Good UX Is Good SEO

by Jim February 25, 2015

SEO used to be all about tricking Google and in many circles it still is. However that approach is not suitable for a business that wants to build a brand. If you’re a hit and run kind of business it’s probably fine but for most of us we’re trying to establish a long term relationship with our customers through the brand. It just so happens that if we take the user experience (UX) into account on the site, it helps our SEO.

SEO Tricks Are Short Term

More than once I’ve me with business owners who are more than prepared to sacrifice their brand in exchange for quick rankings and traffic. I remember having a meeting with one guy who explained to me that he’d judt been penalised by Google and moved his site to another domain and needed to buy back links fast. I explained that in all likelihood he’d get penalised again. He didn’t care as he’d done the numbers and in those six months the cash he could make from getting the traffic, outweighed what it would cost to rebuild on another domain. This was probably about 5 years ago and I remember asking him about his brand. He didn’t care.

The same is true with the brand counterfeiters. It’s a bit like setting up in an outdoor market and breaking the rules. It’s fine until you get caught, then you have to move onto the next market.

Forget About SEO

What? Well just for the moment. You shouldn’t be thinking about SEO until you have worked out who your clients are and what your content strategy is for them. Then you can work out what the keywords are and how you are going to rank for them.

SEO And The User

In the context of SEO UX to me is about site performance and behaviour. It’s not about having the right shade of peuce. Or making sure the page has enough emotion (did that sound disdainful) . It’s about making sure the site isn’t full of broken links, doesn’t have the same piece of content at multiple addresses and that everything loads fast. By getting that right first you can then move on to on page SEO elements like keyword density etc. In today’s video you’ll see how one business owner is now getting an extra 150,000 visits /month simply by getting rid of duplication.

Duplication Kills SEO

If a user can easily get lost in your site because you have lots of pages with the same or duplicate content, then its not a good UX. This was the case with one of Darren Rowse sites that we looked at last year. Basically one of his sites had been triple indexed by Google. I have not yet spoken to Darren about today’s show but the data I am looking at is showing an increase of about 150,000 sessions a month from Google organic since they cleaned up their duplication.

Choose The Ecommerce CMS Wisely

Following on from last week, the wrong ecommerce platform can kill your SEO. Some of them, like the ones I discuss in the video today, duplicate your site as one of their functions! It’s crazy.