You might have often heard the term UX, or user experience. Most people assume that the term deals with just the design aspect of a software product. However, that is not the case. What if we were to tell you that there is more to a great user experience than just the design? Would you believe that SEO content or search-engine-optimized content plays an important role in a visitor’s website experience?
In fact, your SEO content strategy plays a major role in your website user experience, far greater than you know. But how does it do that? And how can we tweak our content strategy to account for UX aspects too?
Let’s dive in and discover how to improve our website’s UX via our SEO content strategy.
The Role of Content in Creating a Great User Experience
In recent years, there has been a massive shift in the techniques and practices behind SEO and SEO content. Gone are the days when the number of times a keyword, stuffed into your content dictated where you ranked in the SERPs. Having the best user experience for your website is difficult by just using the best coding languages for web or app development, as it’s vital to have it SEO optimized for better results. Neither can you create standalone pieces of content and expect them to do well in the rankings.
Today, the focus is on providing value to the consumer by offering them a great experience. An SEO expert today diligently researches things like user needs, search intent, and more before developing a piece of content tailored to those specifics.
Furthermore, there is also a focus on determining the type of content desired by the consumers as well. In its simplest form, this may mean determining if the search intent is a simple how-to article or a detailed piece of content that covers the topic in depth. However, nowadays, it may also mean determining if that content would do better as an article, an infographic, or even a video.
But what has all of this got to do with the user experience?
Well, your web page’s UX depends on your content, and vice versa. If it contains the information the user desires and fulfills their search intent, then that will add to the overall enjoyable experience of the page.
Other elements, like the relevance of your content and the way it resonates with your audience, also contribute to the UX of that page. So, if we combine it all, we can say that relevant content that fulfills the consumer’s intent and expectations and resonates with them emotionally increases your user experience exponentially.
SEO Content Strategy and User Experience – How Are They Linked?
Now, we understand the role that good, well-developed content plays in boosting our website’s user experience. Generally, companies that create SEO content do so by following an SEO content strategy. This strategy defines the types of content that the company needs to produce to boost its engagement and conversions.
So how do your company’s content strategy and user experience overlap?
Well, both UX and UI design need to be taken into account, as it’s important that your UX designers keep the content strategy in mind when designing your web pages. Based on that strategy and collaborating with the content strategist, they come up with a design that caters to your strategy’s various content elements.
These elements, such as content discovery, taxonomy, messaging strategy, and more, when catered to properly in your design, can have a massive impact on your user experience. These elements would allow your consumers to find the content they desire quickly and easily, as well as ensure that your brand voice is consistent across all pieces of content.
Interestingly, these elements are a necessary part of search engine optimization as well, especially recently. As the content strategist works closely with the UX designers, they can learn how to build a user-centric app or product, thus improving the relevancy and resonance of their content. Therefore, this collaboration can work wonders for your user experience.
How to Develop a Content Strategy Optimized for Search Engines and UX?
So far, we have learned that your site’s UX can be boosted wonderfully if paired with a well-developed SEO content strategy. The question is: how can you create a content strategy optimized for SEO and UX?
Well, the process for it is quite simple, especially when we consider that both search engine optimization and user experience have several elements in common. Let’s take a look at how you can develop an amazing SEO content strategy that gives your website’s UX the boost it needs.
Identify and Develop Your User Personas
The first thing that you need to do is identify your ideal consumers. To develop content that speaks to your consumers, you need to understand them deeply. To understand them, you need to study their behaviors, perceptions, demographics, and a variety of social and psychological elements.
Now, optimizing your strategy for a random set of data can be quite difficult. Therefore, we use personas. Using the consumer data we have gathered, we create a fictional persona of an ideal consumer, which guides our creative process. Moreover, this way, we can test our strategy against consumer goals and pain points easily.
Carefully Map Out User Journeys
Next, you need to identify the journey of an ideal consumer on your website. A user journey highlights the path a consumer needs to take to fulfill their goal with your product. This also maps out any points of interaction that a consumer may encounter in the journey, as they have an impact on the overall user experience.
By mapping out these user journeys, you can get a clear idea about the type of content needed at each phase of the journey. This in turn can help you create a clear and connected flow of content that smoothly guides the consumer towards conversion, providing value at each stage.
Schedule and Perform a Content Audit
After that, you need to perform a comprehensive audit of the content assets already available to you on your website. The reason you need to perform this audit is that it allows you to measure the effectiveness of that content at that moment, identifying dead or dying pieces of content. Moreover, it helps to identify any gaps that your competition may be capitalizing on.
Once done, you will have a good idea about which content needs to be created or revamped. Moreover, you will also identify content that needs to be removed from your site, as well as problems with tone, readability, consistency, and relevance.
Perform Competitive Analysis to Identify Gaps
Next, you will need to perform a competitive analysis, which will help you identify any gaps after evaluating your market position, competition, target audience, and brand messaging. These gaps can then be addressed in your new content strategy, which will allow your website to connect better with its consumers.
This step of the process is critical to helping you analyze what content to prioritize in your strategy. Moreover, it also helps you understand what you need to do to make your content stand out. That will help you create a unique and distinct brand voice, one that will be highly memorable to their target consumers.
Define Clear KPIs and Metrics for Your Content
The last step of this process is to use all the data and insights you have gathered so far, along with your content strategy and business insights, and use it to create a set of clear KPIs. KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are a set of metrics that evaluate whether the strategy is performing as well as planned.
These metrics include page views, click-through rate, conversions, bounce rate, consumer engagement, and more, which can be measured by tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console. By using these monitoring metrics, you can evaluate whether your strategy needs tweaking as well as identify areas for improvement. That way, you will be able to tackle any issues as soon as possible, allowing for maximal strategic efficiency.
SEO and UX – Best Practices that Ensure Success
Finally, now that you know how to develop an SEO content strategy to complement your website UX, you are ready to begin the process of creating one of your own. However, before you do that, let’s take a look at a few best practices for creating such a strategic plan.
- Always prioritize mobile responsiveness, both in design and content, as 67% of mobile visitors are more likely to buy something from a site if it has good mobile UX. Just as your website or product needs to be responsive for a variety of screens, so should your content. Avoid long, rambling paragraphs, and structure your content so that it is easy to read, whether it is on a PC, laptop, or mobile device.
- Ensure that your content isn’t just informative but engaging too. Too often, we see people optimize their content heavily for the search engines. However, in all of that, they forget the most important thing: the content is for humans. People need engaging content.
- Ensure that your content flow is intuitive and natural. Ensure that your content has a naturally flowing set of headings and breadcrumbs, making it easy for a user to navigate.
- Use simple and natural language, with organic placement of focus keywords. This will ensure that consumers from different backgrounds will find it easy to read and understand your content.
- Improve internal linking for a better user journey. You can plan and structure your internal linking so that an interested user spends a longer time on your website, thus allowing for a more effective user journey.
Conclusion
To sum it up, the role of SEO content is inherently combined with that of the user experience. Without an effective SEO content strategy, you will not be able to optimize your website’s UX properly. Therefore, you need to ensure that your content strategist, SEO expert, and UX designer work together to come up with a web structure that fits the bill for everyone.
That way, you will be able to ensure that your content is structured to provide a good experience, while your UX scores will be able to capitalize on your SEO content’s engagement for more conversions.
