A site that contains too many usability friction points, is a site that is going to miss conversion / sales opportunities, needlessly.
Going to a site should not cause me a headache.
Exploring the site in the first 30 seconds upon my arrival, shouldn’t force me to guess where to go, what to click on, or even if I’m on the page I expected to get.
What are UX Audits?
UX (User Experience) audits are a vital part of ensuring a business web site is set up to produce the best possible outcomes for visitors needing to achieve goals.
While my business specializes in SEO, and sustainable SEO audits in particular, we do integrate UX evaluations as well.
It’s important to understand that, at the highest level, SEO is 100% about User Experience.
- Google & Bing are users of your site.
- LLMs are users of your site.
Except those “users”, attempt to emulate human experience, trying to understand, formulaically. No emotion is involved. No previous human experience impacting the psychology of the “user”, exists. There is no context to the user experience beyond formulas.
Because of that reality, when we look at a site from a usability perspective, we need to include that type of user as well as human users.
SEO, itself, is also about, from a human user perspective, the need to understand human needs and human behavior when presenting content, on scale, hierarchically.
Breadcrumb Navigation as a UX Consideration
The code behind breadcrumb navigation, for example, is for search engine & LLMbot users. The links visible to humans, that comprise the breadcrumb, are a human usability aid. Combined, they help all users discover where on the site they are hierarchically, reinforce the “you’re in the right place” signals topically and regarding intent, & they reinforce topical relationships across pages.
This is just one example of why usability matters on its own, why it matters to SEO, & why, when someone is performing an SEO audit, they know how to evaluate usability issues beyond those commonly considered by people new to SEO.
Always Evaluating Usability
Any time I perform a site audit, or even a site review, or simply look over some individual aspect of a site, I’m thinking about how effortless, how intuitive, it was for me to achieve whatever goal I had on the site.
Part of my success in my audit work, comes from the fact that every site I evaluate, I attempt to put myself into the mind of the range of typical users who might come to the site needing or wanting to achieve a goal. First time buyers. Researchers. Industry knowledgeable people. Interns helping their boss. Bosses researching what they heard about offline. People just exploring options. People in the final decision sequence.
All of these people have common usability needs, yet some of them need more help than others, to explore a site or to learn something about a product or service.
Another Reason To Get an SEO Audit
If you have not truly considered the importance of an SEO audit for the sake of better rankings, or improved click-through rates, or for increasing conversions, one more reason to have a proper audit done, is usability.
Industry Tools Come Up Short
Fact — you are only going to get some insight on actual usability, using an industry “audit” tool. They’ll point out things like broken links, as one example, or page speeds as another.
Yet they won’t inform you that the labels you use for your links in your site navigation are confusing, disorienting, or otherwise causing friction for people trying to find information.
Only a human auditor can, at this point, do that kind of work, across the full spectrum of usability considerations on a site that an algorithm just can’t.
To be fair, with the onslaught of AI “agents”, I am sure somebody will attempt to create such a thing. An LLM where you can ask an agent to evaluate your site as if human, for usability issues.
Whether they’ll ever succeed, or to what degree, I can’t say.
In the mean time, while I don’t offer truly comprehensive usability audits for their own sake, and my audits don’t evaluate things like the choices of button colors you prefer, I cover enough UX factors and signals that when you’re getting your SEO act together, you can be confident the biggest UX factors will be covered. Contact me today to learn about how I can help you with usability while I’m helping you with your broader SEO needs.