SEO is great at helping the right people find a website, but once they land on the page, the experience they have can make all the difference.
Since joining Lumen two years ago, I’ve found myself getting drawn to the UX side of what we do. I decided to start the Google UX Design Professional Certificate to learn a bit more, build on what I’ve picked up through the job and bring some new ideas back to the team.
Through the course, I’ve been learning more about things like user needs, pain points, accessibility and testing different solutions. What’s really stood out to me is how much of that overlaps with SEO.
A lot of SEO is about understanding what someone is looking for and helping them find the right page. UX looks at what happens once they get there, whether they can find what they need and how easy the whole experience feels.
So, if you’re trying to improve your website’s performance, UX is definitely worth paying attention to! A better user experience can support your SEO and make it easier for people to enquire, book or buy once they’re there.
I wanted to share a few of the things I’ve been learning and look at how UX design principles improve SEO in practice.
Here are the things that have stood out to me.
Start With the User: Empathy, Search Intent and Pain Points
A major theme the Google UX Design Professional Certificate focuses on is empathy: understanding what users need rather than assuming we already know.
That instantly made me think of search intent. In SEO, we don’t just look at what people type into Google. We try to understand what they actually want from that search and what might stop them from getting there.
Empathy maps are a well-known UX tool for understanding users and their pain points. They involve looking at what someone says, thinks, does and feels, helping us build a clearer picture of their experience and spot gaps in what we know about them.
We probably won’t create a full empathy map every time we optimise a page for SEO, but we can still think about these things as we review a website: what is the user trying to do, what might they be thinking or feeling, and what could be getting in their way?
That also fits nicely with Google’s focus on creating people-first content. The better we understand the person behind the search, the easier it is to create pages that genuinely give them what they came for, remove some of the friction in their journey and make them more likely to stick around and take the next step.
Accessibility in UX Design and SEO
A huge part of UX is accessibility (I can hear Holly’s voice in my head as I write this!), and it’s something we talk about a lot at Lumen. One example from the course that made this click for me was the curb-cut effect.
Ever found yourself heading towards the sloped bit of the kerb because it’s just easier, whether you’re running, wheeling a suitcase or pushing a pram? That’s a curb cut!
It was designed to improve wheelchair access, but it’s a great example of how designing for accessibility can end up making the experience better for everyone. The same idea applies online, and this is where SEO and accessibility overlap.
Think about landing on a page that’s just one long block of text with no headings. It’s harder to scan, harder to find what you need and much easier to click away. Clear headings make the page easier for people to move through and can help search engines understand what each section is about.
Essentially, making your site easier for more people to use can help turn more visitors into customers, while also ticking a lot of the same boxes that could help your search rankings too.
Define the Problem Before Making Changes
Another thing the course has really drilled into me is the importance of understanding the problem before jumping straight to a solution.
In UX, a pain point is basically any bit of friction that gets in the way of someone getting what they need.
To get to the bottom of that, the course uses the 5 Ws and H: who is having the problem, what is happening, where and when it happens, why it matters and how they’re trying to reach their goal.
I think that way of thinking is really useful for SEO too.
Say a service page is getting plenty of organic traffic but hardly any enquiries. We might not literally sit there and run through the 5 Ws and H every time, but the thinking behind it is really useful: Who’s landing on the page? What are they trying to do? Where might they be getting stuck, and why?
That helps us understand the problem before jumping straight to “let’s add some reviews” or “let’s move the CTA higher up.”
This is where tools like GA4 and Google Search Console are really useful.
For example, a service page might be getting plenty of traffic, but GA4 may show that very few people are clicking the enquiry button.
That gives us a clue that something on the page may be getting in the way, so we might need to look at things like load speed, whether the CTA is easy to find, or whether the page is giving people enough information to feel ready to enquire.
Once we know what the problem actually is, we can make a change with a clear reason behind it, then check the data afterwards to see if it’s helped. That way, the SEO work isn’t just bringing people to the page, it’s helping make sure the page actually does its job once they get there.
Use Competitor Research to Find the Gaps
The course also covers competitive audits as part of the ideation stage. In UX, that means looking at what competitors are doing well, where they’re falling short and where there might still be gaps for users.
That felt pretty familiar from an SEO point of view, because competitor research is something we do all the time. We might look at who’s ranking above a client, what topics they’re covering and how their pages are structured.
UX just gets us to look a little deeper. What’s the site actually like to use? Is the important information easy to find? Is there something they’re doing really well, or something annoying that we could do better?
It’s also worth looking beyond the businesses doing exactly the same thing as you.
The course talks about direct and indirect competitors. So, if we were looking at a meal kit service, another meal kit brand would be a direct competitor. A food delivery app could be an indirect competitor because it’s solving the same basic problem, getting dinner sorted, just in a different way.
That food delivery app might give us ideas around filtering meals or making dietary requirements easier to spot. We wouldn’t copy it, but we could take inspiration from what makes the experience work well.
For SEO, competitor research gives us loads of useful clues about what’s working, where there might be gaps and how we can make the page more useful for the person searching.
What I’m Taking From It
What I’ve found useful about the course is that it’s given me some new frameworks for the SEO and UX work we already do.
We’re already thinking about the person behind the search, what might be getting in their way and whether the changes we make are solving the right problem. The course has just given me a few new ways to explore those questions and better understand what users need.
I’ve already started bringing some of that thinking into the work we do at Lumen, and I’m looking forward to building on it even more.
Think your website could be doing more with the traffic it gets?
Get in touch through our contact form, and we’ll take a look at where UX could make a difference for your site.
