SEO and UX are no longer siloed practices. Search engines are prioritizing user-centric experiences, making UX optimization a critical component of any SEO strategy. Beyond just a basic guide to how UX affects SEO, we’re going to dive into the technical aspects of UX that directly and indirectly influence search rankings.
Understand these user behavior signals
Google utilizes various user behavior signals to gauge a website’s UX quality. Here’s how these signals impact SEO:
- Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a set of metrics that measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Google incorporates CWV directly into its ranking algorithm. Optimizing for these metrics improves both UX and SEO.
- Time to Interactive (TTI): Time to Interactive (TTI) was a metric used to measure how long it takes a webpage to become fully responsive and usable for a visitor. However, it wasn’t very reliable. Because of this, TTI was removed from Lighthouse, a popular tool for website performance testing.
There are now better metrics to use: