Part 3: UX and SEO: KPI Measurability and Optimization of a Product

The previous two posts in this blog series have provided an overview of SEO and design, and the role of the designer in user-centric design and co-design. Finally, we will now address specific measurability and application examples for the implementation of software products.

In this last post, we will first explain crucial search engine specifications and then present tools for measuring UX and SEO data.

UX & UI design tips for relevant SEO specifications

Integrate the primary search term

For each page of a web app, one should define with which primary search term/keyword the respective page should be found.

When dealing with the main keyword, the following standards should be observed:

Always place the primary keyword in the page title
Format page title in HTML as < h1 >.
Place the primary keyword in the URL
Ensure that the entire URL is not too long
Placement of the primary keyword in the meta description
Provide an overview of the page content o in the meta description
Avoid keyword stuffing. a WDF*IDF tool can help with this.

Designing the page architecture in a comprehensible way

Equally important is a clean and understandable web app page structure with as few structural and technical errors as possible.

Important points for a good page architecture are as follows:

Page logic: the website should be built based on a thematic silo structure.
Mobile responsiveness: search engines now penalize pages that are not easy to use for mobile users. (Google Mobilegeddon)
Unique Content: Search engines work to filter out duplicate and irrelevant content. You should therefore avoid unwanted cannibalization of your own content. Plagiarism (such as copying text excerpts from other websites) should be avoided.
Page speed: A fast loading of the page improves the user experience enormously. Design-wise, this can be achieved by avoiding external loading of font files, over-complicated layouts and resource-intensive animations or movies, or by lazy loading.
Avoid dead ends in the user experience (e.g. dead links).

Control user experience with content architecture

It is recommended to have your web app UX thought through with the objective of each individual page being easily and quickly accessible via navigation. In addition, the navigation must be structured in a comprehensible way. This should be reflected in the site map file of the page, preferably in the form of a hierarchical silo structure.

Content architecture methods:

Keep the navigation levels flat
Make the most popular use cases (e.g., search, call, email) quickly accessible
Use clear headings and subheadings
Show industry-standard defined and labeled navigation
Map top categories on the home page
Divide continuous texts into paragraphs. When doing so, a paragraph should not exceed 100 words.
Include multimedia: Content with at least one image significantly outrank content without images.
Use bulleted lists and summaries to provide concise information to readers in a hurry.
Actively include white space

The following components are actively rewarded by search engines:

Table of contents
Breadcrumb navigation
Date display (see Google Caffeine)
Display of authorship
Immediate visibility of main content (content above the fold)
Integration of Schema.org microformats (entities, user reviews, ratings)
Minimum size for buttons
Internal links to related content

Focus on readability

If content is to be conveyed in text form, it is essential that attention is paid to the formal design. This means, for example, that the font size must be in proportion to the screen size and thus to the viewing distance.

Special attention should be paid to the following formal specifications in the UI design:

Well-readable, harmoniously combined fonts.
Adaptive font size in relation to the screen size
In continuous text, a maximum of 50-60 characters per line (CSS example: max-width 60ch)
Line height should be higher on digital devices than on paper
Color highlighting for important content
Sufficiently large color and font contrasts

Since the user’s time is limited, a lot of content is only skimmed. Therefore, the choice of short, concise headlines and key statements is particularly important.

Using measurable SEO data to evaluate UX and usability

SEO and UX design are particularly intertwined when it comes to measuring usability. In design, you can think of many features and optimizations, but ltimately, these must also be positively received by the user.

To find out if UX & UI changes are well received by the user base, and search engines as advocates for users, various UX signals can be measured.

For example, the search engine Google uses the RankBrain subsystem, consisting of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML), in order to be able to include user experience signals in the evaluation of a page.

Measurable and interesting UX signals

Measurable UX signals are:

Dwell time: Dwell time is an indicator of how interesting and engaging the content of the app is.
Pages viewed: The more pages a user views within the web app, the more relevant the respective content appears.
Bounce rate: The bounce rate is an indicator of how relevant the structure and content of the page is to the user’s search intent.
Click-through rate: The click-through rate of a page in the search results is a key indicator for search engines of how relevant the page is for a search term.

Other interesting UX signals are:

Daily Active Users (DAUs): A DAU is a registered user who opens an application at least once within a 24-hour period. The Facebook and Snapchat platforms have made this metric popular.
Average Revenue per User (ARPU): Average revenue per user can also be a UX signal of great importance, even though it is actually a financial metric.

Get readings from lab tests with Google Lighthouse

A simple way to evaluate the usability of your own site is to perform an audit with Google Lighthouse. In Google’s Chrome browser, Lighthouse is integrated into the developer tools.

The tool’s report evaluates your site by the categories “Performance”, “Accessibility”, “Best Practice” and “SEO”.

The values under “Performance” are the so-called Web Vitals. These are KPIs with which Google measures the user experience of websites. With the Web Vitals, Google has established metrics that can be used to quantify the first impression of visitors. The Accessiblity category examines the accessibility of the entire website, and in Best Practices and SEO, the technical structure and semantic markup of the content is examined.

With PWA, Lighthouse also looks at whether the Responsive Website has so-called offline features. In the case of poor mobile Internet access, for example, these functions help to still offer information to the user.

All these evaluations focus on the structure and technical implementation of websites and the semantic preparation of content. Here it already becomes clear that the two professions UX and SEO can only be considered together. Complementary to this, profound knowledge in the technical realization of websites and modern web technologies is needed to achieve 100 percent in a Lighthouse Test.

From May 2021, Google has announced it will to take these criteria highlighted here more into account in its ranking algorithm.

Measuring human reactions with A/B tests

What cannot be measured in Lighthouse is the taste and the visual impression visitors have when they visit a website. The best-known method for measuring human reactions is so-called A/B tests.

In A/B testing, two or more versions of individual elements of a website are tested. For example, two different versions of a button compete against each other. A prediction about a possibly better design is not made in advance. Thus, calls to the web app are distributed evenly between a version with a red button and a second with a blue button. The behavior of the visitors is recorded in relation to a goal, for example, as many clicks on the button as possible. Once the specified number of clicks has been reached, both versions are evaluated against the target and a winner is selected.

If, at the end of the test, the red button was clicked more often than the blue button, the decision is made to keep the red button. The blue design is discarded.

However, these tests only provide statistically reliable results with a sufficiently large test group. How large this must be depends on the type of hypothesis and the number of variants.

The advantage of this method is that it is empirical and unbiased. Facts are generated that are based on the behavior of the visitors.

However, a disadvantage is that it may not be clear why a particular color, font, or layout works better than the other. Consequently, it remains uncertain whether a global or only a local optimum has been achieved. Perhaps the goal could have been achieved even better with the help of a completely new design approach. This is where the prudent design of hypotheses and a sound, advanced assessment of the item to be tested can help. Very complex building blocks such as data tables with filter and search functions can not be tested as a whole in an A/B test.

A/B tests have become an established part of product development and marketing. Companies like Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley companies have made this variant popular.

Amongst available software products supporting A/B testing, well known providers include Google (Optimize 360) and Optimizely.

Optimization using design hypotheses on SEO KPIs: Dwell time, page views, bounce rate and click-through rate.

Along the customer journey of a website, individual stations can be optimized based on SEO KPIs. For example, a blog post would be optimized for the highest possible dwell time. Other goals could be as many page views as possible, as low a bounce rate as possible, and as high a click rate as possible. Of course, the A/B method and the optimization of classic KPIs can be combined.

The SEO KPIs mentioned here are classically evaluated by tracking tools such as Google Analytics. In digital experience platforms such as Adobe Experience Platform, such analyses are also integrated. In addition to commercial providers, the open source tool Matomo has also established itself and is used in many public institutions.

So if the dwell time of the blog post is too low, this KPI is interpreted to mean that the visitor has not read the text completely. Since this assumption is fuzzy, it can be analyzed in parallel to the dwell time whether and how far the visitor has scrolled. If this data is combined and an average is formed over all other blog posts, a tendency to not read the posts can be determined.

Assuming that the text quality is right, a design hypothesis for optimization here would be the following: In order for visitors to actually read the blog posts, the font size as well as the line spacing should be improved (see recommendations under “Focus on readability”).

Such a serious change to a website can hardly be tested with an A/B test. In the best case, a test group is used and a prototype is built for this purpose. If the results are promising, you can think about a partial or complete rollout of the adaptation.

Auswertungsübersicht in Google Analytics

Collecting user surveys and market analysis for optimization on Net Promoter Score

One option that existed long before the Internet was market analysis and user surveys. Consider household goods companies and brands, which began tailoring their products to different target groups as early as about 1900.

One example of this is the pharmacist Dr. August Oetker. He laid the foundation for the Dr. Oetker company as early as 1893 with the development of baking powder, which has since been known by the brand name “Original Backin”. To this day, the marketing focus is on “guaranteed gelatin”. In communicating the branded product, the focus is still very much on the target group of “housewives” and “women with little time who like to bake.

Classic operational data, which were also important back then, are for example:

Rate of orders won
Inventory turnover rate
Financial ratios (e.g. net margin)
Profitability (e.g. ROI)
Employee turnover

Today, additional focus is being placed on experience data:

Customer satisfaction
Purchase intention
Product feedback
Employee engagement
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Brand perception

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that has gained widespread recognition due to its simplicity. The NPS describes the difference between promoters and detractors of a company.

A promoter is a customer who would recommend the company’s product to others.

A detractor is a buyer who would definitely not recommend the product. Consequently, the highest possible NPS is particularly desirable for a company.

One tool that can be used to collect and evaluate this data is SAP Qualtrics.

Include SEO data from off-page optimization

Measurement of backlinks of the own page and those of the competitors

In addition to the so-called on-page factors in search engine optimization discussed so far, off-page factors also play a role that should not be neglected. For example, Google has its origins in the evaluation of interrelational links between individual websites. PageRank, which was invented and patented for this purpose at the time, laid the foundation for the company’s current success.

In the meantime, PageRank has lost some of its relevance, as countless other factors now flow into the evaluation of a website’s ranking. Nevertheless, the links to one’s own page, the so-called backlinks, still play a major role. Especially when competing pages have similarly good on-page factors.

Practical tools to evaluate the backlinks of a page include Ahrefs and Semrush.

Building a large backlink network is achieved mostly with social media marketing, linking to the individual content of the website. In addition, there is a whole range of other creative possibilities. The important thing here is that all communication channels point with their media to individual pages of the website. Thus, one builds up a network, consisting of long and short term backlinks. At the same time, the challenge here is to remain consistent in appearance and tonality. To achieve this, a company’s corporate design must define clear rules.

Drawing conclusions about interests - with the click-through-rate (CTR) of links

Last mentioned, but equally important, is the click-through-rate (CTR). The CTR can be collected for many links. One considers both a button on one’s own page and the clicks on search result pages (SERPS), which direct the visitor to the blog post. The CTR is an important success criterion, especially for elaborate advertising campaigns.

However, the average CTR can vary significantly depending on user interest. Furthermore, the CTR is different in every industry. The stronger the competition on a topic, the lower your own CTR usually is.

The tool with which you can find out and optimize the click rate of your own subpages in Google search results is called Google Search Console.

SEO and UX – A conclusion

Today, search engine optimization and user experience design go hand in hand to make a website successful. In doing so, both professions use common metrics to perform data-driven and continuous optimization.

Neither SEO nor UX can now work without the other. Google ultimately reflected the importance of co-dependence of the two with its new weighting of Web Vitals. With this, the search engine market leader is continuously driving the orientation for websites towards their visitors. Digital products or services, which are to be found over search machines, in the future must focus on the user (Customer Centricity).

However, in order to do justice not only to Google’s Web Vitals, which are very technically oriented KPIs, it is possible to collect further measured values. This makes it possible to better assess visitor behavior and preferences.

Based on this collected data, a variety of hypotheses can be made for optimization. In UX design, “best practice” approaches and design theories are brought together with creative solution approaches to systematically tackle problems along the customer journey.

The environment of the central website is also included in the design. Backlinks to one’s own website are continuously built up in a whole network of communication channels to bring new and old users to one’s own offering.

Of course, SEO and UX design alone do not build a website. Without the appropriate competent technology developers; an editorial team for great content; and marketing experts, the construction and operation of a great website is unthinkable.

In this article, we explicitly addressed the interplay of user experience designs and SEO.