The third frontier in SEO
Usually, when a company is helping you to put a search engine optimisation strategy together, they’ll look at two things. The first of these is the content on your website and the second is the links out there on the internet that point to it. These two specialisms are now being joined by a third – the user experience of your website.
Google’s algorithm changes
This development is mostly down to a number of changes that Google has made to its search algorithm over the last couple of years. Put simply, it’s now looking at how quick and easy your site is to browse when it’s deciding where to rank your website in its results pages. There are many individual factors that can impact Google’s perception of your site’s user experience, but in this article, we’re going to look at two of them.
The mobile experience
The first of these is the mobile experience of your site. Even if you only expect visitors to come to your site from desktop computers (and that’s unlikely in this day and age), you still need to account for mobile since Google looks at the mobile user experience when populating desktop search results. Google asks that your site uses responsive design. Having a separate, mobile-only version of your website simply isn’t good enough anymore. Thankfully, the vast majority of web technologies and website designers now support responsive technologies so it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement this in your next redesign.
Speed and overall user experience
Finally, you should be aware of the overall speed and user experience of your website. This means ensuring that your site loads quickly and doesn’t hog resources. There are plenty of online tools that can help you do this or you can ask an SEO expert to do some of the heavy lifting for you. Generally, the quickest wins you can get will come from optimising the images on your website so that it loads more quickly and removing any scripts and plugins that you aren’t using.
By keeping up with these changes and implementing all of the traditional SEO efforts, you massively increase your chances of producing a high ranking website.