Sourced from searchenginejournal.com – 30th December, 2015
SEO has advanced light years in just a few years.
With all the complexity and progress, it can be easy to forget some of the fundamentals. Sometimes, I find myself thinking about an advanced content marketing technique, then stop myself, realizing that I’ve just leapfrogged over several crucial building blocks of SEO strategy.
If we’re too quick to rush off to play with the shiny objects of SEO, we risk our entire SEO strategy. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy is a simple one, built on reliable SEO practices that have always worked and will continue to work.
In this article, I share three of those strategies. They’re so simple, you might be surprised. But at the same time, you might be shocked that you’ve overlooked them.
Killer User Experience
Want to have a flawless, streamline, powerful, unbeatable, killer SEO strategy?
Do this: Create the best user experience you possibly can.
Often, UX is viewed as a separate discipline. The UX people don’t talk to the SEO people, who don’t talk to the design people, who don’t talk to the IA people, who don’t talk to the developers.
All of SEO is built on the foundation of user experience.
According to Wikipedia, “User Experience (UX) refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service.”
It’s actually a lot more than that.
The Nielsen Norman group explains, “‘User experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
But, it’s actually a bit more narrow than that. SEO plays a crucial role in the process of user experience. But viewed in reverse, user experience serves SEO, too.
You can’t have “good SEO” unless you have a good user experience. Why not?
- To have “good SEO,” you must have great content (a beneficial user experience).
- To have “good SEO,” you must have a functional site (an error-free user experience).
- To have “good SEO,” you must have logical site navigation (an easy user experience).
- To have “good SEO,” you must have relevant keywords (a relevant user experience).
- To have “good SEO,” you must have quality backlinks (a trustworthy user experience).
See the point?
I can keep going, but I think the relationship is clear. Every aspect of SEO, no matter how technical, somehow gets back to producing a great user experience.
User experience is not a single discipline, just as SEO can’t be confined to one narrow slice of marketing. They both encompass a wide swath of marketing practices and function. Nate Dame put it clearly with his Search Engine Land article.
Nate approaches it from a Google-is-a-business-vantage. I totally agree, and I see more than the mere economics of optimization at play. SEO is all about user experience.
When you forget this fundamental concept, you lose touch with the whole point of SEO.
Let’s bring SEO back into the realm of improving the user experience. When you improve user experience, from any vantage, you upgrade your SEO strategy to a whole new level of awesome, and that should all be underpinned by the fundamentals of strategy.