Kiteworks Quadrupled Non-Brand Traffic with Quattr.
Kiteworks Quadrupled Non-Brand Traffic with Quattr.
User experience has become a fundamental part of SEO, as Google increasingly prioritizes websites that are fast, mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and genuinely helpful to users. A well-optimized page experience not only improves engagement and reduces bounce rates but also strengthens your visibility in search engine results. In this blog, we’ll explore why user experience matters for SEO success and how aligning your website with Google’s UX guidelines can drive better rankings and long-term growth.
i. Identify and Match User Intent
ii. Use Keywords Naturally Across your Site
iii. Speed Up Your Pages
iv. Keep Content Clear, Useful, and Focused
v. Use Headings to Guide Readers
vi. Design a Clear Site Structure
vii. Optimize for Mobile Users
viii. Collect and Act on User Feedback
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Google defines user experience (UX) as the sum of all interactions with a product or service. Google considers how easy it is for users to find the information they need, how well it works, and how satisfying it is.
Additionally, elements such as the overall look and feel of the search engine, the loading speed of the pages, and how easy the search engine is to navigate are all taken into account when determining user experience.
Google views UX as a combination of factors influencing the user's overall page experience with a web page. These include usability, accessibility, design, performance, and security.
Good UX aims to help users find what they’re looking for in the least amount of time and with the least effort.
The importance of user experience extends beyond search engine rankings. Poor user experience can decrease customer satisfaction, negatively affecting a business’s reputation and sales. According to PwC, 32% of all customers stop doing business with a brand they liked after one poor experience.
A user’s experience with a website can be a significant factor in determining how long they stay on that website. If a user finds a website confusing or challenging, they are likelier to leave it, meaning fewer page views quickly. Search engines are constantly evolving to ensure they provide the best possible experience for their users.
Google Page Experience ranking signals are criteria used by Google to measure the quality of a user's experience when visiting a website or web page. The signals listed below are critical for providing a pleasant page experience to users in Google Search.
Core Web Vitals are three real-world performance metrics that reflect web pages' load speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. They objectively measure how quickly a web page loads and responds to user input. The three core web vitals metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
LCP measures loading performance, FID measures responsiveness, and CLS measures visual stability.
Google believes core web vitals are key to page experience because they are real-world performance metrics that reflect how quickly a web page loads and responds to user input. They are the most accurate way to measure how the technical performance of a web page affects the user experience.
By including them in their Page Experience criteria, Google hopes to ensure that web pages’ load quickly and accurately, improving the overall user experience.
Mobile-friendliness measures a web page's optimization efforts for smartphones and other mobile devices. Websites must load quickly and display correctly on smaller screens. It consists of two elements:
Mobile Usability shows any errors related to display or interactivity on mobile devices. Mobile Speed shows the load time for a page on mobile devices.
Mobile Friendliness is critical to a good page experience because mobile searches are increasing drastically, and Google wants to provide a good user experience across devices. Mobile-friendly pages are more likely to be visited and interacted with and more likely to rank higher in search engine results.
Read how to create a Google mobile-friendly website.
Secure websites use the HTTPS protocol, a secure version of the traditional HTTP protocol. A website needs to offer secure connections to protect user data.
An SSL certificate helps website security by encrypting the data exchanged between a user and a website.
Securing a website with HTTPS ensures that users' data is protected and secure, which gives them confidence in visiting and interacting with the website. Thus following HTTPS protocols aligns with Google’s page experience ranking factor.
Safe Browsing checks the reputation and safety of the website and ensures that users do not engage with harmful content. It looks for malicious content, deceptive content, and unwanted advertisements that could harm a user's experience on a website or web page.
Security with safe browsing settings is an essential page experience signal because it ensures users have a secure web browsing experience. A secure page experience will reduce the likelihood of malicious content or attacks and increase the trustworthiness of a website.
Intrusive interstitials are pop-ups that cover the content of a web page and can be challenging to dismiss. They can be disruptive to a user's experience.
Your web page content should be easy to find and read. Pop-ups that appear without any clicks can negatively impact the page experience.
Intrusive pop-ups can disrupt a user's experience and lead to them leaving the page. By measuring how well a page avoids using intrusive pop-ups, Google can evaluate how well a page is providing a good user experience.
By considering these factors, businesses can create a product or service that offers the best possible user experience.
User experience (UX) affects SEO because it changes how people interact with your website. Even if your content is good and you have strong backlinks, users may leave quickly if the site is slow, confusing, or hard to read. When visitors leave without engaging, search engines see this as a sign that the page is not helpful.
Simple things like fast loading speed, mobile-friendly design, clear navigation, and useful content make it easier for users to stay on your site. A good user experience also helps search engines crawl, understand, and rank your pages more effectively.
Page experience has become especially important as Google now looks closely at how smoothly users can browse and interact with a page. If visitors stay longer, view more pages, and return later, these positive signals can improve rankings.
UX designers and SEO specialists may approach problems differently, but they share the same goal: giving users what they are looking for. UX focuses on making the site easy and enjoyable to use, while SEO focuses on helping users find the site through search.
When UX and SEO work together, websites perform better. Faster pages, clear layouts, readable URLs, helpful headings, and well-structured content improve both user satisfaction and search visibility.
Understanding why someone searches for a query is the foundation of both SEO and UX. When you know what users are trying to achieve, you can create content that answers their questions clearly, reduces friction, and keeps them engaged. This process also helps you understand how your audience naturally phrases their searches.
For example, a food website should create content around steak cooking techniques if users are actively searching for it. Similarly, a travel site might publish destination comparisons after discovering interest through keyword research.
To uncover search intent:
Use keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush to analyze variations and demand
Review the current top-ranking pages to understand what type of content Google already favors
Study user messages, comments, and on-site behavior
Run surveys or conduct interviews to learn directly from your audience
Keywords help search engines understand what your pages are about and connect users to relevant content. Instead of forcing keywords, focus on using them where they make sense within page copy, navigation, titles, and descriptions.
Long-tail keywords are especially useful because they reflect specific intent. For example, someone searching “affordable vegan cafes in downtown LA” knows exactly what they want. If your site includes that phrasing naturally, you’ll attract the right visitors.
Make sure your title tags and meta descriptions clearly describe each page and align with search intent. Avoid overusing keywords unnatural repetition can harm both rankings and user trust.
Page speed has a direct impact on user satisfaction, SEO performance, and brand perception. Faster sites keep users engaged longer and are favored by search engines.
Ways to improve loading time:
Use a CDN to serve content from locations closer to users
Clean up and compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Reduce image sizes without hurting quality
Enable caching so repeat visitors load pages faster
Remove unnecessary plugins and scripts
Keep your CMS and software updated
Regularly test performance with tools like PageSpeed Insights
Content should be easy to scan and simple to understand. Avoid unnecessary jargon, and explain complex ideas in small, digestible sections.
Different users prefer different formats, so don’t rely on text alone. Visuals like charts, diagrams, infographics, or videos can make information easier to absorb and more engaging.
Headings help users quickly understand what a page covers and decide if it’s relevant. They also help search engines interpret content structure.
Use headings logically:
One main heading to define the page topic
Subheadings to break content into clear sections
Smaller headings for supporting points
Well-structured headings improve readability, keyword usage, and content flow.
A strong information architecture helps users find what they need without frustration and allows search engines to crawl your site efficiently.
Simple menus, logical categories, and clear page hierarchies improve navigation. For example, a news site that separates content into categories like business, tech, and lifestyle helps both users and crawlers understand content relationships.
Testing navigation paths and user flows can reveal where visitors get stuck or confused.
Most people browse the internet on mobile devices, so your site must work smoothly on smaller screens. Mobile-friendly design improves usability, engagement, and search visibility.
Responsive layouts, readable text, fast load times, and easy navigation are essential for mobile SEO and UX.
Listening to users helps uncover pain points you might miss internally. Feedback can highlight issues with design, content clarity, or navigation.
When users feel heard, engagement improves leading to longer sessions, fewer bounces, and better SEO signals.
Internal links help users discover related content and understand how pages connect. They also help search engines distribute authority and index pages more effectively.
Linking related articles, guides, or service pages keeps users engaged and supports better crawlability.
Accessible websites create better experiences for everyone, including users with disabilities or limitations. While accessibility isn’t a direct ranking factor, it strongly influences engagement metrics that affect SEO.
Readable text, proper contrast, clear navigation, and descriptive links help users stay longer and interact more. As Google’s John Mueller explains, sites that are hard to use naturally lose visibility over time because users avoid them.
Understanding how users interact with your website and providing a better user experience boosts your SEO and encourages users to stay on your website longer. To achieve success online, you must combine UX and SEO strategies. By focusing on both aspects equally, businesses can create websites that attract more visitors and increase conversions.
Investing in user experience and SEO can give your business the edge to succeed in the increasingly competitive online world. Ensuring your website’s optimization for users and SEO is complicated if you have multiple landing pages. Using an SEO platform like Quattr, you can scale your UX and SEO efforts to the next level. Quattr helps to track key performance indicators like rankings, traffic, backlinks, and website health.
It also provides detailed reports and analytics to see which SEO strategies are working and which are not. The Quattr platform lets you stay on top of changes in the SERP and quickly adjust your SEO strategies accordingly.
User experience in SEO is optimizing a website to improve the user experience and provide visitors with an enjoyable, trouble-free experience. It includes increasing the website load speed, creating a user-friendly navigation system, creating a clean and attractive design, optimizing content for search engine visibility, and improving the website structure.
User experience affects SEO because it directly impacts a website's dwell time and click-through rate. It can influence how high a website ranks in search engine result pages. Good user experience also encourages visitors to link to and share content, which can help to improve a website's ranking further.
User experience (UX) can improve SEO by making the website easier to use, encouraging visitors to spend more time on the page and complete the desired actions, and providing a positive user experience that encourages visitors to return. Following user experience best practices ensure the website is easy to use and enjoyable, encouraging more people to visit the site and increasing time spent on the page.
Quattr is an innovative and fast-growing venture-backed company based in Palo Alto, California USA. We are a Delaware corporation that has raised over $7M in venture capital. Quattr's AI-first platform evaluates like search engines to find opportunities across content, experience, and discoverability. A team of growth concierge analyze your data and recommends the top improvements to make for faster organic traffic growth. Growth-driven brands trust Quattr and are seeing sustained traffic growth.
Try our growth engine for free with a test drive.
Our AI SEO platform will analyze your website and provide you with insights on the top opportunities for your site across content, experience, and discoverability metrics that are actionable and personalized to your brand.
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