A (not so) long time ago in an office (not so) far away…
It is a period of war. SEO experts, striking from a hidden base, have won their first Internet victory against the UX Empire.
During the battle, SEO experts managed to steal the plans to the UX ultimate weapon, the ‘Think of a Human User First!’ approach, an approach with enough power to help Humans to access more usable websites.
Pursued by the UX experts, a lonely SEO expert races home, custodian of the stolen plans that can save the Internet and restore usability to the websites…
Today, luckily, the situation is different.
SEO and UX used to clashed a lot as the perception was that SEO is just about pleasing search engines (Google) and as a result, it interferes with and negatively impacts customer experience. Often, the result of attending an SEO Copyriting workshop or reading some SEO advice online was a web copy that was impossible to read as it was clearly written for search engines, not humans.
While “Write for humans, not search engines!” was a compulsory warning in every SEO presentation – in reality, the outcome was often terrible – a copy written just for Google.
In the early days, Google wasn’t that great in understanding the meanings, correlations between words, so placing specific keyword phrases repeatedly in the web copy (keyword stuffing) worked quite fine.
Luckily, Google has been improving its understanding of languages, terminology, synonyms, keyword correlations, intent/meaning behind search terms.
While it was always possible to (and many copywriters did) write a well optimised web copy that fulfilled the SEO objectives and at the same time sounded great and useful for human visitors – it required a good mix of copywriting skills and a proper understanding of SEO. Unfortunately, it was much easier, cheaper and quicker to write bad copy (often outsourcing this key activity) – simply by stuffing keywords. Sadly, there is still a large amount of low quality content published online and it is still being produced even today.
The war is (almost) over. Today, with Google being smarter than ever before, almost mimicking human level of understanding (soon fully, get the Turing test ready… ), SEO and UX objectives should be aligned.
There are many befits of SEO and UX working together. Both can benefit significantly when aligned.
Customer Research / Insights
User Interviews, Surveys, Observations, etc. give great insights into the minds of customers, both Quantitative & Qualitative. You get quality insights from dozens of people. However also consider that Google has ~ 95% market share in AU, about 90% of the Internet users use Google daily – so using Google data gets you access to 10,000,000+ minds just in Australia.
Google trends, keywords provide highly useful data to better understand your customers, their interests, uncertainties, questions.
IA (Information Architecture) / Content Structure / Navigation
IA plays a key role in SEO – for me it’s in the top 3 key focus areas for SEO success, together with the ‘visible content’ = Web Copy & Title Tags and Backlinks (links from other websites).
So having a well-structured website (IA), good content and quality backlinks – those 3 areas will make a significant difference to your SEO performance.
Google insights provide highly valuable data about user interests and preferred terminology that should be strongly considered when updating or creating IA, content structure, naming conventions, primary & secondary navigation, etc. The card sorting activity can use Google insights as an important input.
Terminology / Copywriting
“Write for humans, however don’t forget to use meaningful expressions.”
A marketing or product copy is often too generic, e.g. ‘…our amazing products and services are designed to help customers improve their businesses like no other in our industry…’, ‘…we are the leading service provider in Australia, servicing our customers for over 50 years and continue developing top solutions that make us the industry leader…’ – you can easily see a half page length web copy that doesn’t have any meaningful, descriptive words and phrases.
Mentioning specific products, services, industries, locations not only helps with SEO, it also helps your potential customers to feel that they arrived to the right place (your site) and that your business offers exactly what they are after.
Customer Journey – addressing customer needs at every stage of their journey
Intent is the key. Customer journey will help to identify the key steps & touch points in the customer journey, together with the key challenges, key feelings, key questions, key thoughts in each of those steps. This important process can significantly benefit from the SEO input – identify what customers are searching for, what questions do they have, what features they care about, what problems do they face, etc….. keyword insights provide invaluable input when developing a Customer journey.
Example: “what ram do I need for new laptop?”, “what is a difference between A and B?, “how do I choose a TV” – some websites do a great job in addressing this – Harvey Norman, Bing Lee – by including a prominent section/content e.g. guides to help you to buy a TV, nicely integrated with the product content.
This approach not only helps when mapping out the customer journey (UX), it also significantly improves SEO performance (via relevant, meaningful content) = content rich page that addresses people’s needs, …not to mention attracting natural backlinks as an additional (massive) SEO benefit..
ML & AI
These days one needs to mention AI and Machine Learning (ML) when talking about almost any topic to sound progressive, cool and as a total expert. So here we go… Actually, in this topic, this is really applicable, so here we go…
Initially, Google’s understanding of relationships between keywords wasn’t that great and was focused on exactly matching words, e.g. this is your search term, here are websites that have those keywords…
Enter ML (and a ‘real’ AI… one day). Google’s algorithm/s teaching itself/themselves to be better at recognising what you are looking for, the intent, so it does not give you just a list of relevant websites, but rather addresses your need, providing you with results that give you information you are really after.
Images – let’s go back in time, again. Years ago, I used to compare Google Bot to a visually impaired visitor – the W3C accessibility guidelines for visually impaired site visitors and the Google SEO guidelines were quite similar. E.g. simply disabling images on a website that was full of images with text embedded in them resulted in almost blank pages, invisible to Google bot.
Let’s play a bit (=speculation) with the topic of Image recognition – today, Google is really great in identifying images. Looking at the Google photos (Pixel) categorisation – Google identifies and categorises images based on what’s on them – you’ll get ‘mountains’, ‘table tennis’, ‘ZOO’, birthdays’ folders auto-generated. So, can quality/descriptive images directly and significantly contribute to page’s keyword relevancy? Google is able to associate the content of an image with the keywords or better said… with the meaning.
Maybe this will make it easier / provide more flexibility when designing websites – to make them visually appealing while also benefiting our SEO.
So what the future holds? Google will continue to improve its understanding of content, the meaning behind search queries, increasing the usage of ML to train its algorithm (let its algorithm to train itself) and getting closer and closer the human level of understanding and even beyond.
To conclude: “Build websites for Humans to improve your SEO and save the (online) world!”