In this blog, we’re breaking down how UX and SEO work together to boost rankings on your website, keep visitors engaged and turn clicks into customers. 

But before we get into it, here is a quick rundown on what they are:

A great website deserves to be seen and enjoyed

UX (user experience) is all about the experience and emotion someone feels when clicking onto a website. Great UX blends research, psychology and design to create experiences people truly enjoy.

SEO (search engine optimisation), on the other hand, is about making your website easy to find. It helps search engines, like Google, understand your content and rank it higher in relevant search results, driving more visitors to your site.

Together, UX and SEO work towards the same goal, giving users the right information in the smoothest, most effective way possible.

The perfect pair

SEO and UX go hand in hand when it comes to creating great online experiences but optimising for both can feel like a balancing act. What looks great to users, like fancy navigation menus, may confuse search engines and make the focus of your content unclear. 

Get this balance right, and you will attract the right people to your site, keeping them engaged and ensuring your content is both discoverable and valuable.

To ensure you do this every time, blend best practices from each discipline. Here are a few key areas where SEO and UX need to work together.

Quick sites = happy users

The faster your content loads, the faster visitors find what they need – it’s that simple. Yet many businesses overlook slow-loading pages.

With Google prioritising load speed in rankings and users expecting pages to view content in under three seconds, optimising your website’s load times is crucial, especially for brands like Dotty Bridal, who experience high traffic and a surge in orders during peak times.

But how can you achieve a fast-loading site? Compressing imagery, enabling lazy loading and stripping back bloated code will all make a big difference. And so will the platform you use, with some content management systems adding unnecessary code, slowing things down. This is why we regularly work with Craft CMS. Their systems are built with clean, efficient code, ensuring a smoother experience for both users and search engines.

By doing this, your site will improve its search rankings, making it easier for people to find your content, check out what you have to offer and take action, whether that’s through reading your blogs, purchasing a product or getting in touch regarding one of your services.

Guiding users with smart navigation

Think of your daily drive to work, it’s effortless. You know the route, and everything normally goes smoothly. But a sudden road closure? That throws you off. A well-designed website keeps the journey seamless, without any blockers.

Users should be able to land on your homepage, quickly find what they need, learn about your brand and take action with ease. But great UX isn’t just about making things easy, it’s about guiding visitors through the journey you want them to take. For example, we implemented an intuitive user journey across the Hexa website to seamlessly guide potential clients to the contact page, turning interest into opportunity. 

One method we regularly use is strategically placing CTA’s throughout our website’s content to ensure that users can easily get in touch or navigate to other areas of the website, whether they've read the entire page or just the initial sections. By thoughtfully considering navigation and removing blockers, you help users explore, engage and convert, whether that’s making a purchase, signing up, or getting in touch.

That’s why we embrace the value ‘Love Simplicity’ in every project we take on. From the initial briefing to the final sign-off, we ensure this brand value is considered at every stage, offering expert insights to help our clients find the simplest, most effective way to bring their digital project to life while ensuring an effortless experience for the end user.

Small changes for a more accessible website

If screen readers, an accessibility tool that converts text into speech or braille, can understand your content, search engines can too. 

By implementing small but powerful changes to your content, like adding alt tags to images and ensuring your colour contrast meets accessibility standards, you’ll not only improve the overall user experience but also expand your site’s reach. We design all our sites to meet AA standards as standard, and where possible, we take this further to meet AAA standards. This ensures your content is accessible to a wider audience, including those using assistive tools, and helps search engines prioritise well-structured, inclusive content.

Mistakes are opportunities for growth

Nobody’s website is ‘perfect’, and yours doesn’t need to be either. But with Google’s ever-changing updates, constant shifts in user behaviour and rising online expectations, staying ahead is all about adaptability and consistent efforts.

The good news? The most common digital challenges can all be fixed effectively when you know where to look. Here are a few quick wins that can instantly improve your website’s performance:

• Keyword stuffing- Implementing keywords into your copy is great for SEO, but it’s easy to overdo it. For the best results, aim for top-ranking keywords to make up 1-2% of your content, keeping it authentic and engaging while improving visibility and performance.
• Unclear CTAs- Your content has a purpose. Make sure people know what to do next with that information with clear, actionable CTAs like 'Get in touch today' or 'Sign up for our newsletter'. By keeping it simple and direct, you'll drive higher engagement, boost conversions, and deliver stronger results for your business.
• Ignoring image optimisation- A fast website at launch is great, but slow load times will creep back in if you don’t keep up with best practices. Using WebP images instead of PNGs or JPEGs keeps quality high while reducing file size. While also utilising compression plugins and completing regular file size reductions will also help maintain speed, ensuring your site keeps running smoothly, improving user experience and boosting rankings by increasing engagement.
• Broken links and 404 errors- Regular maintenance of your website can make all the difference when addressing broken links and 404 errors. We include custom 404 pages with clear CTAs. This ensures that if a user lands on a missing page, they’re seamlessly directed back to relevant pages of the site. By regularly checking for these issues and fixing them promptly, you'll improve navigation, enhance user satisfaction and boost rankings.

So, there you have it. Optimising for both UX and SEO can be as simple or as complex as you make it. But by implementing even a few quick wins, you can expect to see lower bounce rates, higher engagement, and an increase in organic traffic over time. Or if you develop it further, your website will continue to grow and work as a sales tool for you.

Great UX and SEO work hand in hand. One brings users in and the other keeps them engaged. Perfect both, and you’re not just ranking highly, you’re building an experience people truly enjoy.

Curious to see how your website’s UX and SEO measure up? Let’s talk.