Tag Archive for: SEO optimization

Online businesses should be constantly striving to better the user experience (UX). In today’s digital world, making sure that your potential customers have a seamless and enjoyable experience on your website is key when it comes to leads, sales, and site optimization. Here’s what you need to know about UX, and why UX deserves a little more attention.

What is UX?

User experience refers to how a person feels when using your website, product or service. It focuses on improving the emotions and attitudes of your customers when they interact with your business online. By focusing on UX, you can improve the usability and visibility of your site, and drastically improve your customer satisfaction.

Why is it important ?

While Google’s algorithms are everchanging, user experience is a major player when it comes to determining how high a page should rank in search results. Not only this, but companies that prioritize UX get many more visitors to their webpage than businesses with outdated, cluttered pages. This is why businesses should make sure they have an updated user-friendly website that will allow them to convert leads into sales successfully.

Usability and UX are not the same thing

Usability is not the same as UX. Although usability will help to decide is the user has a positive or negative experience on your site, it is only a small part of the entire experience. Usability focuses purely on how your site looks and feels, and how easy it is to navigate. Big buttons, few pop-ups and clear text all help to improve the usability of your site. UX however is much broader than this, and relates more to how the user feels when they are on your page.

A good UX creates brand advocates

The process of earning loyal customers and creating genuine consumer-brand relationships cannot be bought or forced. It is something that happens over time depending on your hard work to consistently better your interactions with your consumers. When you put in the effort to create seamless and rewarding customer interactions, they will repay the favour by spreading positive opinions about your business – both online and offline.

Good content is vital to UX

Original, engaging and thought-provoking content that performs great when it comes to SEO is key to a good UX. Not only will it help your page rank well, but SEO friendly copy will deliver relevant information to your customers, and give them the answer they are looking for. This will help make their experience with your brand easy, pleasurable and (above all) useful.

A positive UX fosters a positive relationship! But focusing on UX is also one of the most effective ways you can help your business stand out against competition. If you need help improving your UX, let us help you. Cloud9 Marketing offers solutions that enhance user experience. We’ll work closely with you to incorporate UX into the design of your site in a way that will fit in with your marketing and sales objectives.

Google recently announced that at some point in 2018 they will be switching to mobile-first indexing. This huge change means that Google will now determine SEO rankings based on the quality of businesses mobile sites, rather than the desktop version. If you want your business to rank effectively for local searches, it’s important you start focusing your efforts on the mobile-friendliness of your site. We’ve outlined for you the difference between desktop and phone searches, and how you can adjust your mobile site to improve your local SEO ranking.

What’s the different between desktop and mobile?

Most laptop and computer searches have delayed search intent. This means that users may be searching for your business from home or work to see if you have what they need, but don’t plan to visit you straightaway.

This can also be true for mobile searches, as people usually grab the nearest device to them to look something up. However, most mobile searches come with immediate search intent, as people are already out and looking for places to visit in the area. Focusing on this immediacy, and having simple, readily available answers for mobile users, is crucial to optimizing your local SEO.

How do I optimize my local business for mobile?

 

  • Focus on Voice Searching

Phone users tend to avoid lengthy searches, as typing on a small device can be frustrating. Using audio is becoming the easiest and most popular way to search online, thanks to the rise of mobile chat bots and devices like Google Home, Amazon Echo and Apple Homepod. This means searches have become much more conversational, as customers actually say what they are looking for. By optimizing your site for shorter keywords, and common spoken phrases like ‘near me’ or ‘where can I find’, you can tailor your site to provide an optimal mobile experience.

  • Increase your Speed

Rather surprisingly, people are typically more patient on mobile than on desktop. That being said, 19% of people will abandon a page if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. To create a frictionless experience, you should really attempt to improve your site speed. This can be done by tweaking your site to reduce the amount of redirects you include, and by grouping assets like JavaScript and CSS, so the browser has fewer files to load. You can also optimize and scale your images, and use browser caching.

  • Create a Mobile-friendly Design

Ultimately, if you design a mobile site with the user in mind, the results will speak for themselves. There are some great websites that can test how phone-friendly your site is, but you can first try clearing all the clutter and pop-ups from your site. Adjust your typography for a small screen, and make sure you leave enough room between clickable elements for fingers and thumbs. You can also try having a responsive design that can adapt to all screens: this means your site is all on one URL and will be easier for Google to index.

With mobile traffic now eclipsing desktop traffic, it’s important to improve your mobile site to keep up with these changes. If you need some help optimizing your site for mobile, our team at Cloud9 Marketing would be more than happy to help.