How UX affects your SEO!
SEO is one of the most important long-term strategies for bringing organic traffic to your website, however a high number of online visitors doesn’t always necessarily mean more patients walking into your practice. To ensure users on your website are encouraged to complete a contact form, book an appointment or call your practice, you will need to consider your website’s user experience (UX).
Relationship between UX and SEO
The easiest way to explain the relationship between UX and SEO would be to say SEO brings people to your website and UX helps convert them into leads and/or patients. However, the relationship isn’t all that simple. There are a number of UX usability factors that impact your organic search rankings.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile optimisation is an important UX usability factor that is used by search engines. As more and more users are searching on mobile, it’s important to ensure that your website is responsive. If not, you could be penalised.
Content Quality
Search engines also consider the quality of your content when ranking your website for keywords. There are a handful of pointers to remember to improve the readability of your content, all of which are considered by Google when indexing.
- Write for human readers – not search engines. Stuffing keywords into every sentence isn’t going to get you ranking if the sentences don’t make sense.
- Formatting your content with subheadings, bullet points and numbered lists to make it easier to read. Remember whitespace is your friend especially when it comes to mobile users.
- Make sure you’re double-checking your spelling and grammar. If you’re not adhering to basic spelling and grammar rules, then this can affect how much the reader trusts your content.
- As a general rule, keep paragraphs short and sentences no longer than 20 words.
Alt Text
Making your website user-friendly means making it accessible for all different users – and a way to do this is to ensure you have Alt text to every photo.
Alt text (alternative text, also known as alt attributes) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on the user’s screen. By writing clear, readable and detailed descriptions for your images in the alt-text field, you’ll be helping search engines to index your content accurately and improve the experience for people using screen readers.
Page speed
Research conducted by Google found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds.Therefore Google includes page-loading time as an important ranking factor.
Website Architecture and Navigation
Your website’s architecture and navigation are also an integral part of the experience for your visitors. If your website doesn’t provide a clear and logical map for where to find any information on treatments, opening times or whatever the user might need, then they’ll be lost and soon abandon ship.
Site downtime
If your website is down, nobody can use it. If it happens often, search engines will start to notice and penalise you for it. Make sure your website is hosted by a reliable and sturdy platform and you have a trustworthy team working behind the scenes.
We at Dental Design are website experts! We know how users interact with Dental Practice website’s and can help you get your website ranking high on Google. Get in touch with us today to find out more!
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