SXO Best Practices: Creating a Seamless Search Journey

Google’s algorithm continues to evolve, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not only about ranking for specific keywords. To meet Google’s requirements, it is crucial to improve your online business’s content, popularity, and user experience (UX).

In this article, we’ll focus on SXO (Search Experience Optimization), a cross between SEO and UX. User experience has been a key factor in Google’s algorithm recently. For Google, the UX begins right when visitors click on a search results page and ends after a conversion.

SXO best practices: beyond traditional SEO

The digital marketing landscape is witnessing a paradigm shift with the birth of Search Experience Optimization (SXO), making a big departure from traditional SEO tactics. It’s an approach that not only emphasizes the importance of ranking on search engines like Google but also focuses on the overall user experience (UX). By integrating UX and SEO, businesses can improve their engagement and conversion rates in a more prominent online presence.

Embracing SXO requires a shift in strategy and mindset from optimizing only for search engines to optimizing for the user. This means we must craft content that’s relevant, authoritative, and also enjoyable to interact with. By focusing on the user’s experience from the moment they search for a word on Google to the second they find the answer or complete a desired action, businesses can gain a competitive edge in their industry.

So, how do you implement SXO and create a seamless user journey for your visitors? Here are the best practices:

1. Keywords and content 

Every customer journey starts with a search. This means we must ensure that we meet the user’s intent. There are three primary levels of search intent:

• Navigational – Users are finding a specific site
• Informational – Users are finding a particular information
• Transactional – Users are finding a specific product or service

After you’ve identified the search intent, it’s crucial to choose the right keywords as they link to the user’s search intent (your potential customers) and the content you want to publish. Keyword strategy is the foundation of successful SEO, which means the keywords you’ve chosen to use on your site must have a high enough search volume. To achieve this, there are several tools you can use:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• SEMRush/Ahrefs

After you’ve selected the right keywords, it’s essential to make sure that your content matches the user’s search intent. This is why content is KING! It must be relevant and of high quality to meet Google’s standards and appeal to your end users as well. Here are essential SEO content writing rules to follow: 

• Write articles of around 700 words or more
• Ensure to use prominent keywords (but avoid over-optimization)
• Give plenty of examples, case studies, and visuals to your text
• Include internal and external links
• Structure your articles to appear in Snippets

2. Attract new visitors to your site

For Google, the user experience starts with the first click. And for this, it’s crucial to increase your CTR (Click-through rate). Ranking first on search engines is no longer enough to get visitors to your site. Nowadays, you must also craft compelling titles that will get them clicking. One way to do this is by setting yourself apart from competitors through unique and engaging meta titles and meta descriptions. Here are ways to increase your CTR:

• Work on your title and descriptions and ensure you include your main keywords
• Add characters or symbols to your copy ($, *, etc.)
• Add emojis to your tags (depending on your industry)
• Include structured data (recipes, reviews, articles, etc.)

3. Improve core web vitals

After users click on your page, Google’s algorithm will analyze their journey throughout the site. To improve user experience, you can check out Google Search Console and its Core Vitals report. Core Web Vitals offer three metrics that score a user’s experience when they visit your site, which include:

• Your site’s loading speed, known as LCP
• The length it takes for the browser to respond to the user’s input, also called FID
• How easy it is for users to access your content (CLS)

Here are ways to optimize your Core Web Vitals:

• Compress images
• Implement lazy loading (delayed image loading)
• Preload your fonts
• Optimize your CMS performance options
• Limit the use of external resources
• Maintain your site’s visual stability (CSS, images, advertising, etc.)

4. Optimize user experience (UX)

After your site meets Google’s standards of loading times, you must understand what users are doing on your site, which requires you to check out their navigation data. Google Analytics can help you check your bounce rate and average session duration. You can also use heatmaps to track what users are doing (such as how far they scroll and where they click) to complete your analysis. 

Here are things you can do to improve your website’s UX:

• Pay attention to the flow of your page (make visitors want to scroll down your page)
• Ensure a visually balanced page with clear headings
• Reduce text or image size to show a hint of the content underneath
• Add a breadcrumb trail for better navigation
• Use prominent links and call-to-action buttons (size, color, and elements that encourage users to take action)
• Boost conversion via a form or make a quick and easy purchasing process 
• Perform A/B testing, card sorting, or 5-second tests 

Final thoughts – when should you implement SXO?

The best time to implement SXO is at the start of a new website project during the planning process, reviewing a site, and during a website revamp. However, it’s also possible to introduce SXO to a potential site that isn’t working as it should be with the help of a UX and SEO audit and find areas of SXO improvement. 

Over time, focusing on SXO can lead to improved search visibility, organic clickthrough rates, and conversions. With the continuous development of machine learning and search engines, they’ll become more effective at filtering out good, helpful, and relevant content for search queries. Therefore, more SXO will be necessary to create more relevant and powerful websites.