UX SEO: How User Experience Impacts Search Engine Rankings

Imagine you’re shopping for a new set of headphones. You know you’d like to upgrade to a wireless set, but you aren’t sure where to start. So you search for “wireless headphones” in Google and click on a promising result.

However, once you land on the webpage, you’re met with slow-loading images, intrusive pop-ups, and an array of options with no way to compare them easily. Frustrated, you exit the page and try a different result. This time, the page has high-quality product images, clear descriptions, and a comparison chart. Within minutes, you end up buying a pair you’re excited about.

This is an example of search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) working together to deliver results. UX focuses on a website’s usability and design, while SEO is the process of improving your site to make it easier to find on search engine results pages. UX SEO ensures a site attracts visitors from search engines, keeps them engaged, and guides them toward conversion.

Learn how UX and SEO work together, including six often-overlooked UX factors that affect SEO.

How do UX and SEO work together?

Good UX affects search rankings. A well-optimized website isn’t just about relevant keywords and search engine rankings—it’s also about usability. Search engine algorithms prioritize websites that are relevant to user queries and of high quality. A user clicking through from the search engine results page (SERP) but immediately leaving sends a bad signal. A user clicking through, visiting multiple pages, and eventually converting sends a good signal, which can result in better search engine visibility.

“All the SEO traffic in the world doesn’t matter if your site isn’t easy and intuitive to shop,” says Kellie Kowalski, head of design at Fuel Made, an agency specializing in ecommerce development, design, growth, and marketing. “You must make a site that both answers the visitor’s question and allows them to convert.”

Search experience optimization (SXO) is about finding the right balance between SEO and UX design to ensure customers from search engines can access the information they’re looking for in an intuitive, effortless way.

6 UX factors affecting SEO

1. Responsive design
2. Core web vitals
3. Accessibility
4. Clear navigation
5. Readability
6. Intrusive ads

UX factors determine how users interact with your website and how search engines rank it.

Here’s a detailed look at six UX factors influencing SEO:

1. Responsive design

Mark Lewis, founder and CEO of ecommerce development and design firm Netalico, cites mobile-friendliness as an important but often ignored part of user experience that affects SEO performance.

Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in search results. Responsive web design automatically adjusts its size for mobile devices, using HTML and CSS to interpret screen sizes and customize the layout, content, and functionality to match. These adjustments include easy-to-read text, tap-friendly buttons, and image stacking.

To ensure your site is optimized for mobile, start the design process with a mobile layout, then iterate for desktop.

“A streamlined design and fast page loads make the mobile experience just as effective on desktop,” Mark says.

2. Core web vitals

Core web vitals are a set of technical factors and UX metrics Google uses to evaluate a website’s usability and performance. Google prioritizes fast and smooth experiences, so achieving high scores for these metrics directly impacts SEO rankings.

There are three core web vital metrics. Here is a closer look at each one, how it affects SEO and UX, and how to improve it:

Largest contentful paint (LCP)

LCP measures the time it takes for the largest visible content, like a headline or image, to load.

“A fast-loading site reduces bounce rates and signals quality to search engines,” says Mark. 

Ideally, your page speed should be less than 2.5 seconds.

If it’s not, here are some ways to improve your LCP score:

• Implement lazy loading, which delays loading images and videos until they come into view on the user’s screen.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN), which stores files (like images) in multiple servers to deliver content quickly to users from a location closest to them.

• Optimize images using a tool like Tinypng to compress files and make them load faster.

Interaction to next paint

This metric is the lag between a user interaction (like clicking a button) and the user completing the action. An ideal score is a response time of less than 100 milliseconds. Otherwise, the experience will feel clunky.

To improve your INP score:

• Reduce the amount of JavaScript on the page.

• Condense third-party scripts using a tool like Google Tag Manager.

Cumulative layout shift

This measures how much a page shifts unexpectedly when loading. For example, an ad may load late and suddenly shift the whole page down, resulting in misclicks. An ideal CLS score is less than 0.1.

To improve your score:

• Set explicit image dimensions so the browser knows how much space to reserve when loading.

• Avoid animations that could affect the layout when loaded, like chat widgets or expanding banners.

You can check your website’s Core Web Vitals score in Google Search Console (GSC) or using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool.

3. Accessibility

Web accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can interact easily with a site.

“Making your site accessible improves user engagement and demonstrates quality standards,” Mark says.

While Google prioritizes accessibility in search results, it’s also a legal requirement.

Some best practices to enhance accessibility include:

• Using contrasting colors

• Including alt text for images

• Adding captions and transcripts to video content

• Ensuring form fields have visible labels

Kellie cautions against using copy like “Click here” for links. Instead, she recommends using descriptive text like “View our summer collection.”

4. Clear navigation

Intuitive navigation means customers can easily find what they’re looking for. This also helps search engines clearly understand how website pages relate to each other, improving indexing and visibility.

With a logical website structure, internal links guide the customer to the page they’re seeking intuitively and effortlessly. For example, footwear and apparel brand Vessi organizes some of its products as follows:

Women > Waterproof shoes > Sneakers

Men > Waterproof apparel & accessories > Jackets

5. Readability

Engaging content usually includes headings, bullets, images, and other interactive elements, while walls of text can quickly overwhelm users.

“Ensure that your content is easy to read on small screens,” Kellie says. “A banner with three lines of text on desktop may take up 10 lines of text on mobile and quickly create issues with cognitive load.”

For example, you can use a visual comparison chart instead of multiple paragraphs explaining why your coffee grinder is better than your competitors.

6. Intrusive ads

Aggressive pop-ups aren’t just annoying; they can result in ranking penalties since they disrupt the user experience. Although pop-ups aren’t all bad, it’s best to use them discerningly. Ensure they don’t block critical content, and make the exit button easy to find. 

Use trigger time delays so your customer has time to get situated before seeing a pop-up, and be sure it’s relevant to your user journey—like a shipping discount at the cart stage. Pop-ups can also pose a problem for mobile users. Test your mobile pop-up to ensure it doesn’t cover important content and is easy to close.