Have you ever visited a restaurant or store and had such a horrid experience that it made you never want to return to that place again? It could happen to any of us. But while this can be an everyday occurrence in the real world, you definitely don’t want it to be a thing that happens online with your business’s website. User experience is meant to make a website more appealing and satisfying to the customer. Find out what you can do to make people stay once they finally find your site.
Why You Should Give a Crap about User Experience
In the real world, user experience (or UX) describes how easy or pleasing it is to use a product or service. When people leave reviews on websites like Amazon or Yelp, they describe their user experience to help others determine whether or not they will spend their money on the same thing.
Impressing the user—quickly—is top priority.
What is user experience design? It has to do with how people see and consume your website, but online, UX is much more than just website design. It also includes the quality of your services and products, your business’s customer service, and the quality of your onsite content and social media posts. To achieve successful UX, you must meet the needs of your consumer, leaving them satisfied.
In this 140-character, 15-second generation, many people have short attention spans. This affects the quality of your user experience, simply because people will leave your site if they don’t find what they need right away. Avoid this by giving them what they want quickly and easily.
Think about it with the 5-second rule—this one has to do with the Internet, not your nasty eating habits. Your website or any page on your site must have the ability to deliver information a user needs in five second or less. Things like what the company does, what services you offer, why a user should care, how a user will benefit, etc.
With your content marketing, improve the UX by using the inverted pyramid style of writing. That is, give the reader the bulk of the most important information first. Readers can then evaluate whether or not they want to read the whole thing (many people don’t read full articles nowadays anyway). But with good UX, even if they do stop reading early, they’ll still leave with the most important information from the article. Starting with the main points also allows you to use your target keyword in the first paragraph, which is great for your SEO.
How does UX impact SEO?
SEO and UX go hand-in-hand. Search engines can find your site more easily if you spend time improving your UX. The Google Bots want to give users more legit, legible, relevant, and reliable information. And if your UX is off, they can tell. Search engine optimization first works to improve your site’s keywords, backlinks, and site structure. But, search engines are also starting to evaluate the ease of crawling your site and the quality of your site overall.
When users like your site, they stay longer, they share it, and they return to the site multiple times. This contributes to higher rankings on Google and your site’s credibility. Yay!
Well Then, What Do I Do about All This?
You can take steps now to improve your website’s user experience. Here are some of the best ways to start:
- Strategize your new website with a web marketing firm first. (If you’re considering getting a new website, that is.)
- Improve your website’s load time. If it’s too slow, users won’t stay around.
- Create easy-to-read content. Avoid technical jargon that users won’t understand.
- Use headers to break up content and improve its readability.
- Make company info easy to find on your site by adding a Contact Us and About Us page, and also sharing links to your website on social media.
- Design your website with appealing colors and fonts. Visual content appeals to the emotions, so try not to scare users away.
- Don’t forget mobile UX!
Wondering about the Quality of Your Site’s UX?
The experts here at Post Launch know a thing or two about user experience design. Schedule a free consultation with us, and we’ll give you a tip or two on how to improve your website’s user experience and your overall web presence.
