You’ve probably seen it. Separate teams work on different elements of a project without much communication, and the end result has a real “Frankenstein’s monster” feel to it. With our team’s years of digital marketing experience, we know it’s easy to fall out of step – especially when working on a complicated project where Website Design, User Experience (UX), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) converge.
Check out our free downloadable guide on some common SEO & UX friction points
It’s common sense that these three elements should play nicely together. After all, who doesn’t want a site that’s logically organized, designed for ease of use, and optimized to be found by users? But how can you prevent falling out of sync when Design is handling one aspect, Development another, and Marketing the third?
How Design and User Experience Affect Search Engine Optimization
For a project like a site redesign or rebuild, it might seem fastest to assign each department or agency its own piece of the puzzle. However, if the project plan doesn’t involve any cross-pollination between contributors, you’re likely to run into some big SEO problems, such as:
- Changes to site architecture that add or remove content without reviewing from an SEO/CRO standpoint
- Flattened site architecture or overly complicated page hierarchy, often with accompanying URL change recommendations, that doesn’t consider SEO performance
- User experience and design choices that negatively influence how site architecture is perceived or how the site is crawled and indexed (i.e., leveraging Javascript for vital elements)
- Design choices that complicate next steps or otherwise confuse users
These elements can impact the website’s SEO rankings or harm on-site conversion rates. And a beautiful, thoughtful site that no one sees is a tragedy!
How Search Engine Optimization Impacts Design and User Experience
On the other hand, SEOs can run afoul of design and UX principles. That’s especially true of less experienced pros, or those who don’t work closely with developers and designers. Focusing solely on achieving the best possible visibility in search results can mean overlooking search intent and user engagement. While this approach may pay off in the short term, in recent years, it’s become apparent that UX and SEO need to work in harmony for long-term success.
Some UX issues that can develop from concentrating solely on SEO “best practices” include:
- Stuffing content and headlines with keywords, diminishing clarity or readability
- Focusing on keywords without considering user intent
- Cramming too many links into site navigation, potentially helping to retain SEO performance but confusing users on the site
- Only considering search rankings vs. how users will interact with the site, threatening conversion rates
The Necessary Evil of Silos – and How to Improve on Them
Taking all these aspects into account at once is the ideal for both search visibility and user satisfaction. But it’s rare to find someone who’s an expert across UX, design, development, and SEO, so communication between silos is key!
Our Enterprise Team establishes regular communication and utilizes inflection point check-ins when working with our internal dev and design teams, as well as with our clients or their contractors. So, when do we recommend calling in the SEOs for a chat?
When to Reach Out to Your SEO Team
Ideally, your SEOs should know as soon as a site overhaul or new site is on the horizon so they can plan along with other teams. That’s not always feasible, and it’s not the only inflection point in these projects.
Here are some other important times to loop digital marketing experts in:
Revising or determining a website’s main navigation structure and overall site architecture
SEO isn’t a page-by-page effort, but rather a whole-site affair. Changing how pages are oriented in relation to each other or how navigations get users and bots to those pages can have massive effects on marketing efforts and SEO strategy. This is a good chance to spot potential problems before much time or money has been spent.
Recommending pages for removal
Launching a new site or redesign presents the opportunity to clean up outdated content. Just make sure to have your SEOs review the proposed changes before you prune away, lest you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
You might be surprised to know we often find additional pages we’d recommend ditching or repurposing as part of our content strategy!
Developing page templates for core pages, blog posts, and others
SEOs generally have insights on how pages can be structured to include elements from existing pages, items that might make optimization more or less difficult in the future, and so on. We may also make some CRO recommendations to maximize the impact of visits to the site.
Proposing changes to user flow through the website, including changes to form placement and usage
While more strictly related to CRO than SEO, this check helps us to spot potential conversion issues very early in the process. Adding, removing, and changing forms or CTAs would qualify.
Reviewing pre-launch staging site
SEOs can check everything from technical SEO issues to page layout problems at this stage. You might be shocked by what we can find, from valuable page titles getting lost in the site move to internal links breaking to entire folders going missing. Even when you’ve got a solid plan and a talented team, having a safety net is always a good call.
Checking post-launch live site
Crawling a site pre- and post-launch gives SEOs the data needed to alert other teams to any potential issues that need to be addressed in the long- or short-term. We can tell you after years of experience that no site launch is perfect – some element will break or something will get lost in the shuffle. What really counts is having a team on standby to help identify and rectify issues.
What About How AI and GEO Work with Website UX?
If you’re concerned about your site being visible to LLMs and other AI-assisted tools – and you should be – it’s even more important that your teams come together. AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization are becoming table stakes across industries.
When your developers and marketing team aren’t keeping an eye out for impediments to the site’s content being understood by AI, you risk becoming invisible to an increasing number of users at the top or middle of the funnel. You want your brand to be mentioned in the conversation, not left out because AI bots can’t make heads or tails of your site content.
Check with your team to understand what technical SEO issues might be standing between your brand and getting cited in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, chatbots, etc.
What Happens When UX and SEO Practitioners Work in Harmony?
Put simply, you’ll know your SEO and UX elements are working together when there’s end-to-end good user experience. Aim for your site to be built and written in a way human users and search engines can understand it.
Getting more granular, a well-built site will have:
- Logical site structure (generally also reflected in the URL structure)
- Organized and easy-to-use site navigation
- Accessible, legible, and responsive design that functions well across desktop and mobile devices
- Strong, logical internal linking within and between sections of the site
- Quick page load times
- Obvious and enticing CTAs or next steps
- If applicable, nearly frictionless forms and/or shopping functionalities
- Use of HTML tags, such as H1-6, to break up content into understandable, digestible, and hierarchical pieces
- Carefully chosen areas of focus for content, demonstrating the depth of knowledge, authority, and personalized experience on specific topics, as opposed to surface-level “jack-of-all-trades” writing
Taken together, these send signals to search engines that your website is valuable and functional. And users will hit fewer roadblocks trying to access and interact with it.
Great UX and site architecture play into SEO success, since there’s a positive feedback loop when users spend more time engaging with pages they’ve navigated to from a search. Plus, deliberating UX, information architecture, and SEO/GEO – and how they will scale with the site over time – helps futureproof the site against content sprawl, haphazard site architecture, and topic drift.
We Can Help Improve SEO Performance While Following UX Best Practices
If you’re ready to loop in an SEO team to help bring some zen to your upcoming site migration or new site launch, let us know! We’re happy to help navigate this confusing but exciting time.
