Many people wonder about whether you should concentrate on the customer or search engines; the answer is that you need to do both. User experience is undoubtedly important if you want to attract people to your website and keep them engaged. People are soon going to lose faith with your site if there is little informative content or it’s difficult to navigate.
It may interest you to know that user experience can also have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings. We are going to take a look at some of the ways in which this can happen.
The benefits of sharing
One of the most important benefits of providing a great user experience on your website is that more people are likely to share links to your site if they are impressed by what they find there. This obviously means that you are likely to attract more people to your site. It’s also likely to help improve your search engine rankings. Of course, not all shares are useful in your rankings but many are. Overall, the more times links to your site are shared by visitors to the site the better the news is for you.
The importance of content
There was a time when people thought it was good enough to just string lots of keywords together on their website. This was done in the hope of attracting as much traffic to the site as possible. Times have changed, and this practice no longer works. Competition for site views is much stronger and the people you are trying to attract have come to expect much better content.
Let’s not forget how important content is when it comes to search engine rankings. Ever since the introduction of Google Panda this has definitely been the case. If you have pages of limited content on your site, then it’s likely that your search engine ranking will be adversely affected.
Other ways in which your ranking can be affected
It can be difficult to tell exactly what Google takes into account in its algorithms but there are some criteria that are likely to be important. It’s improbable that Google just uses bounce rate in ranking calculations but it may look at how many people are directed to your website and then immediately leave to return to the search page only to select another option.
It’s also possible that Google could attempt to measure how many people are satisfied when they visit your website. Obviously, this means that you need to do everything you can to maximise user satisfaction.
As you can see, there is no doubt that user is experience is an important consideration from both a user and search engine point of view. If you have any doubts about the user experience of your website it may be a good idea to check out online marketing services to get some help. You cannot afford to take the chance of not concentrating efforts on user experience, considering the benefits it provides.
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