines.
Remember to keep your URL structure flat to ensure that all content can be found quickly. A three-step hierarchy like home page -> category -> product is usually the most efficient for SEO. However, a deeper structure can work well if done correctly, especially for sites with complex content where additional context is beneficial.
3. Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is a form of data added to a webpage that allows search engines to better understand its content. When added to a webpage, it generates a rich snippet on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Rich snippets can feature descriptions, photos, reviews, ratings, contact details, and other content about the webpage based on the search result.
By ensuring that Google can read your content, schema markup can improve your search engine rankings and click-through rates.
You can see average ratings as schema markup.
4. Prioritize Users Over Search Engines
While ranking high on search engine results is important, creating valuable content for users should be your priority. Search queries are usually classified as:
- Transactional: Users want to perform a specific action on your site, such as booking a flight or purchasing an item.
- Navigational: Users want to access a specific webpage.
- Informational: Users want to find specific information on your site, such as contact details, opening hours, or FAQs.
When your content is valuable to users, your search ranking will naturally increase, making your website more visible to potential visitors. Search engines reward websites that demonstrate a clear understanding of their users’ needs. Therefore, focusing on how your users interact with your site can result in higher rankings.
5. Minimize Page Load Time
The average attention span of a website visitor is only eight seconds, and 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you risk losing a third of your visitors.
To reduce load time, optimize images and media, prioritize visible content, enable browser caching, and minimize redirects. Investing in a cloud storage service can also help reduce page load times. According to Cloudwards, half of the top 12 services take only 25% longer to upload data and 27% longer to download data than expected.
6. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
The importance of mobile optimization cannot be overstated. With at least 52.6% of web traffic being generated through mobile devices and 51% of internet users shopping online through mobile devices, mobile should be a top priority.
Design your mobile website with touch devices in mind. Instead of small click-through links, use visual icons to guide users. A visible Call to Action on all pages is also recommended.
7. Use the Topic Cluster Model for Content
Topic clusters use hyperlinks to group related pieces of content on your website. Organizing topic clusters makes your posts easier for your target audience to find, potentially increasing traffic and engagement on your site.
Google prioritizes the quality of information provided by your content. By focusing your content around broad topics and creating detailed posts on specific aspects of those topics, you can provide as much relevant information as possible. This allows users to find other posts on the same topic, boosting user experience and rankings.
8. Use Clear and Specific Labels
Navigation labels should be clear, descriptive, and engaging. Direct and descriptive navigation labels can boost customer engagement and reduce bounce rates. You can use online SEO tools to track your rankings and select the right keywords for your website labels.
9. Avoid Dropdown Menus
Dropdown menus can be difficult for search engines to crawl and users to navigate. They can also lead to decreased visits to top-level pages, as users often skip directly to options in the subpages.
If you must use dropdown menus, ensure they are activated by touch for mobile users or by hovering for desktop users. Keep multilevel navigation simple, with no more than two layers of dropdown options.
10. Use Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs, or short navigation menus, can help your visitors navigate your site, especially when they’re on a page far from the homepage. Breadcrumbs make your website’s SEO structure cleaner and more efficient to navigate, enhancing user experience.
Conclusion
Achieving a high search engine ranking involves more than just a keyword strategy. A well-designed and SEO-optimized website leads to improved user experience and, consequently, more conversions for your business. Remember, Google rewards websites that users love, so prioritize user experience and watch your rankings soar.