Website usability to improve SEO ranking
Useful, high-quality, relevant content
“Dwell time” is the number of time visitors spends on your website and it can affect SEO ranking. When you provide useful content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website.
Based on this research, content between 2,000 – 2,500 words seems to rank the highest in search engine results.
Although word count doesn’t rule the SEO world, longer content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, include more keywords, incorporate more outbound links, and of course, get people to spend more time reading to increase dwell time.
Page Load Speeds
Both Google and Bing take page-loading speed into account in their website ranking algorithm.
Users may leave your site if they have to wait even just an extra few seconds for each page to load. That would hurt your dwell time, increase your bounce rate and reduce the number of pages viewed – all of which could hurt your SEO ranking.
There are many ways to increase page load speed, some of which include using a caching plug-in, making sure the code is clean and streamlined, optimizing image sizes, reducing the number of plug-ins, and minimizing redirects.
Research has shown that using good-quality images can increase the conversion rate. Properly optimizing your images can help you take advantage of using photos to generate empathy, increase trust, and improve a visitor’s experience without hampering load time which could affect your SEO ranking.
Using Header Tags
Good formatting of your content helps improve the user experience of your website tremendously. It makes readers more willing to spend time reading your content and come back for more, which will ultimately signal your relevancy to search engines.
Proper use of header tags can help break up your content into sections that are easier to read and utilize.
It’s easy to insert header tags in WordPress to improve user experience and improve the SEO ranking of your website.
Search engines also rate keywords in header tags more heavily. By including relevant terms in your header tags, you are also boosting your SEO ranking against those keywords.
Outbound Links
To make your content more useful and relevant, you can link out to authority sites for more in-depth information your readers can use.
Linking out to well-respected authority sites will not only increase the relevancy of your content and the time readers spend on your site but it is also believed to send trust signals to Google and improve SEO ranking.
Use Different Multimedia
Images, videos, slideshows and audio can help enrich the user experience and allow you to deliver information in a way that is most suited to your ideal site visitors. They also act as a signal of quality content to search engines… after all, you have put in the work to make your content look good and interactive.
Video marketing has become an increasingly integral element in driving user engagement and conversion. It’s found that websites using videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate, compared to a 2.9% average on websites that don’t use videos.
Use Different Multimedia
Even if you have a well-educated audience, they probably don’t want to be deciphering a PhD dissertation every time they visit your website and read your content. You don’t want them to give up reading your content and click away because it’s too difficult to digest. Making your content easy to read and understand, helps make it useful to your readers. Some experts also believe that Google takes readability into account when ranking web pages.
Layout and Formatting
When visitors can’t find what they need on a website right away, they most likely leave the site and this contributes to a high bounce rate, low dwell time and a low number of pages viewed.
A well-thought-out site architecture reflected in clear navigation is critical in helping visitors find what they want on your site, accomplish their goals and come back repeatedly (repeated visits can improve SEO ranking.)
A “flat” site architecture not only makes content easier to find, but it can also help improve SEO ranking as it surfaces links of all critical pages making it easier for search engines to crawl the entire site.
Site Architecture and Navigation
Proper formatting and a user-friendly layout can help improve user experience and make your content easy to scan and digest, so your readers will stay on your site longer and consume your website’s information.
Formatting can help dramatically improve a webpage’s usability by making the content easy to read:
- Font size and typography that are easy to read.
- Bold type and colours – sparingly and strategically
- Shorter paragraphs and ample line spacing in between
- Bulleted or numbered lists for clarity.
- Techniques such as sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal windows, and rollover elements to organize content and add interactivity.
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