Usability

User-friendliness is a term you often hear when dealing with SEO. What exactly is it? We will discuss what it entails and why it is important for your website’s SEO.
Meaning of usability
Usability is the degree to which your website is pleasant to use for the visitor. It is nothing more than ensuring that the visitor’s user experience is as optimal as possible.
While optimizing your website for SEO, you need to keep the end user in mind. If you only optimize for Google, it will not have a good effect on the usability of your website. If you make your keyword appear 30 times on a page for Google, this is detrimental to the visitor. (1)
Since larger updates from Google, such as Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird, the focus has been on the actual usability of your website. Therefore, optimizing your website for Google is not the point. Then you quickly fall through the cracks.
Usability of your website
Websites that are user-friendly and fulfill the needs of your visitors rank higher in Google among organic search results. Therefore, usability is not an additional factor, but takes a starring role in your SEO.
Your job is to analyze and really understand the behavior of your visitors. Only with this information can you address your website’s pain points.
So how should it be done? There are a number of points to consider while making your website user-friendly for the visitor.
- Keyword research: the starting point of all online marketing. The outcomes determine navigation, site structure to blog posts. Find out how your visitors move around your site.
- The visitor’s search intent. The goal is to provide the right answers to your target audience. To achieve this, you need to understand the intent behind the search as well as possible. There is a difference in someone searching for a beginner looking for what SEO is, and someone looking for an article about a Google update.
- Meta title: make sure your meta title is concise. The searcher wants a good idea of what’s on your landing page. The chances of the searcher clicking on your result are higher.
- Meta description: the short description below your search result should be as relevant as possible to the searcher. Therefore, make sure it gives a clear picture of your web page.
User-friendliness of the mobile website
More and more consumers are buying through their cell phones. The more accessible your website is, the sooner the customer will proceed to purchase.
Make sure your mobile site is optimized. This is crucial for usability. This is because when visitors have a positive experience on your mobile site, they are more likely to return.
Google crawls the mobile version of your website first. All the more reason to optimize your mobile website.(2)
Your mobile website is crucial for bringing in new customers. Understand the difference between types of mobile sites. There is a fundamental difference between a tablet and a smartphone. Tablets are used for entertainment on the go. Phones are more likely to be used for communication and information gathering. You should keep this difference in mind while creating your mobile website.
How do you test the usability of your mobile site? You do that through Google Search Console.
Optimizing your website’s usability, along with other factors, will help your website rank higher in Google.
User-friendliness website testing
There is always room for improvement. To optimize the usability of your website, keep testing. When you make a change, it can often be even better.
You measure the usability of your website with Google Search Console. All you have to do is link your URL in the program. From this follows an analysis of various points such as loading speed of your website.
Want to rank high in Google? Then you must continually want to get the best out of your website. Winners in Google never stop improving.
- Hanak, A., & Hanak, A. (2023, Dec. 18). How to make a User-Friendly Website [As told by design experts]. Digital Silk. https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/how-to-make-user-friendly-website
- HTML Responsive Web design. (s.d.). https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Usability?
Usability says something about how pleasing your product or website is to the user. When something is very user-friendly, we also talk about a very good user experience.
What is the impact of Usability on SEO?
If you are going to optimize your website for SEO, you do need to keep user-friendliness in mind. If your pages are full of certain keywords, you don’t really excel at this. Parties like Google also very clearly take this into account when ranking pages.