Does UX Play A Crucial Role In Ecommerce SEO?

Search engines are constantly putting their effort into creating value-added experiences for their users.

Recently, Google added page experience as a new category of metrics in May 2021 to promote sites in the search results that offer a better experience. The aim is to help users get relevant and faster results with the best user experience (UX).

Therefore, UX helps to improve your ecommerce store rankings. A well-developed SEO strategy which considers user experience is the key to attract quality traffic to your site.

An ecommerce website that meets all the parameters of the best UX such as optimizing for core web vitals promises customer retention and reduced conversion times, leading to increased sales.

Brands should care about user experience because  88% of online consumers do not return to a site after a poor experience.

Hence, if you are working to improve the experience for your ecommerce site, you are actually improving your ecommerce SEO. In other words, UX directly correlates with ecommerce SEO to offer a positive experience to the customers.

Here are the reasons why UX is crucial in ecommerce SEO:

1. Improves Website Loading Time

While a slow ecommerce website is frustrating and creates a poor image of the band, it also provides the consumers a chance to look for their product somewhere else. Around, 79% of online consumers  stay away from any ecommerce site with performance issues.

Hence, the first step to UX optimization begins from minimizing loading time to the least. It is good for a reason. The latest search engine ranking system is prioritizing sites with minimum loading time.

Most of the leading ecommerce websites have load times less than a second, and this is certainly one of the primary reasons why they rank well in SERP.

The site speed has become a priority for SEO after Google announced that speed is a ranking signal for desktops and a ranking factor for mobile searches. Page speed from 1-3 seconds is considered good. Anything more than 3 seconds will negatively impact your ecommerce SEO strategy.

Therefore, you should choose the best WordPress hosting provider who has faster load times and high uptimes. Here is a quick comparison guide to help you select the best UX UI design companies. Remember, your hosting agency has a crucial role to play in maintaining your website speed.

2. Increases Conversion

If the same product or service is available on different ecommerce sites, people will prefer the one with an easy and attractive user experience. It is a proven fact.

The findings says, the website with great user experience can increase conversion rate upto 400%. Hence, all great ecommerce sites, including Amazon and Ebay can be seen offering the ultimate user experience, while consistently working on it.

SEO and UX both aim to increase conversion. By optimizing usability and accessibility of a website, you can incredibly raise the bar of customer satisfaction. Further, it will minimize the prospects’ reluctance and boost their willingness to buy your products or services.

Videos also play a vital role in improving UX. As WordStream suggests, adding videos on your landing pages improves conversions by around 86%.

As a whole, SEO and UX partnership eases off the way customers interact with the company and leads them till the end of the sales funnel.

3. Builds Brand Loyalty

Social proof is a powerful element for great UX. Most of the successful ecommerce sites use social proof on their homepage as they do not want the customers to search brand’s review somewhere else. This is because the chances are that if they leave once, they might get distracted and never come back again.

Besides, reviews help people trust the brand and make the decision. According to the research, 70% of the people trust a consumer’s opinion posted online, even if they don’t know them.

Hence, adding reviews builds brand loyalty, resulting in more site visits and increased repeated purchases.

Reviews with links indicating the actual origin are also significant in terms of SEO. This is because reviews are counted as fresh content and search engines prefer ranking such sites, especially if reviews come at a frequent rate.

Search engines appreciate relevance, freshness, and links. As a result, all these factors turn the review into an opportunity for improved SEO.

4. Improves Mobile Friendliness

The increasing use of smartphones over the last decade has pushed brands to optimize their sites for mobile phones.

Around  74% of people like returning to a website if it is mobile optimized. For instance, sports website, Lines.com offers landing pages that are easy to use on a mobile device. The site has a high performance score of 98%.

Since people are more active on mobile phones than desktops, a mobile-optimized site encourages them to make the purchase by reducing the friction.

Mobile website optimization can give the much needed boost to your ranking in SERP.

Search engines create their search page based on the user’s behavior. If they are searching from a mobile phone, the search engine will display results that are mobile optimized. This is another way how UX helps ecommerce SEO.  

5. Optimizes Website Navigation

An unattractive design and bad navigation can cause 38% of people to avoid interacting with a website. Keeping the fact in mind, UX design widely focuses on site navigation to take users to the exact page they are looking for. Guiding users to the right page ensures conversion and increased user satisfaction.

SEO professionals also work on website navigation to optimize website crawling. It is one of the most essential ways search engine crawlers find and crawl the page content to dig out the most useful results for the user. Hence, better navigation positively impacts your SERP ranking.

Summary

The ecommerce space is becoming competitive with every passing year. The UX is a helping hand in the development of effective SEO, resulting in a profitable ecommerce business.

UX and SEO have many common goals. Hence, UX when coupled with SEO can create an optimized user experience as well as promise the desired results for both the customer and the brand. Indeed, UX plays a crucial role in ecommerce SEO, ensuring the success of the website.