Today, we’ll explore why user experience matters for SEO and how these factors work together to improve website performance.

Bounce Rate Reduction

A positive user experience leads to lower bounce rates. When visitors find your website engaging and relevant to their needs, they are more likely to stay longer and explore multiple pages. Search engines like Google consider lower bounce rates as a positive signal, potentially improving your website’s SEO ranking.

Page Load Speed

Website speed is a key UX factor and a significant SEO ranking factor. Slow-loading pages frustrate users and can lead to higher bounce rates. Optimizing your website for faster load times not only enhances UX but also boosts your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Mobile-Friendliness

With a significant portion of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is essential. Google prioritizes mobile-responsive sites in its rankings. Ensuring a seamless mobile experience contributes to both UX and SEO success.

Content Quality and Relevance

High-quality, relevant content is at the core of both UX and SEO. When your content addresses users’ needs and provides value, visitors are more likely to engage and stay on your site. Search engines reward well-structured, informative content with higher rankings.

Site Navigation and Structure

A well-organized website with intuitive navigation benefits users and search engines. A clear menu, logical page hierarchy, and easy-to-find information enhance UX and help search engine crawlers understand your site’s structure, improving indexability.

User Engagement Signals

User engagement metrics, such as time on site, pages per session, and click-through rates, are valuable signals for search engines. When users interact positively with your website, search engines perceive it as a sign of relevance and quality, potentially boosting your rankings.

Reduced Penalty Risk

Poor user experiences can lead to Google penalties. For example, websites with intrusive pop-ups or excessive ads may face ranking penalties. Prioritizing user-friendly practices mitigates the risk of such penalties.

Voice Search Optimization

As voice search continues to grow, optimizing your website for natural language queries is crucial. User-friendly content that caters to voice search also aligns with SEO best practices, helping you rank well in this evolving search landscape.

User experience is not just a matter of making your website enjoyable for visitors; it also plays a fundamental role in SEO success. A seamless, user-friendly website not only keeps visitors engaged but also satisfies search engine ranking criteria. By prioritizing UX, you can create a website that not only ranks well in search results but also delivers a positive experience to your audience, ultimately driving better online performance and success.

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1. Not optimizing for mobile devices
With more than 60% of online searches performed on mobile devices, it is critical to optimize your website for mobile devices. Google rewards websites that provide a mobile-friendly experience with higher rankings on SERPs. Therefore, if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not only hurt your domain authority but also reduce your website’s visibility and traffic.

2. Ignoring the importance of user experience
User experience is a critical factor in determining your website’s domain authority. Google uses various metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and click-through rate to evaluate the user experience of your website. Therefore, your website’s high bounce rate or low engagement metrics can hurt your domain authority. To improve user experience, ensure your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and provides valuable and relevant content.

3. Keyword stuffing Keyword
Stuffing is an outdated and unethical SEO practice that involves stuffing your content with too many keywords to manipulate search engine rankings. Keyword stuffing can negatively affect your domain authority, making your content unreadable and less valuable to users. Instead, focus on using relevant keywords naturally and strategically in your content.

4. Not optimizing for local search
If you operate a local business, it is crucial to optimize your website for local search. Local SEO involves optimizing your website to appear in local search results, such as Google Maps and local directories. Ignoring local SEO can hurt your domain authority and reduce your visibility to local customers.

5. Ignoring on-page optimization
On-page optimization involves optimizing various on-page elements, including title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. Ignoring on-page optimization can hurt your domain authority, affecting your website’s crawlability, relevancy, and user experience. Therefore, optimize all on-page elements to improve your website’s domain authority.

6. Not building high-quality backlinks
Backlinks are essential to improving your website’s domain authority. However, not all backlinks are created equal. Low-quality or spammy backlinks can hurt your domain authority and even result in penalties from Google. Therefore, focus on building high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites.

7. Ignoring the importance of content quality
Content quality is a critical factor in determining your website’s domain authority. Google rewards websites that provide high-quality, informative, and valuable content with higher rankings on SERPs. Therefore, if your website has low-quality content, it can hurt your domain authority and reduce your visibility on search engines.

8. Not optimizing for voice search
Voice search involves optimizing your website to appear in voice search results, such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. With the rise of smart speakers and voice assistants, optimizing your website for voice search is becoming increasingly important. If you ignore voice search optimization, it can hurt your domain authority and reduce your visibility to users who prefer to use voice search.

9. Ignoring technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing various technical aspects of your website, including website speed, security, and crawlability. Ignoring technical SEO can hurt your domain authority as it affects your website’s usability, user experience, and crawlability. Therefore, ensure your website is technically optimized to improve your domain authority.

10. Not monitoring your website’s performance
Monitoring your website’s performance is essential to improving your domain authority. It is imperative to track your website’s performance regularly as it enables you to identify areas that require improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance your domain authority.

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What to choose for an intensive course?

Recently, in the American Forbes, a short but cautious entry about the anticipated SEO trends for E-commerce for the upcoming year 2019 has been published. The author of the entry is a Canadian, Kenny Tripura, co-founder and managing director of the Edkent Media Agency. Tripura argues that operating strategies for the e-commerce industry should be based on four main pillars. It’s: voice search, links obtained from content marketing activities, implementation of user experience on the website and increasing the security of data transmission.

These predictions coincide in the majority with what we have recently written about on our blog. We trusted the continuation of trends related to user experience or content marketing. We also wrote about the need to improve the SEO transition to a secure SSL certificate. In today’s post I want to familiarize you with the most important thesis that a Canadian businessman puts forward.

1. Voice search in the online store

According to Tripura, vocal sleep (r) of search engine evolution is a big mistake. Voice search, currently not very popular, is to become a gold coin. The pioneers will benefit most from it, as they are not afraid to adjust their store operations accordingly. It is therefore worth allowing customers to search for products through a properly optimized database of questions. Users who pronounce phrases aloud use the form of full questions rather than clusters of keywords. Unlike text search. For example, when looking for a black winter jacket in Washington’s stores, most users will say: “Where can I find a winter black jacket in Washington?”. According to this assumption, it is worth adjusting the content in the store to the possible pronouns asking: “whether”, “where”, “how”, “what”, “when” etc.

Another issue is featured snippets on Google, which is ours: “recommended fragments with the answer” (or something like that). These are the results displayed above the organic and paid results, containing the highest-rated question from Google. This item is sometimes called the ZERO position on Google and, of course, it is the object of desire for everyone. According to Mr. Tripura, matching snippets to voice search will bring us closer to achieving this royal position. These are keywords, URL, title and H1 header. Why? Because during voice search, we formulate questions like in the normal use of language, not in the form of impersonal clusters of keywords. Tripura refers here to Google research, according to which approximately 70% of voice queries are formulated in natural language.

2. Acquiring links from content marketing activities

For e-commerce platform and online store owners the only reliable indicator of success are conversions and this is obvious. After all, it is a living cash that flows into the company’s account and decides about its profits. High positions are obviously desirable, but only as a means to the goal (through increased traffic on the page). According to Tripura, link building is still one of the most important aspects of positioning stores and e-commerce platforms. However, there are times when we will have to change our view of getting links. In 2019, link building specialists should focus on strengthening the brand through cooperation with bloggers and sites containing content corresponding to a given niche. Besides, I wrote about this on Position in 2016 (link building a PR). And everything is still valid.

Forbes’ columnist argues that link building should acquire more authentic referral links from external websites, thematically related to our industry. So what do we come to? Well, it’s content marketing and SEO! I wrote about it a few months ago, developing the issue and giving many examples of application.

3. User Experience

UX site is a trend not so much the future as the present. And this is a very strong trend that positively affects the SEO of the e-commerce sector, and in principle on every page. I would call here the metaphor of Feng shui. These are ancient Chinese rules for planning and furnishing in such a way that we are well placed in them. UX is therefore such a Feng swebsite / online store. The arrangement of the elements and content makes the site look quickly, intuitively and pleasantly, and the user willingly returns to it.

The importance of UX is strongly emphasized by Google, which rewards sites rated as fast, consistent and easy to use. Here, for example, Page Speed is of great importance, i.e. page loading time. I was convinced of its importance a month ago in the entry “Website loading time – basic FAQ”. It will be necessary in 2019 to improve the readability of content on the store’s website, its composition (headings, paragraphs), internal links, as well as well-written texts that are pleasantly readable.

The columnist of the American magazine also draws attention to the need to apply the same principles in the case of the mobile version of the site. A site well-suited to human use works just as impeccably on any device, whether portable or stationary, but with an accent on mobile devices (remember that mobile has already jumped the desktop!).

4. Secure data transfer to the server

Another issue that will be urgent for the e-commerce industry next year. A few months ago we informed that the lack of secure SSL certificate on the store’s website will be penalized by Google in the form of the sign “dangerous side” from July this year. This has a key impact on the reputation, especially for sites that use sensitive personal data, including credit card numbers, payment numbers, ID cards, etc. I covered this whole article under the title “SSL certificate and positioning”. Google also announced that it reduces the visibility of sites that do not use secure server connection encryption.

In addition, sites marked as dangerous do not encourage you to leave your bearings on yourself, right? Currently, many users still pay little attention to whether the website address starts with http or https, but this may change next year. Public awareness of crime committed in virtual space, theft of passwords, login data, etc. is growing. Therefore, the use of secure data encryption and the passage of the site to the protocol https (http-sercure) and the green padlock icon before the URL is necessary for the industry e-commerce, which must process personal data from users to process the order and which commonly uses online payment systems connecting to the clients’ bank accounts. The use of the https protocol is a signal for users that their data is better protected.

Trends SEO 2019 – summary

That’s it when it comes to the main SEO trends for 2019 for the e-commerce industry. In fact, they are valid for all websites, so these recommendations can also be successfully applied to corporate websites, business cards or websites.

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The post 4 Seo Trends That Will Matter Most In 2019 appeared first on SEO TECH GUEST BLOG.

Do not wait for the moment when the optimization of content will become an urgent need: take the chance to take the first places in the top issue under the new rules.

Who and how to use voice search

Users over the age of 20 using voice search are basically looking for the desired route, type text and make calls. Teens, in addition to the above reasons, turn to the assistant for advice in working at home and listening to music.

The reason for using it is the employment of hands or the desire to get results faster: a person can say 150 words per minute, and print – only 40 words.

Among the main tasks of voice services are:

• Personal assistant functions: calls and a set of messages, keeping a calendar of meetings and making purchases;
• Search for information about products or services;
• Laying the optimal trip route;
• Search and download your favorite music, video, listen to programs and TV shows;
• Help in solving household issues through devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Trends in the use of voice search
In short, we are on the verge of a boom: in 2017 this function in the world was used by 39% more often than a year earlier. On a regular basis, the technology already employs about 40% of the adult US population, the percentage of use by teenagers is even higher. True, everything is just beginning in our countries, but the trends are similar.

Trends in the following years:

• The quality of query recognition will continue to improve, encouraging people to use voice services more often;
• The number of users of virtual assistants and smart speakers will multiply. Sales of gadgets like Amazon Echo and Google Home are gaining momentum: in 2017, sold more than 24 million smart columns, and this is 4 times higher than in the previous year;
• Alibaba launches its own voice assistant: it is planned to be used in shops and hotel rooms;
• Voice search will be used to promote entertainment content and make purchases. For example, in “The Oprah Winfrey Show” the presenter tells about the novelties of the season, which can be ordered immediately through Amazon Echo. Group U2 creates special content for its fans and promotes it with the help of Alexa from Amazon.
• In contrast to the standard search, the voice is more often used in connection with the area. Most users are interested in what happens near their place of residence or work: where you can go to eat and have fun, where to cut your hair or buy something. That is, specific, point requests are working.

How to optimize content for new requirements

1. Consider the difference between the key phrases of standard search and voice
It is important to understand how your potential customers communicate, what words and phrases apply. This can be done in several ways:

• Browse specialized forums and interest groups;
• Study social networks: questions on the pages of your company, rating entries and comments under the blogs of competitors;
• Look for information on TripAdvisor, Amazon and social services like Quora;
• Be interested in employees of call centers and sales representatives, what questions they are asked by customers;
• Use tools to select natural key phrases – for example, Answerthepublic.com.

2. Test the voice service from the user position
Read the requests through different voice services and see the results of the issue. By the way, the priority search engine for Siri is Bing. So you determine the competitors and will be able to evaluate their answers to the questions asked: is it clear how complete and useful information they provide. This will help you to take into account the mistakes and carefully plan your content.

3. Communicate with customers not as a marketer, trying to sell, but as a journalist or blogger giving useful information
Less think about the use of keywords, and more – about accurate and understandable answers to the questions “how”, “what”, “who”, “what,” “where.” Think of different variations of queries: “in what stores are smart watches sold,” “where can I buy a smart watch?”. Consider that people often use the words “best”, “cheapest”, etc.

To place such content is appropriate on a dedicated page – for example, “Frequently Asked Questions”. This is a great way to optimize content for voice search, without radically changing the content of the site.

4. Use the local directionality of voice calls
According to the research, 22% of users are looking for information about services and goods in their area of ​​residence. For example, “Where can you order sushi at night?” Or, even more often, “Where is the Japanese restaurant next to me”? “Near Me” is a very convenient and common request, take advantage of its advantages:

• Enter information about your company in the virtual card database, including local search ads on Google Maps, as well as in Facebook and Foursquare;
• Make sure that the address and time information is correct and visible to the search robots;
• Make a section about your company more visible with the Google Ads extension.

5. If you (suddenly) still have not made a mobile version of the site, it’s time to improve
Voice search is more often used on smartphones, especially people under 25 years old. If you do not have a mobile version, this traffic will pass by. Check the download speed of the site: if it exceeds 3 seconds, you lose half of the potential customers even at this stage. Use micro-markup: it helps search engines recognize the content of the page and affects its ranking.

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How would you ask a question in the search for Google and a living person about the president of Nicaragua? Most likely, in the search engine you would have introduced: “The President of Nicaragua”, and in the second case the question would sound something like this: “And who is the president now in Nicaragua?”. And what would you say to Siri (Voice Assistant on the IPhone)? I’m sure you would have given about the same voice command as a living person. Without realizing this, you change your behavior.

Today, voice input is increasingly popular. From ordinary SMS-messages and letters in social networks to software, various reports and complex accounting software. For entrepreneurs and marketers this is a good sign. These technologies will help achieve greater personalization and give many useful benefits.

Who uses voice search?

Very soon the popularity of this type of search will greatly increase. And if for the age category 18-43 the use of new technologies is normal, then the increase in activity among users of the 44+ has greatly surprised the developers and researchers. Perhaps this is due to the fact that for the older category of people, voice search is easier than small buttons and flat screens.

Google conducted its research and got the result: the voice search coefficient is growing much faster than the textual one. Researchers explain this by the fact that it is more comfortable for people to use speech commands and see the quality of the results. The number of errors in speech recognition by search engines decreased from 25% to 8% in just 2 years. And people, in turn, use more natural suggestions to perform a search.

Why do we use voice search? Maybe we need an assistant to simplify our life.

It’s all interesting, but how can it help you in business? Voice requests produce results in the search. It is on them that you should pay attention. Do your ads appear as a result of a voice request?

How to use voice search

Consider the 5 most important differences between such requests and text.

1. Length of request
Not surprisingly, when typing in, short key phrases in 2-3 words work best. Thus the person does not use the offer. Just a few words that reflect the purpose of the search. But when using the voice search engine, the key phrase is much longer.

What to do about it?

Most likely, you already use 1-2 keywords, for example:

• fishing;
• fishing gear;
• camping;
• everything for fishing;
• for lovers of fishing.
• add longer and more convenient for voice queries keywords.

For example:
how much is the rod for fishing;
when the opening of the fishing season;
the best places for rest and fishing;
the highest quality fishing gear.

2. Questions

Voice search differs from the textual use of interrogative phrases. Entering the query into the search bar, you use the computer language: “Vacation in the Canaries”. Pronouncing the phrase in the voice search, use the spoken language: “Which tour operator has the best package tours to the Canary Islands”?

What to do?

Try adding some questions to the list of key phrases.

For example, for a company that sells holidays in the Canaries, you can take such examples:

How much does an air ticket cost to the Canary Islands?
How much does it cost to fly to the Canaries?
Where can I find information about the rest in the Canary Islands?
What is the best holiday package in the Canaries?
When is the best time to travel to the Canaries?
You can also exclude irrelevant phrases and questions:

Who lives in the Canaries?
What time is it in the Canary Islands?

3. Intention

This is the most important difference. Natural language shows what a person plans to do. For example, if he enters a “laptop” query, you do not know exactly whether he is going to buy, browses pictures, studies the latest news, or does research by comparing models.

The use of natural language changes everything. The question type shows what exactly a person is going to do. This is important when displaying the results in the issuance.

And this is good news for you. Now you can show your advertising specifically to those who want to buy, or “warm up” potential customers. This improves ROI and conversion rate.

What to do?

Identify keywords that are searched most often;
Optimize them, and set your bids.
Consider dynamically replacing information in your ad and on the site, depending on the request. This will make your advertising as personalized as possible.

4. Local Search

Mobile voice search, in contrast to text, is 3 times more efficient with local queries. What does this mean for local entrepreneurs? That you need to take time to voice search and change the approach. It is with his help that you will find customers.

What to do?

If you have a business that is relevant for a certain area, it is important for you to improve your strategy. Because using a voice search you have a better chance of getting new customers.

Learn the keywords relevant to your business and product. Think:

Do you need landmarks that will become a clue to customers.
What sights can become landmarks.
How people describe your location in a natural conversation.

5. Faster responses and actions

Voice search yields accurate answers in search results faster than text search. This is due to the presence of question words. They are closely related to local queries. For example, “Where is the best Thai food next to me?” And “Where can I rent a car today?”. These are explicitly local queries. They run ads in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which allow the user to act without going to the web page.

If your potential client wants to see the reviews or call, make sure that he does not need to go to the site. This will help you stand out from the competition. Respond to requests, give information and options for action immediately in the search results.

What to do?

Make sure that the links and contacts on your sites work and are always active. Use all the advantages of SERP for voice commands. For example, is your company address correct? What about the hours of your work and your phone number? Do you have any feedback from clients that you need to answer?

Keep track of every little thing. The result is worth it.

Conclusion

This is the 5 main differences between voice search and text:

1. For voice commands, people use longer queries.
2. The natural language is more questions.
3. Voice search shows what the intentions of a potential customer are.
4. Voice search is of great importance for local entrepreneurs …
5. .. and greatly affects the speed of obtaining information.

One of the biggest expectations from using such technologies is that they will exceed our needs. Imagine, you walk in the park in the morning. Your phone tracks and transmits information. You felt that you were very hungry. They took advantage of the voice assistant. He found out that now it’s breakfast time, and the weather is a bit cold and wet. If you ask where the nearest cafe is, the phone will show you the search results. And since your assistant knows that you adore fresh croissants, as a consequence – in your phone only the best places with the most delicious pastries.

Well, if you are the owner of this establishment, you can quickly apply such technologies to your institution and get new hungry customers.

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