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How to evaluate your website’s usability during an SEO audit?

6 minutes of reading
How to evaluate your website’s usability during an SEO audit?
Category SEO

When it comes to performing an SEO audit, there are many factors you must consider. Of course, as with any type of web audit, you need to make sure that your website follows good security practices and fully complies with search engine algorithms and best practices, but there’s also the issue of how usable your site actually is. If users can’t find what they’re looking for or they don’t understand how to use your website, they won’t stay on the site – and that means they won’t see your valuable content or read your persuasive ads either.

Contents:

Understanding usability

Usability is a term used in web design and development that refers to how easy it is for someone to use a website. It can also be thought of as how quickly a user can accomplish their goal or task on a website. In other words, if a person can’t figure out how to use your site, they will leave and not return.

When evaluating usability, there are three key factors to consider:

  • efficiency (does the user find what they are looking for?),
  • memorability (does the site have a memorable feel?),
  • satisfaction (does the person get what they wanted from using your site?).

When evaluating these three aspects, keep in mind that you should always aim for balance between the three. A well-designed site should be efficient, memorable and satisfying at the same time.

Usability SEO audit

Usability SEO audits are a subset of website audits that focus on how usable your site is for visitors. They provide insight into how easy it is for your users to find what they’re looking for and achieve their desired outcomes. It’s an excellent way to identify improvements that can be made in order to make your site more user-friendly.

The three most important elements

Navigability

Navigability is key when it comes to usability. It should be easy for people to navigate your website and find what they’re looking for. You can do this by having a design that’s clean and simple, where there are no unnecessary distractions or links. A good navigational structure will also make it easy for visitors to quickly go back and forth between pages without getting lost. Think about main page, menu (breadcrumbs menu), categories, filters, sections.

Information architecture

Information architecture is all about how you’ve structured your website. If a visitor has trouble finding what they’re looking for or can’t easily tell where content lives on your site, then they’re going to have an unpleasant experience and leave without engaging with any of your content. One way to evaluate information architecture is by conducting a heatmap test. Heatmaps are visual representations of which areas visitors click most often while exploring your site; they give you insight into whether people find it easy or difficult to navigate through different pages on your site.

Interaction design

It should be easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for and make it through your site’s pages without being frustrated. It should also be easy for visitors to move around within a page, clicking on links, filling out forms, and scrolling through content. Users should always know where they are in relation to other elements on the page, like menus or social media icons at the top or bottom of the screen. They need to understand what’s happening as they navigate through each step in an online form, and not feel like there are any hidden catches that might ensnare them later down the road.

How can you improve the usability of your website?

On-page elements

A good way to evaluate usability is by looking at on-page elements. These are things like keyword density, meta tags, titles and descriptions. You should also check for broken links, errors and a lack of images or content. Finally, you’ll want to make sure that your site appears in search engine results pages.

Link profile

With internal links, users will be able to navigate around your site with ease. This is important because you want people to stay on your site as long as possible. Linking can also help a person find what they’re looking for in a few clicks rather than having to click through several pages or search endlessly for something. You want both visitors and search engines to be able to easily navigate through all the content on your website without any barriers or confusion. The way you do this is by creating intuitive navigation menus and easy-to-follow hyperlinks.

Mobile experience

Is your site responsive? This is an important question that you should ask. If it isn’t, then you will want to evaluate if there are any mobile-specific elements on your site that could be broken on a mobile device. For example, if your content is embedded in the design, then they may not show up as text when viewed on a phone screen. The same can happen with videos or slideshows embedded in the design. In this case, you would need to create specific versions for mobile devices and ensure they work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Page speed

The speed at which a page loads on your website has a significant impact on your search engine rankings. Google uses page loading speed as a factor in their algorithm and it’s important for your users too. If a visitor clicks on your site but has to wait for too long, they will likely leave and head over to one of your competitors, who may have more resources available than you do. Check your Core Web Vitals indicators in Google Search Console panel.

UX and design

User experience is not just about making things look pretty, it also encompasses how people interact with a site, whether they find what they are looking for and how long it takes them. If your site doesn’t have good design, you’ll have high bounce rates and low conversion rates.

Designing an easy-to-use website requires some understanding of UX principles such as removing distractions, using appropriate colors, providing feedback in response to user actions, showing one thing at a time on the screen (not two or more), creating information hierarchies on screens so that users can see where they are within the content.

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Summary

If you want your website to be successful, it’s important that it is easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site. This can help increase visitor satisfaction and encourage them to stay on your site longer. Doing a usability audit and evaluating how effective your website is will help you identify any problems and fix them before they affect your rankings.

Aleksandra Pietrzak
Copywriter
Curator at the National Museum in Poznań, graduate of Art History at the Jagiellonian University and Contemporary Art at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, curator of exhibitions and author of scientific and popular texts. A lover of contemporary art, literature and travel.
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