Tom Peyton says: "My insight is to focus primarily on user experience and optimizing for the user journey, basically.”

So what sort of user experience should you be optimizing for?

“If we take it back into the core elements, this is just about thinking that you as an individual, if you go onto a website, or you're trying to make a buying decision engage with any brand, what kind of things would you like to see? So from the navigation of the menus, how easy is it for me to find where I want to get to on your website, all the way to ask the question of can I trust this individual? As SEOs, we might know many of these things, as you know, the EEAT guidelines and a lot of this terminology is thrown around in the SEO space, but I think taking it back to basics and thinking about what would I want to experience as a potential customer or someone who will engage with a brand, then what would I want to see? What experience would I want to have?

I think when we focus on that, instead of getting caught up in the nitty gritty, it can help to not only bolster our rankings and bolster the traffic we're getting, but also protect us from algorithm updates. Because if you look at any algorithm updates over the past ten years, they have all been focused on giving users a better search experience.”

Is there still a case for squeeze pages? Because while they will traditionally enhance conversion rates, they're not necessarily great for users and helping them find an alternative, or they're not necessarily great for search engines because they don't necessarily show other links on your website.

“Yeah, I agree with that. There's always been debate around using squeeze pages, especially in SEO. The way I see squeeze pages is for paid traffic. We do still want to use them, because statistically, we do a ton of stuff in my agency on conversion rate optimization. From all the tests we've run, if you can simplify, strip out that menu header, and get rid of options, you’ll generally always see a high conversion rate. But as you said, with SEO, I think Google does put a lot of value on giving people an easy user experience. So there are some things we can do to take a hybrid approach. And like you'll see with a lot of very high-converting websites, what they do, is instead of having a ton of items in their menu header, they might sub-categorize things better. So they put things into sub-sub categories and they use ‘mega’ menus, where you're able to condense the amount of options somebody sees when they land on a website, so you're eliminating any confusion. But you're also still retaining the SEO benefits while improving that user experience and subsequent conversion rate.”

Does that mean that sort of page is a good landing page for PPC or paid search? Do you always tend to see pages designed specifically for that medium?

“It depends on the objective of that paid search campaign. For example, we're running a top-of-funnel campaign where we're looking to call out a particular audience, and we’ll later retarget them. A lot of the time, we will use blog content for the top-of-funnel campaigns because it's the purpose of that click the purpose of that campaign is to get our audience to raise their hand and to demonstrate credibility, authority, and trust. That's what we're looking to do. And we are then going to retarget them. We want to encourage, at that stage, people to click around and then get to know about the brand. It's only when we then drive that conversion later in the funnel. That's when we may use squeeze pages.”

Your core tip is around enhancing user experience and assisting your SEO efforts by doing that. So how does an enhanced user experience deliver increased organic traffic?

“There are a few ways, like distilling this into its different elements. One of the things that users would want to see is a page that is specific to them. And this is something that SEOs have known for a long time. But having dedicated pages for a particular product or service, a particular category, will give you more chance of ranking for that keyword because there's more specificity there. But that also happens to align with user experience. So I give improving the user experiences a broad term because it reduces the overwhelm often associated with SEO. If you think about what would make this website better for the user, nine times out of ten, you will probably help your SEO.”

Where does the importance of improving user experience lie in relation to other SEO activities? Because things like the technical health of a website, making it faster, and doing basic optimizations, such as paid page titles, could be more important initially to get an understanding from search engines. Is it more or less important than those areas, and are there other areas of SEO that you could list that you think are less important than user experience?

“I would argue that it's the same thing. If we're looking at the Technical SEO, the titles, the optimizing the titles, optimizing the Page Speed, that Page Speed is a massive factor in user experience. If I have to wait a minute for your page to load, or elements are shifting around on the page, like Google, looking at many of these Core Web Vitals, it's a huge hindrance in the user experience. So I think this tip is just about helping to reduce it overwhelmingly.

Now, in response to a question about priorities, it's going to vary depending on the industry. So, for example, if you're competing in an industry where there's very little competition, the work you need to do is going to be in direct relation to generally and in proportion to what your competitors are doing because that's the benchmark Google have got for that particular keyword. For example, you're in an industry where there's tons of competition, all of the top ranking websites, super-fast loading, very well optimized content, we then need to pay a lot of attention to the website speed, the website content, if we're in an industry where every single website is equally slow as ours, we don't need to pay a massive amount of attention to that. So I would say from a prioritization standpoint, it comes to looking at the competitive landscape and what other choices does Google have? What other choices do they have to rank above yours?”

I like this way of looking at SEO, it helps to explain to people why SEO is important, but I guess it's a more simplistic way of deciding upon what's the most important thing to do next because, within SEO, there can be hundreds of different things that you could be doing when you have to learn how to prioritize. Does this also assist with training? I'm thinking of SEOs, SEO managers, training, and other marketing departments within organizations. Do you recommend leading with user experience when training others on SEO?

“100%, because it's one of those things that is going to impact every single area. It impacts the SEO and other teams, from general UX and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) to paid or user retention. And some of those are more back-end metrics. Because if you've got a rubbish user experience, people probably aren't coming back to buy from you again. So it does impact all areas.”

How do you ensure that you get everything? Because it's all well and good to look at things from a user experience perspective, but there's only sometimes the way that a search engine proceeds all the time.

“That's true, and I think there's a segment of marketing you're working within. It’s important to stay updated with what's happening, like AI. For example, what is going on in the near and long term that could potentially impact this? It happens that, again, nine times out of ten, user experience always has to do with that. But again, the nuance here and which bits we should focus on first, it is important to understand what's coming. Both short-term and long-term.”

And what about measurements? Do you attempt to measure from an organic SERP ranking perspective? What kind of impact does user experience and making a change in user experience such as navigation? Or does website speed have an impact on those rankings?

“Yeah, I like to see measurement only by looking at the things that matter and everything within context. This is always the most important thing. For example, if we've had a drop in traffic, I would be looking at the keyword that has resulted in that drop in traffic. So instead of just looking at all these things, what is our link profile? Let's first identify the keyword we potentially lost that has big SERP falling, where we've dropped positions causing this. And if we find one keyword, we can confidently say this is the issue. We’ve lost this keyword. This was a huge search volume. Now let's look at that particular page or page ranking for that keyword. So we narrowed down our focus in terms of where we need to be putting our attention because otherwise, there are a million and one things you can measure. Where do you even start? So I like to see the measurement aspect is, make sure it's contextual to what you're trying to achieve from measuring this specific thing.”

So how often do you take user experience into the strategy that you said? Because I'm thinking that maybe once every three months or once every six months, it might be worthwhile doing a deep dive into what's happening on the website and perhaps setting out a strategy. Is there a regular frequency that you recommend for this? Or is it just on an ongoing basis?

“I would do it as regularly as possible, but even if we take help because you can build in formal processes for this and have checklists. I would boil this down to a fundamental, common-sense exercise. Let's say we've just published a new blog or a new bit of content. It's amazing how often SEOs do this. And even if you see this with web developers, they'll create something, but then they don't go through that themselves and pretend like they are a user. I typed in the keyword I want to rank for here. And I landed on this page. Would I be happy with this? Is this allowing me to get to the answer that I want to get to quickly? Easily? Do we have a table of contents? Do we have images to support what I'm talking about? If I scroll down this page, is it all text and difficult to read? We can debate the use of images in SEO, and the impact of that is that you will have a higher bounce rate because it's not nice to consume that content. It's not broken up with just loads of text. And that bounce rate, as has been shown in a lot of studies, is probably going to affect your SEO, and it is probably going to affect your rankings. So it's just looking at it from a process aside when you publish a bit of content when you secure a backlink. Whatever you've done, think about how this is supporting the user here.”

How would you recommend setting up that third-party approach to review the content that's been produced?

“That is a very good question. So yeah, like peer-review, and having wherever you do across your team or have people in other teams to review content after it goes live, absolutely is going to be important because it is very easy. I do this all the time, myself as well. We’ve set up processes internally where we'll check out each other's content, and as painful as it can be to hear you've missed something or not done something. ‘This is different. I wouldn’t say I like how this is written’. It’s more, again, that the instruction for your team members and anyone who is cross-checking content or cross-checking anything you're doing is, again, user experience. If you were looking for this thing, what would you improve to make this a nicer user experience, a better user experience?”

Okay, well, you’ve shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“So the thing I've seen time and time again, and I fall into this trap as well, is still focusing on the quantity or length of content we put on our websites. It’s this kind of thinking of, like, more is better. It's such a seductive thing for SEOs. ‘If I include this as well, then this is going to be the best article in the world. And Google's going to love it’. Again, it comes down to this user experience. This was a wake-up call when I looked through my content and asked myself, ‘Hang on. All I wanted to know was this. And I've landed on a page with tons of stuff. It's not particularly useful for me or a nice experience for me. So what we need to focus on in 2023 and beyond is not putting too much emphasis on how much content or the length of content. And we see from even articles and pages ranking in Google these days that they're often not the ones with the most content. They're the ones that most concisely address the user’s topic. Or it has a lot of trust behind it and all of these different factors, right trust signals, and all of these different things. But it's not so much to do with the content length, but it's such an easy trap to fall into.”

Tom Peyton is the co-founder at Elevate Digital, and you can find them over at elevate-digital-solutions.com.