Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 09.07.2025

Introduction

Many agencies are increasingly discussing backlinks and content marketing, which are essential SEO ranking factors. What this means is that, if you want your business to rank on the top page of Google, you will need links, well-written blog posts, and other key elements.

However, with that said, what many agencies discuss much less is the UX of a website.

UX, for those that don’t know, stands for “user experience”.

The reason we believe many SEO agencies don’t discuss UX and how it can improve a company’s search engine optimisation is often that they may think it’s more closely related to web design.

However, as any good agency will tell you, a good website, combined with effective on-page search engine optimisation, needs to work hand in hand.

 

A good UX can offer the following benefits:

• Higher dwell times
• Reduced bounce rates
• Increased conversions

In this article, we’re going to walk through several ways you can improve your website’s ranking by improving your business’s user experience.

 

Let’s cover the basics first.

As we aim to write our blog posts for all abilities, let us explain what search engine optimisation and user experience (UX) mean.

Search engine optimisation is an ongoing effort to improve a business’s ranking on Google.

The goal is to increase organic traffic from Google and drive more sales.

Then, UX stands for user experience.

 

U.X is all about making life easier for the customer, helping them navigate the website more easily and sort products more efficiently – you get our drift.

So, we can all recall from experience where we have had to find a product on an e-commerce retailer’s website that was less than user-friendly. I can personally recall an experience of seeing a home item, only to discover that it was out of stock, along with a mass of products that were also out of stock, yet there was no way to sort the items that were in stock. Frustrating.

This can frustrate the customer, that’s if the website doesn’t offer a good user experience.

This is why we say good web design companies and search engine optimisation agencies need to work hand in hand to design a user-friendly website.

 

What exactly does U.X. mean? Why should our business be working on improving this?

U.X is all about reducing friction in the buying process and minimising stress for the customer.

It’s all about creating a pleasant shopping experience, not just so that the customer finds it easy to buy a product from you right now, but so that they become a returning customer.

 

How do you achieve this?

– Main navigation should be easy to use and have a logical layout
– The site speed should be fast
– You should offer good product descriptions
– You should incorporate a good FAQ so that the customer can have their questions answered
– You should help the customer to sort products, such as by whether they are in stock, price and other factors, such as brand, for example:

 

Expert tip: Ryan Walsh says:

You should put yourself in your customers’ shoes from time to time, plus ask family and friends to act as customers on your website and pretend to buy products. This can help you spot areas in the website’s design and the buying journey that you can improve. It could be something as simple as reorganising where pages are placed on the mobile menu. However, this could reduce bounce rates, improve dwell times and help to improve conversions.

 

 

Why U.X. is a bit like an airport

When you go on holidays, airports are carefully designed to take you from A to B as efficiently and as effortlessly as possible. Think about those belts that you walk on to take you somewhere even quicker: well-thought-out and clear-to-understand signage, plus a design meant to get you to your terminal as quickly as possible.

This mindset needs to be adopted in conjunction with effective web design and SEO.

Your user experience, therefore, is the process of guiding a shopper from a landing page to the right product pages as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

Reduce the work for customers, make it easier for them to find what they want, and your business will sell more products.
It is as simple as that.

In theory, it sounds like a piece of cake; however, some British businesses spend millions improving their UX every single year. This is why your business should take improving your UX seriously.

Therefore, all online businesses should take note of this. The reason is that if you have something that may annoy customers, this could be costing you sales while also increasing your company’s bounce rate.

Having a sustained and very high bounce rate will ultimately also damage your company’s organic search engine optimisation.

The reason is that Google RankBrain, the AI used by Google, will notice that your website has a sustained high bounce rate.

If this bounce rate is much higher than the competition, and that’s sustained for an extended period, this is likely to cause your organic rankings to suffer.

Therefore, work closely with your web design team, check the pages using your Google Analytics account that have a high bounce rate.

Then, use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track all the pages with a high bounce rate.

You then set about with your web design team, devising a way to reduce the bounce rate and improve the website’s user experience.

This could be as simple as overhauling the main menu, trying to replicate a similar style to that of a leading competitor’s main menu.

This can then be used to determine, via A/B testing, whether it dramatically reduces the bounce rate or not.

 

What exactly does the A/B testing mean?

But what is it?

Well, A/B testing is a gradual process of making incremental changes to a website’s design.

Sometimes it could be something as small as changing the colour of a button on the main menu from black to grey.

Now, this change might sound like a waste of time to some.

However, if you’re running a multi-million or billion-dollar e-commerce website, these are the times of incremental changes they’re making to their web design to improve sales. Then the team uses A/B testing to see which option customers prefer.

It may be that the A/B testing could show, for example, that the colour used on the main buttons on the main menu has helped increase sales by over 1%.

This will then demonstrate that web designers need to implement this change to enhance the website’s user experience.

 

When improving a business’s UX, what aspects should we focus on?

When designing any website, app, or mobile version of a website, you must carefully consider how the business will offer a good user experience.

For example, will you make it an absolute breeze for customers to find the products or services they want?

How can you design the website in a way that makes it extremely helpful?

How can you design the entire website to make it an enjoyable experience when purchasing a product from you?

For example, do you have the functionality to save a credit card record, just in case the customer wants to make a repeat purchase?
These are some of the questions that a UX web designer and SEO agency should be asking:

 

Website structure

How should the website be structured?

Quite often, some websites are built and designed so that the whole website is a one-page website.

Now, this might be easier for the website designers, but it’s not a good idea from a search engine optimisation perspective.

The reason is that often to optimise different products and services, you need to have a different URL extension, alt text, meta titles, and content marketing.

Therefore, shoppers usually don’t want to land on a website where all your business services are merged, as this can be off-putting for the customer, as they may have to wade through a lot of products all jumbled together before finding the service they want.
From a user experience perspective, we believe it is better to present your company’s various services and products on dedicated pages.

 

Why is UX important?

Providing a good user experience (UX) can mean the difference between success and failure for a business.

 

 

If customers like using your website, they will stay on the page for longer, helping to increase dwell times.

If dwell times are increased, the bounce rate is reduced.

Google’s algorithm will notice that your website is engaging customers for an extended period; therefore, they must be interested in your business and the products you are selling.

 

How can improving a website’s UX improve the company’s SEO?

Having a well-designed website that offers a good user experience (UX) can positively impact your SEO in many ways.

For example, if your website offers a good UX, the following can occur: the dwell times increase, and you may obtain more sales, which marketing companies refer to as higher conversion rates.

You may also reduce the bounce rate.

Because you’ve offered the customer an enjoyable shopping experience, they may also return and purchase more items from you.
So, let’s explore each point in some more detail now:

 

What are dwell times?

Dwell time, also known as time on site, refers to the amount of time a shopper spends on your website.

For example, the longer they stay on your website, the more it indicates that the shopper is more interested in what your business offers or the information your company provides about a product or service.

Marketing companies believe that websites with higher dwell times tend to rank higher in Google search results.

Some leading SEO companies believe that now, because we are moving into an era of “Google AI Mode, what is happening is that user experience signals, such as dwell times, are going to become a more critical ranking factor.

Now this makes sense.

As AI mode is currently being rolled out, it’s only logical that the artificial intelligence being used will learn through machine learning, ranking businesses higher that have higher dwell times.

These are then placed higher, or ranked higher, in Google’s results.

 

Higher conversion rates

If your website offers a good user experience, you are likely to spend more time on it.

For example, if the blog posts are helpful, if each product has well-written product descriptions, and the content marketing helps shoppers find the right product, then this can result in much higher conversion rates.

Compare this to websites that offer a poor user experience, such as duplicated text, slow loading, and a lack of helpful advice; then the conversion rates will be low.

There was also a major Google update, called the “Google Helpful Content Update.”

This was an essential update because businesses that published helpful content marketing would be rewarded with that content being ranked higher in Google’s results pages.

Therefore, by spending the time to write helpful content marketing, you can increase your business’s conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and also, because of Google’s Helpful Content update, your business can be ranked higher within Google’s organic’s SERP’s.

Therefore, the bottom line is that if your business wants to rank high on Google organically, your website needs to be well-designed, which means offering a good user experience.

 

Reduced bounce rates

By offering a good user experience, such as having a staff member explain the benefits of a product via an embedded YouTube video, this can significantly help improve dwell times and reduce bounce rates.

Whether that’s to help sell a washing machine or a hypercar, your marketing team needs to think of ways to reduce bounce rates.

Backlinks are described as “the currency of the web”, meaning that if your business has a lot of good quality links, usually your website would be ranked much higher on Google.

Now, backlinks are still essential, don’t get us wrong, at the time of writing, many SEO agencies believe that links are still Google’s most important ranking factor.

However, as we mentioned earlier, as we move into this era of Google AI, we believe the businesses that will rank higher, much higher on Google, will be the websites that offer a good user experience.
Could we see U.X signals, such as dwell times, becoming the most important ranking factor in 2026? We think so.

Increase in return business.

Many people return to large online retailers because their websites are so well-designed that they offer a good user experience.

They provide a good user experience, so shoppers know that when they return to buy another item, they can generally do so with ease and make a quick payment.

Because the item can be bought so easily, this is what generates repeat business for the company.

 

Keyword research and good UX

Offering a good UX starts with making your company website easy to find.

For example, you want customers to land on the right page, find the exact product they want, and make a purchase swiftly.

Offering a good user experience starts with effective keyword research.

Find out exactly which keywords you want to optimise your company website for.

We recommend using Google Search Console, as well as Ahrefs.

Moz Pro also offers a free trial, and in our opinion, the Moz SEO tools are excellent.

Then you need to add good on-page SEO, that’s after you know which keywords you are optimising the page for.

This will help shoppers find and land on product pages, which could be the exact product they are looking for.
So, please ensure that you make it crystal clear what products are being sold on that page. Make this clear by optimising the following:

– URL slug
– The page title
– The meta description
– The alt text
– The product description
– The H1-H6 tag
– The anchor text
– The internal links
– Optimise all of these in a white hat way

 

Walsh & Partners

Walsh & Partners is a Cardiff SEO business. We can help you get your company to the top of Google’s search results. Monthly retainers start from just £1000.00.

 

Call us today for more information.