The Role of UX in Local SEO

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What is UX?

Which was the app you last used, and how did you feel while using it?
You probably don’t remember the answer to the latter part of the question. And that is a good thing. It means the UX or the user experience for the app is good. So, coming back to the question, UX is how a customer interacts with a business. It can be an app, a product, or even a service offered by a business.
The crux of the matter is how easily the users could interact, how they felt, and how the experience influenced them.
To give an example, if you need a lot of guidance and tutorials to start using an app, it means the UX is not good. The smoother the experience of using a product or an app, the better is the UX.
When you search for rooms on OYO website, it will ease you with option like near me, city name, and other option to select from including the available dates.
Similarly, when you visit a hotel, the kind of service you receive would affect your experience of staying there. Regardless of how much it costs, what matters is how you felt. That is what UX is all about.
UX is so relevant in the context of all kinds of businesses today that there is a new field of UX designing. UX designing deals only with maximizing positive user experience through design techniques.
The whole point of UX design is to create an environment of ease for users, especially for local businesses. The goal is to make the experience of using an app or a product as smooth, enjoyable, and easy as possible.

Importance of UX

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Why Do You Need a UX Design?

The simplest answer is because it is a consumer-driven world now. People are impatient nowadays, and they have very little patience. They want the best for the money they spend. And, with so many options available, why should they settle for anything less than the best?
Just think about this. There are tens and hundreds of businesses offering the same product or service as you. So, why should people choose you over others?
Although there are several social media messaging apps, people, often, prefer WhatsApp over others. You know the reason why.
Yes, the brand name, quality, price, these things matter too. But when the competition is among hundreds, there will be at least a couple more companies offering the same things as you.
What makes a difference in such a scenario is UX. The experience your customers have when they interact with your local business. If you can offer a more positive and overall better user experience, they will always choose you over your competitors.
It is all about the added benefits you provide your customers as a business. If people feel good interacting with your app or product or service, they will keep coming back to it. They will also recommend it to their acquaintances, and this is what makes UX design so important.
For this reason, even big names like Apple, Google, and Amazon are spending billions of dollars on UX design. They too are trying to improve the experience for their users continuously.

UX & Its Effect on Local SEO Rankings

Every business focuses on providing the best user experience to users. Search engines are no exceptions as they strive to better the user experience. Search engines now rank websites keeping into account not only the content but user experience too.
There are thousands of websites, and it is not easy to rank the best one among them. Hence, search engines have updated their process to become stricter, better, and more user-friendly. It is not just about the content anymore because search engines now look at several other factors for ranking a website.
User experience now ranks high on the list of what makes a great website for getting a high local ranking on search engines. If you are optimizing your website for local SEO, it is not just about keywords and backlinks anymore. Your ranking on search engines would also depend on how your website scores on UX.

• Is your website user-friendly and secured?
• Do all the pages load fast?
• Is it easy to navigate through the website?

These are a few of the questions you need to address to ensure your website SEO is good. If you want to rank high on search engines, your website should not only be rich with good content. You also need to ensure that its UX design is great.
UX design for a website, therefore, contributes a lot to make your website stand out and attract traffic. From making your business website look good and making it user friendly, to improving local SEO, UX design does it all.

How to Score High on UX?

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The job of UX designers is to keep experimenting to come up with new ways of improving user experience. Some of the ways to score high on UX design are:

1. Focus on Design & Attract Users

The biggest scorer for UX is the design. Beautiful artistic layouts can go a long way when it comes to designing a website. But the design also needs to be simple. You have to layout the information and content in such a way that it is easy for the users to decipher and digest.
One of the best ways to maximize a positive user experience for users visiting your website is to incorporate white space into the design. Some may think that white space is a wastage, but it contributes to the aesthetics of your website.
Did you know that white space around texts increases user attention by 20%?
For instance, even though Forbes gets millions of traffic, they don’t forget to give each content space.
However, you also need to incorporate ads into your website to maximize your profit. The trick is to find a balance. Good UX design will make sure that you utilize the white space smartly to maximize profit as well as a positive user experience.
Other UX designs you need to consider are using bullets to break up long texts, using headlines that are appealing and is relevant to the content. You must also use original, pleasing images wherever possible.
There are more to UX designing, but using the above would make even a basic website resonate positively with users.

2. Simplify Navigation & Remove Unnecessary Options

All your hard work in designing an aesthetically pleasing layout will be in vain if you do not take care of the navigation. Just think about it, you come across a website, and it looks so wonderful that you want to explore further. But you cannot locate the other pages on the website.
For instance, here’s a simple navigation bar that allows users to land onto the page they wish quickly.
There are no clear shortcuts or buttons to lead you to other content on the website that you would like to access. How long will you spend trying to navigate through such a website?
Yes, UX design should not only be about how good the website looks but also how easy it is to use. Simplified navigation amplifies a positive user experience.
That is the reason it also contributes to local SEO because search engines take ease of navigation into account when ranking websites.
Search engines will crawl your website to see how easy it is to browse through the pages, if links are leading from one to another, and will give you a ranking based on that. So, simplifying the navigation of your website should be at the very top of your UX design must-do list.

3. Optimize Your Site & Make it Load Fast

People nowadays are impatient. They demand good service, and they want it fast. No one has the time to sit and wait for a page to load.
How frustrating and annoying can it feel when you want information fast, but you need to wait long for it?
Your users will move away to a different and faster website.
Regardless of how good your website looks and how easy the navigation is, if the pages don’t load fast, it all becomes pointless.
One of the most important parts of UX design is to simplify the website to ensure faster page loading. By using original, high-quality pictures, you can create a beautiful website, but if it increases the load time, it leads to negative UX.
Use content like images, videos, and audios wisely. The reason is that although such content attracts the attention of users, they also slow a page down considerably.
But ensure that images are of high quality. It is okay not to have images on your page than to add a blurry picture below, which annoys the user.
Fast loading is also an important factor that will contribute to your local SEO rankings.
You can check your loading speed on Google page speed insights or GTmetrics. Here’s how long a website page takes to load (12s). This creates a negative user experience.
Search engines look at how fast your website loads to ensure maximum positive user experience. Hence, you have to make sure that your UX design balances the aesthetics and load time of the website.
A good UX design will consist of a simple layout that is easy to navigate. It should also have content that is rich with information. The website should be a pleasure to browse with pages that load fast.

4. Create a Mobile-friendly Website & Make it Compatible For All Devices

It is important to optimize your website such that users can browse it from any device, especially smartphones. You never know from which device your traffic is coming to your website. Good UX design will optimize websites to be viewed equally well from any device.
Most people nowadays browse websites on their smartphones and not laptops or desktops.
Here’s a fun fact survey conducted by BCG on smartphone users which says optimizing mobile websites is crucial.
Make sure your websites UX design is user-friendly to score well on local SEO rankings.
Users should find it easy to browse from their mobile phones. Else, people will stop visiting your website, and you will lose valuable traffic.
Being mobile-friendly is also necessary for local rankings. Search engines like Google penalize a website for the lack of mobile optimization. And, this makes it even more crucial for the UX design of websites not to be device-specific.

5. Use Proper Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons

It is common knowledge that you need to have CTA buttons to prompt your audiences to take the action that you would like them to. But did you know that a lot of things go behind UX designing a proper CTA button?
For instance, the use of colours can have an impact on the number of clicks on your website’s CTA buttons.
You can use different kinds of colours to invoke different kinds of actions in users. While designing your CTA buttons, consider what kind of action you are trying to invoke and ensure your UX design follows that.
Another important point to consider is the words you use for your CTA buttons. The words you use should not only encourage but excite the users to take action. The words should incite emotional identification in the minds of the visitors to your website.
This is why most software includes “TRY FREE” as their prime CTA option. Mailchimp has used the “Try for Free” CTA on their homepage.
Use action-oriented and time-sensitive words like ‘Get started’ or ‘Sign up now’ wisely. Such words will help to guide users to move forward and take action immediately.

6. Be Careful of 404s

Another website issue that annoys users after slow page loading is encountering a 404 error. This error occurs when a page is not found.
Search engines will not penalize you for a 404 error, and hence Google will not harm your local rankings either. But if your users encounter such an error on your website, they will stop browsing your website and move away to a different one.
Your website UX design should ensure that all the pages that are linked to each other are working and running. It ensures that a user’s journey through your website doesn’t get disrupted and the visitors stay on your website for a longer time.
If you have to remove a page that makes it essential that a user encounters 404 for a short while, make sure your UX design allows them to go back. And, then lead them towards embarking on a different path towards the same content destination they are looking for.
Continuously keep checking for 404 errors on your website design.
Use any SEO tool or a free Check My Links Chrome extension to see if your page has 404 pages. It will highlight the 404 in red color and indicate the number of invalid links.
Ensure that there is an absence or occurrence of as few 404 errors as possible.

Final Words

UX design is incredibly important in today’s business context.
Make it look attractive with images like Pixabay or enticing text to let users engage with your web page for a longer time.
Websites must look good, load faster, be rich in content, should be easy to navigate, and should be all-device-friendly.
The trick is to find a balance that allows all the above to be present and make a positive impact on the users. Maximizing a positive user experience is a priority for every business now, and if you are not investing in it, you are digging a grave for yourself.
By this time, you would have understood the importance of UX for your website. Drop your details to improve your UX and get the best Local SEO done for your website.