A discussion of UX for SEO | Search Off the Record

[Music]
hello hello and welcome to another
episode of search off the record a
podcast coming to you from the Google
search team my name is Lizzie and today
I'm joined by John hi John hi and we
have Rio today hi Rio hi hi lzy hi John
it's so good to see you I think the last
time we saw each other was at bright and
SEO maybe two years ago is that right I
think so yeah it's been two years yeah
it was in this in-person meeting that we
had this idea that maybe we should have
a podcast recording to talk about ux and
SEO sort of a spontaneous it's one of
those like magical hallway conversations
that they say that you have when you're
in person at events and it happened to
us um when we first met I
know um you told me that you are uh I
think it was was it your first uh SEO
conference as well or it was maybe the
first few it was mine as well it was my
very first time yes and uh you told me
that you coming from actually a ux
background and not necessarily SEO could
you tell us a little bit about how you
came into SEO World sure so yeah it was
2020 when I first joined this uh
industry uh as soon as I graduated from
the college and the first couple of
years I had been Consulting our clients
uh landing pages and websites uh using
our heat map solution so we we have
we're a digital marketing agency based
in Tokyo Japan but um at the same time
we develop our own SEO platform and also
heat map tool which is useful for uh
optimizing web pages and yeah so I have
been Consulting our clients uh web pages
using heat map tool and I think in total
I analyz and consulted around a couple
hundred pages and since about two years
ago I've been managing our own websites
in both SEO and C aspects and also doing
product management as well you mentioned
cro what is cro cro stands for
conversion rate optimization SEO is a
search engine optimization but C which
was more optimizing the conversion rate
of the web pages oh that that sounds a
lot like
usability yes ux and C they yeah get
along is cro that's um is this the main
metric for uh ux in terms of like is
this the thing that you're sort of
optimizing for when you're improving the
usability of your website yeah I think
that's one of the metrics that you use
because you know uh when you like own
your websites or when you manage your
websites most of the time the main goal
is to uh get higher conversion rates
from your websites right so in order to
get higher conversion rate of course you
need to Pro provide a good user
experience on your platform okay and
practically what would that mean like
people can find the button so if you if
you cannot find a button there's nothing
to convert you to do this action or if
the button is like at the bottom of the
page how can you possibly convert yeah
that's one of the things I think uh like
placing the buttons at the the right
places of the pages that's also a very
very important um tactics of C
and that's also a good aspect of ux as
well I think so when you when the user
come to your page they're looking for a
certain information and if they're
engaging well with your content if
they're satisfied with the information
that you're providing on your websites
most of the time or maybe sometimes uh
they're likely to convert like they're
likely to click the buttons that you're
promoting and well let's say you have
your own products promoting on your
website and say oh um free delivery or
something I cannot really come up with
but any kind of promotions right and
when users are really like engage highly
engaging with your contents you're
satisfied then they're uh likely to
click the buttons so that they're look
into like look further uh about your
products or anything that you're
promoting there does ux and SEO also
share a common goal or is SEO kind of
separated that I think pretty much ux
plays very very significant role in SEO
so this is what I always say but what do
you do SEO for like what's what's the
main thing that people are spending so
much time and money and effort uh on SEO
for like of course getting your uh page
ranking higher that's the main thing
that people pursue on SEO but the goal
behind this is to gain more users gain
more sessions on your web pages and to
ultimately convert them to your
customers or your users right so first
of all you do SEO to get more sessions
more users come into your pages but
after that what you have to do is to
modify your pages satisfy your users
with the the contents that they're
they're looking for so that they can you
know one day ultimately become your user
become your customer so when you're
thinking about like the user experience
or Journey end to end does the journey
start when they're on your website and
then making a purchase or would it start
from before for example like when
they're on the search results page I
would say ux which stands for user
experience is a pretty broad term right
any kind of experience that user
experience is defined as user experience
ux so what your users experience before
or after they come to your website is
also your website or even your business
ux ah so it's almost like how they're
experiencing your business as a whole
it's not necessarily because I think
like when I think about ux I'm thinking
about maybe UI or something that's like
more visual but if they're starting uh
on the search results page then that the
first thing that they're seeing is maybe
text if it's just a Blue Link U they're
seeing like the title of your page
description and that is maybe more like
writing side of things and not
necessarily the visual layout of your
web page yes but maybe that's writer hat
I'm wearing like Tech writer hat I'm
thinking about ux writing that's my own
bias I think well yeah any kind of text
images any kind of contents that your
users are looking at so any kind of the
content that you're promoting or it can
be on your website or it can be your
actual product any kind of feelings or
emotions that they get from using that
product or service can be set as a ux so
it's sort of like the whole end to end
yes exactly any interaction it's almost
like anytime that they're like touching
your site uh before they see it even is
maybe all connected it it is yes what
did you do with our documentation Lizzy
when in terms of uix or did you did you
do anything specific or well I mean I
think this is sort of like H how do we
uh scope ux like if we're saying that
everything is ux then maybe everything
that I do is it's very philosophical
conversation we're now having
um but I think uh if we're talking about
converting people um like our landing
page has that big blue button so we're
trying to get people to do a certain
action uh and like the primary action
that we want people to do is to read the
SEO starter guide on our landing page um
so we think that that's like the
majority of people should go over there
so that's what we put as our first sort
of above the- fold thing uh and then we
have secondary things that we think that
people might want to find um so we have
case studies help resources search
console and we sort of ordered them by
how uh important and common that action
would be uh so if everybody should be
going to this first thing like that's
the first uh uh thing that we want to
point people to um but what Rio was
saying earlier about uh converting
people I don't know how I would think
about this or apply this sort of
thinking to like a documentation page
that doesn't have a clear button that
you're like trying to get people to like
add to card like it they're not buying
anything on onz so what am I trying to
convert people to in for example like
the favicon documentation or structured
data where there's some action that I
want you to do but you're not I don't
know if you did it or not that's
something that maybe I want Rio's
opinion on is how would I go about
measuring that they completed the thing
like I'm I'm trying to get them to do it
but I I don't know if they did it
because there's no button to say like
yes like I added markup to my website
after reading your document ation it was
me converting to the next step if that
makes sense so I'm hoping like that
that's that's what you know the
documentation should get you to do but
there's not like a clear thing uh for
some of our stuff that we can see that
that's what led you to do that action if
that makes sense it's not as clear as
like a e-commerce site I I think you
also have a quiz on on the bottom of one
of the pages right or couple yes and our
that feels like a conversion thing or
test like did you read to the
bottom well we can look at like the uh
how far did you scroll so I think that
that that is tracked uh in Google
analytics so we can see that you got to
80% uh but that's another thing that I
don't know if that is what I should be
optimizing for because what if what you
wanted to find was in the middle of the
page and like you had success uh like
you found the thing that you wanted to
you sent the link to somebody else uh
because we have people who are reading
the documentation with different goals
in mind it might be that you wanted to
send it to a colleague and then you
completed your action that's like what
you came to the documentation for you
didn't necessarily need to sit and read
top to bottom in the crawl budget
documentation and complete the quiz and
you spent 15 minutes reading the thing
maybe I don't want you to spend 15
minutes reading the
thing maybe longer time reading the page
is not necessarily good for all of our
pages so that's one thing that I
struggle with with the the metrics side
of things because it's not like there is
okay two minutes reading for all pages
is yes that's the
Baseline for at least onesie uh our
developers.google.com search
documentation because there's many
different goals and lengths of
documentation I actually never deeply
thought about the conversion points of
those kind of documentations but the
main purpose of those documentations is
to get people learn about your uh the
contents that written on documentation
right and especially like Google's
documentations those kind of stuff helps
a lot of uh people um when they want to
start you know SEO when they want to
learn about SEO when they want to learn
deeply about SEO and even the experts
they still um you know look into those
kind of Google documentation so I think
the one thing
that you can set as a conversion point
is I don't know if you guys already have
it but the share button ah or the the
copy like link copy button that might be
a good point that that indicates that
users are actually engaging with the
contents right if they're if they're
satisfied or if they're like if they
think that stuff that written on the
documentation is helpful then they of
course they want to share it to somebody
or if they want to share it with SEO
newbies that you have in your your team
or company right so I think that can be
a good point as a conversion point for
documentation I think that's like a yeah
a good thing to look at I I'm curious
what you also think about the like the
helpfulness satisfaction rating so we
have like thumbs up thumbs down would
that also be something that to to look
at in my mind it's not like a conversion
stat but it would be helpful to measure
sort of like is the usability good or
bad yeah you can just
know if the users are satisfied or you
know engaging with the contents yeah I
guess also it kind of shows that people
read as much as they wanted and now they
have an opinion which which is kind of
the goal right even if they say I I
wasn't happy with this page then it's
like it gave them the information that
they needed to make that call yeah even
that is like sometimes difficult because
you need to sort of do analysis or like
I don't consider what this means in the
context of the page that you're on
because it could you could apply metrics
to mean different things based off of
other information um so for example the
removals
documentation has really negative
ratings and people the comments that we
get about it is that they're frustrated
with the actual process so to remove a
page or an image or like some personal
information they're frustrated with how
it works which is not necessarily the
documentation page and this is sort of
ort of a common problem with
documentation and like the way that the
product works like are they upset with
the report or the thing the function
itself or the way that we wrote about it
is like that was the best that the tech
writer could do in that
situation um based off of like this just
just how the thing works and we need to
fix like the root problem to make it
better
um but maybe that's like a an example of
just like how you can uh look at the
unhelpfulness rating and sort of figure
out you need to do like some sleuth work
uh to figure out like why are they so
unhappy and what thing do you need to
fix to make it go up and is it the way
that it's written is it the way that the
page is laid out um is it the process
itself like can they not find the thing
like the the button to then go remove uh
that URL maybe we need to make the
button bigger so that they can then go
to the next thing and then that can be
uh like a conversion rate thing that we
can look at I mean it also sounds like
our doc are a weird Edge case that a lot
of people don't have with regards to
content on the web I I imagine most
people who are commercially active want
people to buy stuff okay well I mean
that's a good like discussion Point what
are the other sites that Rio that you
looked at that were not
e-commerce when you were analyzing like
heat map stuff was it all sort of like
shopping minded or was there other type
of content like news or like article
these kinds of things most of them are
advertisement landing pages so it's
pretty much like a page that leads to
e-commerce site or service site yeah and
other Pages service sites and also like
articles SEO articles as well so not
always uh e-commerce s so e-commerce
site is really uh simple like the
conversion point is very very simple
either they purchased a a thing or not
right it's really simple but also like
Pages if you're navigating the users to
your actual service Pages product pages
then the number of the clicks of that
the button that navigates to the actual
Pages can also be a conversion point and
for SEO articles most of the time
they're also promoting something on
their uh Pages like they promote
something their own products or it can
be somebody else products on your web
pages right so if they hit the purchase
button or if they hit the like inquiry
buttons you know ask for demo or
something like that that can also be a
conversion Point like there are so many
different kinds of conversion point I
think for the search console help center
documentation it would be that open the
report uh so the pages that are about uh
like the URL inspection tool then the
conversion event is probably that main
like open that tool and then go use it
perhaps uh but maybe it would be like
secondary things to yeah that could be
yeah that could be one have you seen any
cases where uix has a conflict with
SEO where it's like you do things for
uxix but they're bad for SEO I think
there are couple things that people do
for SEO but it's not good for ux for
example maybe there are only like few
people nowadays I believe but still you
know I see sometimes like people stuff a
lot of keywords in their contents so
that they think those contents can get
ranked higher but that's terrible for ux
so I have this one experience with my
customer um they were stuffing a lot of
keywords because they were expecting
that could help the content rank higher
but that was actually causing a lot of
like clusters on the pages so it was
really really hard to read the
visualization of that contents was
really bad it was it was terrible and so
I I recommended them to remove all the
unnecessary keyword on that page which
doesn't make sense for the context and
that actually helped improving the
conversion rate and then did you see
also some positive impact in like the
SEO side of things like did their
ranking improveed so they're already
ranking pretty high so it doesn't like
added any positive side for SEO but that
didn't affect SEO so the customer the
clients were believing that stuffing
keyword is good for SEO so they were
like are you sure it's okay to remove
all those keywords because I don't want
to you know affect our content yeah yeah
yeah but that that didn't happen ah okay
so they had no uh negative impact from
what ranking side of things they got rid
of the keyword stuffing they thought if
we get rid of these words then we our
ranking will fall yeah and that didn't
happen to them no that's great cool so
good for both SEO and ux yeah cool okay
maybe we shouldn't take it to an extreme
and remove all words though just keep
the
button is there like a certain balance
for um I guess like maybe that's another
ux thing where you want something to be
more streamlined and not so cluttery
like if you have a really text Heavy
landing page where it's like paragraph
paragraph paragraph and it's hard to see
the button that is maybe not so good for
ux it depends on what kind of contents I
would say so if the the purpose of that
content is to provide a lot a lot of
information then maybe it's hard to
place a lot of uh bottons between the
the paragraph right but maybe you can
like add some like images videos or any
kind of visualization so that user can
interact with those content without
getting bored so placing a lot of
buttons is not the only answer for
improving the ux but adding the the
visual assets like images and stuff like
that that that can also help the user to
engage more with the content and they
can you know satisfy with the content
they can keep reading keep they will
keep scrolling down and then eventually
they'll find the bot and they convert
that's also a case Okay so it sounds
like adding gifs to a page is good for
uxix I actually don't know about that I
don't think there's any like bad
influence or you know anything from U ux
aspect so I don't know if this is like a
maybe need to look up like where did I
read this is it a personal uh opinion or
did I read this in like a best practice
somewhere but I read that gifs are not
something that we should be doing too
much within documentation because
they're distracting and you can't pause
them so from like an accessibility point
of view like they're like flashing and
like constant movement so if you're
trying to read Focus documentation it
might be like something that's
distracting that uh sort of like calm
reading vibe that you want to be having
and so like a pause playay video Loop
would be better but that's not
necessarily like ux or SEO maybe well
that actually makes sense but I me
personally never faced any trouble
putting GIF images between the the the
paragraphs in the article but you know
when the image quality is pretty bad
that that it that leads to bad ux so and
it's hard to maintain the good quality
on when you put gifs right like J
sometimes it can like really blurry and
the quality might be bad so in that case
that's terrible ux I would say but the
GIF itself I don't know I don't think
GIF itself has a bad effect on ux ux or
something would it have a positive
effect or could you measure whether or
not it has a positive or negative effect
on user experience by adding or like an
AB test for whether you have like a gif
or yeah yeah you well you definitely
should do ab test and any cases but
actually we once replaced an it's not a
video but it's an image to a gif and it
generated a higher conversion rate oh
okay okay so we have remove all the
keywords and add more
[Laughter]
gifs okay maybe I shouldn't look at it
this extreme uh but it really depends
though I feel like that's part of the
user experience is like looking at does
it make sense to add that drift for this
user in this context because maybe it is
weird to have a DF on your landing page
or maybe it's really helpful maybe
that's very important to show like how
to use a product for example and then
that helps them convert because they saw
oh that's what that product does I put
this thing here and that's how that
thing works that makes sense yeah I
don't know Rio have you seen that people
do things differently in Japan for uix
or is uix mostly global I don't know if
there is any particular thing that
people in Japan do for ux but there is
one unique thing about the user Behavior
or ux Trend in Japan I would say so it's
not like people intentionally do but
people actually prefer to have a visual
assets like videos or so many images on
their contents so I once did the the
research there was uh two articles one
without any visual contents and one with
few visual contents between like each
paragraph and the the content with few
images that has higher uh user
engagement rate and in Japan we see a
lot of content that has a lot of images
uh visual assets but when I do when I
search something in English when I read
like English documents I rarely see a
pages with a lot of like visual assets
so maybe that's one thing that is
different from how people react in Japan
and in other countries you see anything
different about like site navigation or
the way that people are like going from
page to page in Japan compared to maybe
English content I don't think there's
difference in that aspect only the the
visual contents more image heavy or like
more illustration yes exactly okay
interesting what kind of common mistakes
do you see people making with when it
comes to uix are there such things or do
people just do things differently well
stuffing keywords is definitely one of
them I've seen I've seen few people
still doing that so that's definitely
one of them oh and also I've seen a lot
of cases where they put Carousel and
that actually have a lower impact on ux
I would say so us have to like keep
clicking the the to to show the
different images right to display the
other images and in the study that I
read users actually don't really click
that much so if you have a lot of
information that you want to provide to
your users that doesn't really do good
so a better thing would be to do some
other like flow like lazy loading or
like something that your user doesn't
need to like click so many times or what
would you recommend uh for a website
that has this Carousel what would be
better for ux it's better to just put
the the image in the content ah okay so
just uh like six images like like this
yeah or if there's too much then I think
you should reduce it because that means
you you are providing too much
information that can cause the users to
you know get confused H or to go away if
like all they're seeing is like image
image image image image yeah interesting
I don't think that we have like any
Carousel I'm now like do we have any
carousels in onesie and now I need to
eradicate them we have carousel
structured that on right yes ah for
Carousel in search results so the
carousel feature within uh that is like
a ux pattern that we have for some of
the rich results interesting huh huh
what is your take on uh the zippies like
the expando kind of like collapsing
content real from like a ux perspective
is this nice is it not very nice I don't
think that's necessarily bad sometimes
you know when you you're using that for
a specific reason so let's say you have
FAQ Pages where there's so many like
questions and answers then you
definitely you cannot like show the
whole content without you know clipping
it so in that case it's better to do
that so that it's easier for them to
look for the the questions or
information that they're looking for but
if you're doing that too much sometimes
it's hard for the user to notice that
you know that's clickable so if you're
provid the very very important
information that you definitely want
your users to notice then it's better
not to do that it's not about like ux
aspect it's more like your information
delivery thing yeah I see people doing
that as like a way to sort of uh like
make the page look more scannable or
like it's more minimal like not
overwhelming with all of this content so
they sort of like zip up zip up zip up
and then you need to drill in to see
more yeah U but then what if you miss it
for example or you can't do like command
find let's see it's a really long page
and you can't find that piece of thing
that you're looking for because it's
hidden behind a zippy um but I guess
John would that be like no implication
from a SEO perspective or how do you see
that from like another angle I think
from from an SEO perspective that's
that's okay because the the primary
information that people will be
searching for is probably visible
immediately anyway so it's almost like
well if the answer is somewhere drilled
down it's like like you don't know the
answer when you're searching otherwise
you wouldn't be searching so uh it's
kind of like you find the question and
you can expand that that seems that
seems okay I guess it's also trying to
show you uh like visual hierarchy like
importance of that content so if it's
behind a zippy then you're kind of
signaling to the user as well that this
thing that's hidden is not as important
otherwise we would have shown it to you
like either bigger or like in a larger
font or something cool okay so kind of
wrapping up is is there one thing that
you think seos should do to get started
in uix or conversion rate optimization
it's like where would you tell them to
start this is one thing that I wanted to
talk about but uh heat map tool it's not
like I'm trying to promote our product
or anything but heat map tool actually
helps a lot every time we do ux
Improvement conversion rate Improvement
cro we always need heat map tool so heat
map tool is basically visualizing the
users's behavior on the pages so it
shows which part of the content users
are reading at and which bottons that
user clicking or if the users are
leaving the page at which part of the
content so it visualizes the the whole
user Behavior so you can actually learn
if the users are engaging with the
content or not or if they're satisfied
with information that you're providing
or not so let's say you are writing
something that you really want your
users to notice or you want users to
understand or to you know promote
something and what if the the the part
that you're trying to promote so hard is
not actually the users are not actually
reading that point then it you know
there's no way that you can convert them
or it's just waste of time and effort
doing that right so it's really really
important to know what your users are
engaging and interacting with on your
content and heat map tool visualizes
that ah okay so you can see like more
quickly where on the page like there's
some sort of like visual element to not
just seeing like I I mean I think I can
look up in Google analytics like where
people like they're going 80% to the
page but then I have to think in my head
where is 80% of my page and like where
are they and you're saying the heat map
thing would show me exactly uh where
that would be on the page and I don't
necessarily need to make up my mind
where is 80% it yeah it's really easy to
analyze it so like you said when you use
Google analytics you have to like do the
settings to know if the users are
reading 80% of the content or not you
don't need any those kind of you know
settings you can just like implement it
just by inserting the like to uh one
JavaScript tag and then you can get the
data of your users's behavior on your
web pages and then you can learn oh
they're reading this or they're not
reading this oh maybe we should fix this
maybe we should place this information
higher so that you know more users can
learn about that that sounds really cool
we should look into that try it out I
now want to analyze the SEO starter
guide put it into a heat map tool and
see where if they are reading 100% of my
gigantic document cool okay well this
has been really insightful Rio thank you
for joining us that's it for this
episode and again thank you for joining
us Rio if folks have any questions or
comments where can they find you I'm
always on X formerly Twitter I cannot
I'm used to saying Twitter so I'm just
going to say Twitter but yeah you can
find me you can just search Riri
ichikawa it's pretty hard to pronounce
but yeah Riri ichikawa and then yeah I'm
always on Twitter so you can you guys
can find me there cool okay we'll we'll
definitely add a link thank you folks
for listening and goodbye bye
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