SEO and UX = SXO, the best strategy in growth marketing

The evolution in algorithms is unstoppable. SEO practices require specialists to adapt to changes in less than a month to provide the best and quality results that search engines need to rank our sites.

 

Keys to good UX to benefit your SEO:

• Practice observation. Investigate, perform manual searches, and understand how others do it to hit the search intent and offer unique and quality content.
• Integrate a UX Writer with an SEO to design website improvements with words and, in the process, optimize the semantic structure with the analyzed search intent.
• Technical aspects like loading speed will continue to be essential to provide a good user experience and site health.

What is SEO and UX?

SEO is the set of techniques and strategies that allow optimizing a digital asset, be it a website, an ecommerce, a marketplace, or landing pages. While UX is defined as the experience a user has when navigating and interacting with said digital asset.

 

Both are concepts and teams that complement each other but one doesn’t necessarily know about the other.

 

Learn how at Asylum we have managed to integrate with agile methodologies, generating results that impact improving conversions on our global clients’ sites. You may be interested in learning about success stories.

 

Why is SEO and UX important in a web project?

These are knowledge areas that complement each other because if you work on them separately, you have to decide whether to have an optimized site with a not-so-assertive user experience for the target audience or a site with a good browsing experience without good practices to rank on search engines.

 

That’s why it’s important to consider these two digital products that will help you grow in:

• Site visibility.
• Quality traffic on different acquisition channels.
• A digital asset that responds to search intentions from information architecture and original content.
• Assertiveness with points analyzed from the empathy map that will make your users return and use your digital asset.

 

What does it mean to be an SEO?

To be an SEO, keep in mind the following skills:

1. Overthink. Be able to visualize possible scenarios from which our users can perform a search and the format that facilitates information retention. This is supported by research on platforms like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
2. Detach. Develop communication skills to handle different ways of working. In SEO, nothing is linear; everything is part of a process of adoption and adaptation to teams.
3. Present your ideas. Achieve presenting the value of your proposals through visual aids that allow teams to understand the brand’s pain and how we can solve it. You can use platforms like Miro and Flowchart for support.
4. Know when to ask. SEO is a curious career. The best advice is always to anticipate your requests and streamline processes with other teams that are learning from your role.
5. Create complex work systems. Have the ability and patience to organize large volumes of work and prioritize each task, taking into account your ability and that of your team to execute them, and for this, it is important to learn to handle Excel.
6. Anticipate the future. Go beyond not only in your proposals but dedicate time to your continuous learning, research new technologies, and applications.

 

Regarding technical skills, you should consider the following learning paths:

1. Web development for understanding Technical SEO. Know about HTML semantics, CSS styles, and programming languages ​​like JavaScript and frameworks like React and Node. Focus on the front-end for greater growth opportunities with development teams.
2. Writing for Content SEO. Study grammatical and inclusive rules for web content writing. Be closely related to these formats, consume them, and innovate in them.
3. Research for On-page SEO. These techniques combine technical and content knowledge. It requires more years of training and practice.
   
   From this point, career plans are defined for SEO Specialists, embarking on a path towards strategic SEO as decision-makers.
4. Organic positioning at a large scale. After acquiring the aforementioned skills, you learn to scale SEO strategies to another level by applying link-building strategies focused on business growth and site authority on the internet.

How is SEO applied in a digital strategy with UX?

For projects of creation and restructuring of digital assets, it is applied as follows:

1. From the briefing stage, the understanding of the business model and brand for project development is carried out. Each role asks the client questions to understand pain points.
   You may be interested in reading more about the search engine positioning brief.
2. SEO specialists start with keyword research and a previous investigation of the brand’s direct competitors. Parallel to this action, the UX design team is conducting a heuristic analysis of the site to understand the main needs that can be improved.
3. The SEO and UX teams meet to define the information architecture and site structure thanks to keyword research and understanding of search intentions related to those keywords.
4. Therefore, the development of SEO content on a website, ecommerce, or any platform becomes important from the beginning and not at the end of the process.

5 UX tips to improve your SEO

As a result of the above, here are the following tips for you to work on a good user experience that benefits your business’s SEO:

1. Information architecture aimed at answering search intentions

Optimize your root content with defined main pages and the search categories or topics that will allow you to have greater visibility in search results.

Define headings based on a main keyword for each page path of the site to achieve quality and well-structured content considering keyword research and search intent.

2. Take care of structure and navigation

A good structure must be clear, useful, and intuitive for the user, in addition to having visual interactions that allow the target user to feel identified and achieve the goal we want: fill out a form, direct them to a CTA (call to action) that allows them to learn more about a service or reference, legal notices, etc.

3. Make a good responsive

Designing for all devices, prioritizing those used by our analyzed target user, will contribute more value to our digital products.

Therefore, it benefits both UX and SEO to create a good experience, usability, and accessibility for our visitors by planning how the interaction will be on multi-devices, also taking care of the loading speed for each of them.

4. Analyze user behavior

After delivering the product, do not detach from the project. Provide a one to three-month service to understand how much the user experience improved with the changes made and the impact it had on them to discover the pains they are experiencing when interacting with the digital asset.

 

That’s why you should analyze the dwell time and bounce rate percentage compared to the report of pages and screens visited, destinations, and goals fulfilled defined in the analytics platform you decide to use.

5. Create MVPs of improvements and new digital assets

Before making decisions, learn to generate A/B tests that allow you to evaluate user behavior and evaluate search intent for both bots and humans.

Learn more about agile methodologies in growth marketing that you can apply to create a complete MVP with UX and SEO.