Tips for improving your Website’s User Experience

Your website is the digital heart of your business, serving as a place that welcomes, markets to, engages with and converts your target audience. User experience is an important part of accomplishing this role.

User experience explains the quality of a visitor’s interaction with a website. It doesn’t matter how good the on-page content is or even how cheap the prices are, a bad user experience will drive people away faster than they came.

An SEO consultant understands that the experience users have on a website is just as important as driving them to it in the first place. Not only is the user experience important for the audience themselves, but for the search engines that crawl the webpage.

Because providers like Google are trying to promote the experience their users have with their service, they will prioritise websites that provide a great user experience. This is why having a functionally adequate website is as important to SEO as its link authority or keyword usage.

The following will discuss some of the best methods of improving the user experience of your website.

The value of white space

Many people will mistakenly believe that an abundance of white or empty space on their webpage is a detriment to them. They think that they are wasting the real estate they have available by not filling it with something.

In-fact, crowding a webpage by stuffing every corner with something is quite detrimental to the user experience.

White space is actually essential to good website design because it make the on-page content easier to read. It also makes the website feel fresh and open, especially if your own branding is consistent with those feelings.

However there is such a thing as too much white space. If you are trying to communicate a lot of information before a user needs to scroll the page, then sacrificing some white space can be useful here.

Optimising page speed

If you’ve ever been frustrated by how long it has taken for a webpage to load, then you already understand this element of user experience. It’s quite obvious, the longer the audience spend looking at a page that’s buffering, the worse their user experience will be.

People expect fast results when they use the internet and nobody should be expected to be patient with your website. If people arrive on your site and then quickly leave because it was loading too slow it will result in a poor bounce rate.

This bounce rate is a metric used by SEO companies for marketing purposes, in analytics so it’s important to make sure you retain users on you page for as long as possible before they leave.

Free tools like the Google Search Console are great for determining which pages are loading too slowly and can suggest ways to improve their performance. There are a huge range of on-page elements that can be optimised to decrease the average load time.

Using calls to action

Modern web users are already trained on how to use visual cues presented to them so they can prioritise content. Designing your on-page calls to action to be colourful and persuasive not only improve user experience but drive conversions.

This is where elements like the psychology of colour come into play. You should do some research to determine which colours will work best for the message you are trying to convey.

Calls to action need to be bold, persuasive and imply a sense of urgency. A basic example is that a call to action saying “buy here” won’t be nearly as effective as one that says “buy here now!”

These are simple tricks that go a long way in promoting user experience. While there’s certainly a lot of other web design factors an SEO consultant will suggest, these are some of the most important in ensuring the audience gets the most out of your website.