Site Usability: Google Ranking Factor

Author: Lokesh Sharma

What is Site Usability and why is it important?

Site Usability is important because it’s about customer service.

The goal of any organization or business professional is to satisfy their customer’s expectations and wishes, as quickly and dependably as possible.

Site Usability:

A site that’s difficult to use or to navigate can hurt rankings indirectly by reducing time on site, pages viewed and bounce rate (in other words, Rank Brain ranking factors).

What Factors Influence Site Usability over Time?

Factors influencing Site Usability are-

  • Accessibility: Web accessibility here means people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web site. This includes taking advantage of its information, resources, etc.

Can everyone use the website, equally?

  • Responsiveness: Responsive web design (RWD) is, "An approach to web design. It seeks to supply an optimal viewing and interaction experience across a good range of devices," (Wikipedia).

Does the web site work on the devices that customer’s value more highly to use?

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): "The process of affecting the visibility of a web site or an internet page through a search engine’s free (e.g. natural, organic) results," (How to Order SEO & Marketing).

Can customers find the web site in search results?

  • Content and Messaging: Users often reach sites in search of answers to a specific question. Therefore, its text should be designed in a manner that’s noticeable, easy to read, and understandable.

If users have specific questions, does the location offer clear answers?

  • Layout & Navigation: How quickly and simply a visitor can find what they’re trying to find through tools like a navigation bar, breadcrumbs, menus, buttons, etc. that are designed to assist guide them to their goals or answer specific questions.

Can people find what they’re looking for on the website?

  • Errors & Effectiveness: this might be a measurement of what percentage errors users’ encounter when using the web site,

What percentage mistakes they create in pursuit of goals or answers, and the way many of them exit the site without completing their goal as compared to those that do so successfully.

How effective is the website for its visitors?

  • Task Time & Expectations: A measurement of the quantity of your time it takes for a visitor to finish their goals via the web site as compared to their expectations (e.g. too long, faster than expected) of that point.

Here are six essential tips that you simply can take to improve the site usability of your website-

  1. Reduce page loading times.
  2. Maintain consistency across your site.
  3. 3. Make your site responsive.
  4. Use a well-known navigation layout.
  5. Use headings and subheadings together with your content.
  6. Highlight your key features.

What makes site usability user-friendly?

Site Usability, or User Experience, is that the art of creating your website simple, user-friendly and straightforward to use.

Some of the most basic and proven usability tips include proper use of taglines, intuitive navigation, concise content, and strategic use of visuals. Avoid confusing features or functionality.

How Site Usability and user experience affect SEO?

Both site usability and user experience have an indirect, yet immensely beneficial, impact on the external popularity of an internet site. Because usability and user experience can help to enhance conversions, traffics and proposals, they will be said to possess an immediate correlation with search engine optimization.

If your website is difficult to navigate, it’s only natural that you’re going to struggle to engage visitors. Lower engagement rates not only increase the exit rates, but they also bring in fewer return visitors.

The only way to increase user engagement and minimize your bounce rate is by improving your usability.

If searchers cannot find what they’re trying to find, it’s likely that they will dwell for just a couple of seconds before leaving and going back to the search result page to seek out a site which will help.

High exit rates reduce the dwell time. This data are often easily fetched by Google to evaluate your website’s user experience of the web site and potentially de-rank it.

There’s a similar concept of pogo-sticking, which is when users need to click through different search results before finding what they’re trying to find.

It normally occurs when a website fails to satisfy their needs despite being ranked highly. Since Google has gotten much better at identifying websites that do not serve the searcher’s intent, this will have an enormous impact on your search engine rankings.

Conclusion on Sites Usability-

The better your site’s usability is, the more users will enjoy their experience. If your website has a superb design, offers outstanding content, and is fun to use, you have a winner on your hands.

When it comes to usability, there are four fundamentals you must keep in mind to urge the simplest possible results:

  1. Clear navigation: the better your site is to browse, the happier your users are going to be.
  2. Performance: Slow websites lose visitors, so you need to optimize for performance.
  3. Readability: Your content should be easy to read in order that it doesn’t confuse or frustrate.
  4. Responsiveness: Mobile traffic is more important than ever, so your site must work well on all devices.