Hi there! 👋

Today I'm sharing a note on what is the role of UX in SEO.

Now, for the last week's news, the structured data testing tool is finally moved from Google’s property to Schema.org, and it is live now.

The new Schema.org markup validator is more for “general purpose” and aimed at helping site owners debug many more structured data types, well beyond the Google-supported ones.

Also, a Twitter user shared a knowledge panel screenshot (for query "Svalbard") where Google is crediting itself instead of Wikipedia.

It's not clear yet if Google is extracting the content from sites and re-writing it using AI or if the content is licensed; we'll get to know more on this in the coming days, maybe.

Now, let's get to this week's SEO tip... 💥

Over the last few years, user experience (UX) has become a significant factor for Google, which means if your site has a poor user experience, it will most likely struggle in Google search.

Now Google focuses on providing the best experience to searchers, which makes UX important for SEO.

Think like this: SEO drives traffic to your site, and the UX gets that traffic to convert.

So let's understand how you can integrate UX and SEO together in your site...

• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
• Simplify navigation
• Keep your site fast
• Focus on quality
• Use ads that can help people take the next step
• and, Don't lazy load the primary content based on the user interactions

A good website user experience provides great usability, clear navigation structure, properly formatted content for readability, strategic CTAs, and quality content that can actually help the user.

Finally, UX plays a massive role in SEO. If you want to excel at SEO, you need to make sure your UX is on point.

You can refer to Backlinko's resource on UX and ContentKing's guide to learn more on this.

• Several months after Google said it would deprecate the Google structured data testing tool, Schema.org has launched its markup validator tool at validator.schema.org.
• The markup validator helps you validate your structured data on your site that is used for general purposes outside of the Google rich results testing tool.

• Alan Kent from Google posted some excellent best practices on the Google Search Central blog aimed at helping ecommerce businesses with video SEO.
• The blog post first shares how videos can be used for eCommerce sites for product pages, blog posts, and live streaming events.
• Then Alan explains how to use video structured markup, how to style videos for customers, the availability of the indexing API for live streams, video sitemap files, and much more.

• Keyword mapping is the process of organizing which pages on your sites should rank for which keywords.
• However, the mapping process may not look exactly the same for every type of site.
• Aleyda Solis has seen how the search journey differs based on the very different sales cycles of commerce vs SaaS vs local services and created a free Google Sheets template for each to help you with the mapping process.

• SearchPilot performed a case study where they tested if adding review content to pages that had no other content about the location would have a bigger impact than adding reviews to pages that already had some content.
• To find out, they tested this on two separate subsets of pages: one with pre-existing content about the location and one without.
• Finally, both of these tests had an inconclusive impact on organic traffic.
• So while adding useful content and structured data doesn’t always have as big or immediate traffic impacts, as Google's algorithm evolves, content like this may provide valuable gains in the long term or at the next big update.

• Interesting Twitter thread where many SEOs shared their thoughts about the trends that can shake up the SEO sector, and that will absolutely have to be mastered!

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Until next week! :)

Saksham

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