Building websites for humans improves your search rankings
Write web content for user experience (UX), not search engine optimisation (SEO). You’ll get better quality interactions and people will want to share your content and come back to your website.
We often get job briefs like this from organisations looking for someone to help with their content:
10x 1600-word unique blog posts about curtains. Must be keyword optimised for SEO using a keyword planner. Each post must contain 5 subtitles and subsections.
We’re also regularly spammed with emails and messages from marketing agencies, freelancers and grifters along these lines:
We have found a very important issue regarding your website and why you are losing lots of traffic. Your website does not follow search engine optimisation guidelines and has low priority in search results. We have done an audit of your website and found it could make more revenue with our help.
Now, if you are running a click-funnel scam or Amazon affiliate get-rich-quick scheme, then SEO writing might be the best thing for you. Even then, we tend to think you could get better results by spending the same amount of money to commission genuinely good content.
For the rest of you, we have a little secret to share about SEO:
SEO is the reason your internet experience is shitty
You know when you’re looking for a carbonara recipe online, and you click on a promising link, then you have to read through a small novel about how the writer’s grandmother used to collect cream from her own cows and get the best prosciutto from a certain butcher in a small Alpine town, and how the writer rediscovered the recipe on a soul-searching trip to Italy that involved meditating in a 9th Century church before you actually get to the recipe?
That is all thanks to SEO – search engine optimisation. SEO is a collection of guidelines designed to trick Google and other search engines into giving your website a top spot in search results. It involves using a wide range of often-searched keywords, and writing long articles so people are forced to spend a long time on your website. The idea is that Google will notice these things and send more people your way.
SEO is to blame for:
- Long, pointless articles
- Irrelevant autoplaying videos at the top of web pages
- Content that doesn’t actually answer your question
- Having to click several links to find simple information on a website
- Long-winded introductions
Do you want users to have a shitty internet experience on your website? What is the alternative?
Designing for UX
UX is shorthand for “user experience”. This makes sure people enjoy using your website, and get what they want when they visit.
Websites with good UX should:
- Direct users where they want to go
- Answer questions quickly
- Give good information at the top of the page
- Be enjoyable to use
- Be easy to use without instructions
But SEO works, right?
Well, yes and no.
Old-school crappy SEO no longer works. There is a whole bag of tricks including hiding invisible text on your web page, stuffing your page with links (and linking to your page from a bunch of other low-quality web pages), and re-writing content again and again with slightly different wording. This stuff no longer works, and Google will actively punish you for using it by lowering your visibility in search results.
Even keywords are not as effective as they once were. If you Google “carpet”, the results will automatically include websites about related words like “rugs”, regardless of whether they stuffed the keyword “carpet” into their web page.
Remember: Google is smarter than you. Maybe you can hack the results in the short term, but if your website is unusable, your business model will not work.
Some SEO techniques do work, and there is nothing wrong with incorporating them as long as your UX does not suffer.
Importantly, there is a set of best practices for SEO that should be done as a baseline. These practices include correctly structuring and tagging content on your web pages so Google can easily read and undertand it, and present it to searchers.
Paying a marketing expert a few thousand dollars to jam your website full of keywords might bring a few more visitors from Google, but what is the point if the visitors don’t interact with your website?
Do you even need clicks?
Not necessarily.
Always remember what the point of your website is. If you are selling something, your visitors need to buy things to make their visit worthwhile. If you are informing people, your visitors need to read your content. If your business model relies 100% on getting eyeballs in front of advertisements, then yes, do whatever you need to get thousands of meaningless clicks.
Contrary to popular belief, most websites, especially small organisations, do not rely on Google clicks to thrive. They get traffic from people who already know about them visiting their website on purpose; interacting with them on social media; looking up local businesses in a directory or on Google Maps; searching for a specific product or service; linking through from a review; and so on.
Ask yourself if hundreds of random people from the internet stumbling across your web page will actually be helpful to your goals.
Probably not, right? Better to attract quality people from your target market who are going to benefit from your website (and benefit your goals).
Remember the age-old marketing mantra:
It is easier to keep a customer than to get a new one.
Treat your customers well and they will be back. Let them enjoy your website. Give them what they want instead of what you think Google wants. They might even share it with their friends!
UX is for everything
This article is specifically about web content, but UX should be applied to everything you produce. Your user’s experience should be the first priority when you are creating products, marketing material, instruction manuals, pitches, applications, tenders, or anything else people see and interact with.
This is the takeaway message from this article:
Give your visitors a quality experience. Provide relevant information they actually want to read. Keep it short and to the point.
Get in contact if you like what you hear, or if your user experience needs a touch-up.