5 Reasons Why SEO + Marketing UX Need to Join Hands for a Brighter Future
With the arrival of 2022, one of the biggest tasks SEO teams face is having to readjust to Google’s Page Experience algorithm change. The technical aspects of making your site crawlable and discoverable is essential but what about your audience? Is it valuable to them? Google knows people use their search engine to find answers. Visitors want to find the information easily and so, websites need to help them find what they are looking for fast..
From Google’s perspective, it’s not about keyword stuffing or word counts. It’s about providing them rich content and great user experience”
That is why both Marketing UX and SEO need to join forces.
But before we get to that part, we need to understand what each of these disciplines are.
SEO and Marketing UX
The goal of any search engine is to provide visitors with the most relevant and high quality results based on their search queries. In order to rank well, you need to optimize your content/site to be visible among the top search results. This is where SEO comes in.
Often, people assume SEO is all about building content around keywords and using them as much as possible. But, SEO goes beyond that; Here’s what SEO helps you do:
- Creating competitive content seems implied.
- Monitor high traffic keywords
- Monitor and build backlinks
- Diagnose your site with Google Search Console tools
- Get rid of duplicate content
Basically, to ace SEO, you need to pass Google’s tests and quality checks while optimizing your online presence.
Now, what about Marketing UX?
Marketing UX is a process of understanding your prospects needs, desires, and emotional cues and tailoring an experience accordingly. It’s a broad discipline, which includes psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, analysis, behavioural patterns, and much more.
Marketing UX designer focus on:
- Usability
- Visual design
- User testing
- Customer research
Bonus Hint: Once an SEO expert positions and ranks your content on Google, there’s another crucial step to take — engage your audience, find ways to make them stay, and push them to take action. This is where Marketing UX comes into play.
Ultimately, both these disciplines have one thing in common — they’re both aimed at making customers happy.
The goal of SEO is to make the business visible to prospects. Marketing UX influences consumer behaviour. They come together to target and leverage content to optimize your brand perception..
Quoted by Neil Patel;
“Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.”
According to, Rand Fishkin “Mozlow’s hierarchy of SEO needs” show how SEO and user experience merge,
It clearly shows how the SEO team needs to focus on the technical aspects such as crawability, compelling content, keyword optimization, and then move towards creating great user experiences.
SEO practices that influence Marketing UX
Google algorithm takes into consideration over 200 different factors when deciding what to rank a website. The amount of weightage for each of these factors is secretive. As a SEO professional, it is important to know the key factors required for optimization. These factors influence Marketing UX as well.
The following are common SEO practices that influence Marketing UX:
- Headings tags:
Just like how they are important for SEO, they improve readability and bring structure to content. This way readers have an overview of each section and can find what they are looking for with ease. - Image tags:
Studies suggest that people can process visual information faster than text. From an SEO perspective, image tags give you the opportunity to utilize your target keywords. And from a Marketing UX perspective, images are essential for engagement — humans are visual beings and having an image motivates them to engage further.
- Page Speed:
According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
This is a no-brainer. If your prospect can’t see your pages within 2 seconds, your brand loses value. No matter how amazing your page is. Do you remember a time when you waited for a page to load? Remember hitting refresh over and over again and finally leaving frustrated? - Content Length:
Kyle Freeman says, “Most SEO experts have opinions on what constitutes the optimal content length. Some will tell you that “300–500 words are best,” or “2,000 words should be the minimum for a blog,” or claim that they’ve found the “sweet spot” at 1,890 words.”
As mentioned above, the goal for both Marketing UX and SEO is user intent. If a page has in-depth content that can answer user questions it’s valuable to the reader/prospect. Similar to this, other factors such as mobile usability, table of contents, and image optimization have an influence on Marketing UX.
What about Marketing UX? Does it influence SEO?
Marketing UX practices that influence SEO
Just like how SEO practices influence Marketing UX, there are Marketing UX practices that SEO team can utilize such as:
#1 Understand your customers
The sole purpose of user experience is to know your prospects — it helps you develop an understanding of their likes, dislikes, emotional triggers, and motivations. Knowing this, your SEO team can curate content and gain key information about prospects.
#2 Great UX will boost organic rankings
Google’s page experience algorithm says, “We believe that providing information about the quality of a web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit.”
Great UX is focused on building a personalized experience and influences your prospects perception about you. But, more than that, it can impact how search engines view your website’s authority, relevance, and trust.
#3 Web usability
Often, SEO teams do a great job of ranking pages but visitors simply don’t engage with it. One of the major causes of this is website usability.
An article by Emma Labrador, in Oncrawl sums up website usability perfectly:
- Accessible: The more accessible a website is the more crawlable it is
- Useful: UX manages expectations while SEO works on intent of search
- Usable: UX makes a website usable, encouraging returning visits
- Findable: UX drives on-site traffic in complement to SEO on-page traffic
- Credible: UX gives credibility which helps gaining authority
- Desirable: While SEO measures results, UX comes in complement by measuring actions
- Valuable: UX needs to fulfill the visitor’s queries to earn SEO rankings
#4 Navigation and site structure
The core of any website is its navigational structure. People visit your site with an objective, and this is where navigation helps them.
#5 Mobile Usability and Friendly
The Google Mobilegeddon ranking factor clearly states that if your site isn’t mobile friendly, people will not see it.
According to Google, mobile searches overtook desktop searches in 2015 (the percentage of mobile traffic is somewhere between 50.1–99.9%). Then in 2016, general mobile web browsing overtook desktop browsing (51.3% for mobile vs. 48.7% for desktop). Google says this growth will continue in the future.
Marketing UX designers run surveys, experiments, and optimize the page for mobile experience. That way, not only does your page get ranked but it is useful and it’s a great experience for prospects.
SEO+Marketing UX
The #1 question UX needs answers to is, “what are people looking for?” And the answer lies on the SEO team. The SEO team needs to provide the Marketing UX team with information to help them understand user intent, and the level of awareness their prospects have. The Marketing UX team, on the other hand, focuses on website behaviour and tells the SEO team what to optimize. This way the primary objective UX impacts is conversion. Both teams need to collaborate for the other to survive.
If you take a look at the customer journey flow, it clearly shows how UX and SEO should collaborate for better business results.
A popular use case on Marketing UX influence on SEO
Elliott Davidson, talked about how UX improved his impression by 300% within a month after change. The image below shows you a jump in organic traffic.
So what did he do? What did he improve or change?
- Value proposition
- CTA were made prominent
- Hero image. (The image of Google was changed to an image of himself) if you notice he has incorporated a directional cue
- Messaging
These may sound simple but you may only see results if your SEO and Marketing UX teams collaborate efficiently.
Future of SEO is Marketing UX
SEO teams can no longer work in silos. UX practitioners need to collaborate with SEO experts regularly. While SEO experts optimize content based on what prospects search for, UX experts focus on engaging them and ensuring they find what they are looking for.
The future of SEO and UX is clearly Marketing UX — it brings both these forces together and ensures your prospects and business leaders are happy.
Related: What the Heck Is Marketing UX?
