UX SEO: How User Experience Impacts Search Engine Rankings

User experience (UX) affects more than just what shoppers do once they reach your website. It often plays a role in whether they find your site in the first place. Search engine optimization (SEO) and UX increasingly overlap as search engines determine what pages to display to provide searchers with the best experience. 

Google, for example, recommends “achieving good Core Web Vitals for success in Search.” These metrics measure real-world loading performance, site speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, making UX and user-experience design important considerations when optimizing your site for search. Ecommerce UX also influences whether visitors stay on your site and if they convert into email subscribers, followers, or customers.

Learn how UX and SEO work together, including seven UX factors that can affect search performance. 

How do UX and SEO work together?

SEO is the process of improving a website to increase its search engine visibility, while UX strategies focus on how people interact with and experience a website. Although they have different goals, SEO and UX are closely related: Some qualities that make a site easier to use can also support SEO performance. Search engine algorithms aim to surface useful, high-quality pages, so they consider some aspects of page experience when determining which content to show in results. 

There’s another reason to consider SEO and UX together. SEO traffic has limited value if a poor user experience keeps visitors from accomplishing what they came to do. 

“All the SEO traffic in the world doesn’t matter if your site isn’t easy and intuitive to shop,” says Kellie Kowalski, head of design at Fuel Made, an agency specializing in ecommerce development, SEO web design, growth, and marketing. “You must make a site that both answers the visitor’s question and allows them to convert.”

Bringing these considerations together is known as search experience optimization (SXO). SXO combines SEO and UX design to ensure customers from search engines can access the information they’re looking for in an intuitive, effortless way.

7 UX factors affecting SEO

1. Responsive design
2. Core Web Vitals
3. Accessibility
4. Clear navigation
5. Readability
6. Intrusive ads
7. Website copy and page structure

These seven UX factors can affect SEO in different ways:

1. Responsive design

Mark Lewis, founder and CEO of ecommerce development and design firm Netalico, cites mobile-friendliness as an important but often ignored part of user experience that affects SEO performance. 

In 2016, mobile web traffic surpassed desktop browsing for the first time, leading Google to announce plans to shift to mobile-first indexing. In 2023, Google completed its transition to primarily using the mobile version of your website’s content for indexing and search rankings. 

This makes the experience you provide on mobile devices particularly important for SEO. 

Responsive web design automatically adjusts for mobile devices, using HTML and CSS to interpret screen sizes and customize the layout, content, and functionality to match. These adjustments can include easy-to-read text, tap-friendly buttons, and image stacking. It’a also a good website accessibility practice.

To ensure your site is optimized for mobile, start the design process with a mobile layout, then iterate for desktop. Make sure important content appears on both versions, and test elements like menus, buttons, images, and forms at different screen sizes. Shopify stores can use one of the ecommerce platform’s responsive themes.

Even if your site is business-to-business (B2B) and your Google Search Console stats show the majority of your traffic is via desktop, it’s still important to employ good mobile UX design. Mobile-first is Google’s universal default for all websites, so if you want to be found, don’t overlook your mobile site.

2. Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of technical factors and UX metrics Google uses to evaluate a website’s usability and performance. Google prioritizes fast and smooth experiences, so achieving good scores for these metrics can contribute to stronger SEO rankings. 

There are three Core Web Vitals. Here is a closer look at each one, how it affects SEO and UX, and how to improve it:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) 

LCP is a metric that measures the time it takes for the largest visible content, like a headline or website hero imageabove the fold, to finish rendering. 

Ideally, your LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds. “A fast-loading site reduces bounce rates and signals quality to search engines,” says Mark. 

Bounce rates indicate the percentage of visits when a visitor leaves your site without engaging further. They enter via a landing page and either realize the content doesn’t match their search intent, or the page is too slow, the copy isn’t compelling, or they can’t find the thing they’re looking for.

If your LCP score is more than 2.5 seconds, here are some ways to improve it:

• Implement lazy loading on non-LCP resources, which delays loading images and videos until they come into view on the user’s screen.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN), which stores files (like images) in multiple servers to deliver content quickly to users from a location closest to them. 

• Optimize images using a tool like Tinypng to compress files and make them load faster. 

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

This metric is the lag between a user interaction (like clicking a button) and the page responding to the action. An ideal score is a response time of less than 200 milliseconds. Otherwise, the experience may feel slow or unresponsive. 

To improve your INP score:

• Reduce the amount of JavaScript on the page.

• Condense third-party scripts using a tool like Google Tag Manager. 

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS))

This measures how much a page shifts unexpectedly when loading. For example, a banner ad or an exit-intent pop-up loads late and suddenly shifts the whole page down, resulting in misclicks. Unlike LCP and INP, CLS isn’t measured in time. It uses a unitless score to quantify unexpected movement on the page; an ideal score is less than 0.1. 

To improve your score:

• Set explicit image dimensions so the browser knows how much space to reserve when loading.

• Avoid animations that could affect the layout when loaded, like chat widgets or expanding banners.

You can check your website’s Core Web Vitals score in Google Search Console (GSC) or using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Shopify provides web performance reports in the Shopify admin to track all three Core Web Vitals and identify performance issues by page, page type, or changes made to a store.

3. Accessibility

Web accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can interact easily with a site. 

“Making your site accessible improves user engagement and demonstrates quality standards,” Mark says.

Accessibility isn’t a direct ranking factor in search, but some accessibility best practices support SEO by helping search engines understand your content. Conforming to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is also necessary to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

Some best practices to both enhance accessibility and improve search engines’ ability to understand your site include:

• Writing descriptive alt text for images

• Adding captions and transcripts to video content

• Ensuring form fields have visible labels

Finally, Kellie recommends using descriptive link text, such as “View our summer collection” rather than a generic “Click here.”

Think of accessible marketing as making your site and content available to the largest possible audience. 

4. Clear navigation

Intuitive website navigation means customers can easily find what they’re looking for. This also helps search engines clearly understand how website pages relate to each other, improving indexing and visibility. 

With a logical, hierarchical website structure, internal links guide customers to the pages they’re seeking intuitively and effortlessly. Breadcrumb navigation can reinforce this hierarchy by showing customers where the current page sits within your site structure and providing links back to broader categories. 

For example, footwear and apparel brand Vessi uses website breadcrumb paths such as:

Women > Waterproof shoes > Sneakers

Men > Waterproof apparel & accessories > Jackets

Shopify stores can create hierarchical navigation from the Content > Menus section of the Shopify admin, using descriptive menu items to organize ecommerce product catalogs and collections.

5. Readability

Engaging content usually includes headings, bullets, images, and other visual elements, while walls of text can quickly overwhelm users. Clear headings, visual hierarchy, and well-organized content can also help search engines understand the structure and main topics of a page. 

“Ensure that your content is easy to read on small screens,” Kellie says. “A banner with three lines of text on desktop may take up 10 lines of text on mobile and quickly create issues with cognitive load.” 

For example, you can use a visual comparison chart instead of multiple paragraphs explaining why your coffee grinder is better than your competitors.

6. Intrusive ads

Aggressive pop-ups aren’t just annoying; they can hurt search performance when they disrupt the ecommerce user experience. Google refers to pop-ups and similar elements that obstruct page content as intrusive interstitials. 

Although website pop-ups aren’t all bad, it’s best to use them discerningly. Ensure they don’t block critical content, and make the exit button easy to find (and use). Pop-ups can pose a particular problem for mobile users, where they can obscure much of the screen. Test your mobile pop-ups to ensure important content remains accessible and the pop-up is easy to close. 

7. Website copy and page structure

A good user experience starts with giving visitors what they came for. Match each page of your site to  customer intent and provide the information or products people expect to find when they click on your page in search results. 

Start by researching your target keywords and looking at the types of pages that rank. Use those results to determine whether the query is best served by a product page, collections page, or informational content. 

Then design each webpage so users can quickly locate that information. Use descriptive headers and subheadings, put important information prominently on the page, and organize related information into logical sections.

“Think beyond just keywords; think ‘searcher’s goal,’” says Kyle Risley, senior SEO lead at Shopify. “If it’s an info query, provide info. If it’s a shopping query, make it easy to shop.” 

The same fundamentals can also help your pages appear in AI-powered search experiences such as Google AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.