UX, Content Quality, and SEO

Editor's note: Today we're featuring back-to-back episodes of Whiteboard Friday from our friends at Stone Temple Consulting. Make sure to also check out the first episode, "Becoming Better SEO Scientists" from Mark Traphagen.

User experience and the quality of your content have an incredibly broad impact on your SEO efforts. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Stone Temple's Eric Enge shows you how paying attention to your users can benefit your position in the SERPs.

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Video transcription

Hi, Mozzers. I'm Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. Today I want to talk to you about one of the most underappreciated aspects of SEO, and that is the interaction between user experience, content quality, and your SEO rankings and traffic.

I'm going to take you through a little history first. You know, we all know about the Panda algorithm update that came out in February 23, 2011, and of course more recently we have the search quality update that came out in May 19, 2015. Our Panda friend had 27 different updates that we know of along the way. So a lot of stuff has gone on, but we need to realize that that is not where it all started.

The link algorithm from the very beginning was about search quality. Links allowed Google to have an algorithm that gave better results than the other search engines of their day, which were dependent on keywords. These things however, that I've just talked about, are still just the tip of the iceberg. Google goes a lot deeper than that, and I want to walk you through the different things that it does.

So consider for a moment, you have someone search on the phrase "men's shoes" and they come to your website.

What is that they want when they come to your website? Do they want sneakers, sandals, dress shoes? Well, those are sort of the obvious things that they might want. But you need to think a little bit more about what the user really wants to be able to know before they buy from you.

First of all, there has to be a way to buy. By the way, affiliate sites don't have ways to buy. So the line of thinking I'm talking about might not work out so well for affiliate sites and works better for people who can actually sell the product directly. But in addition to a way to buy, they might want a privacy policy. They might want to see an About Us page. They might want to be able to see your phone number. These are all different kinds of things that users look for when they arrive on the pages of your site.

So as we think about this, what is it that we can do to do a better job with our websites? Well, first of all, lose the focus on keywords. Don't get me wrong, keywords haven't gone entirely away. But the pages where we overemphasize one particular keyword over another or related phrases are long gone, and you need to have a broader focus on how you approach things.

User experience is now a big deal. You really need to think about how users are interacting with your page and how that shows your overall page quality. Think about the percent satisfaction. If I send a hundred users to your page from my search engine, how many of those users are going to be happy with the content or the products or everything that they see with your page? You need to think through the big picture. So at the end of the day, this impacts the content on your page to be sure, but a lot more than that it impacts the design, related items that you have on the page.

So let me just give you an example of that. I looked at one page recently that was for a flower site. It was a page about annuals on that site, and that page had no link to their perennials page. Well, okay, a fairly good percentage of people who arrive on a page about annuals are also going to want to have perennials as something they might consider buying. So that page was probably coming across as a poor user experience. So these related items concepts are incredibly important.

Then the links to your page is actually a way to get to some of those related items, and so those are really important as well. What are the related products that you link to?

Finally, really it impacts everything you do with your page design. You need to move past the old-fashioned way of thinking about SEO and into the era of: How am I doing with satisfying all the people who come to the pages of your site?

Thank you, Mozzers. Have a great day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com