Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Laurah Mwirichia

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Digital Work Frenemies?

For many UX designers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that we know exists but often try to avoid until the last possible moment. I’ve read plenty of articles telling UX designers, “Don’t focus too much on the SEO, create and write for users using their language.” Which is nice in theory, but obscures the fact that SEO should not be an afterthought in the design process. When SEO is thrown in at the end, you get not only terrible SEO, but a dreadful user experience to boot.

So how do you marry the two when on the surface, SEO principles seem to constantly go against the very principles of UX design itself. While SEO specialists work to optimize a site to be higher ranked by whatever algorithm the search engines are using at the time, UX designers work to optimize a site to create a great user experience for the user. Optimization experts focus on learning what the machine (search engine) wants, while designers focus on what humans (users) need. A constant tug of war between man and machine. But looking beyond the surface, the fundamental concepts of both areas of concentration are much more interconnected than it may seem. In fact, when SEO and UX are working in concert, the product is more successful, machine optimized, and user friendly than it would be otherwise.

Differences Dividing Us

UX designers have to keep both the user and the business in mind when designing products. Not only do they have to make things look better, but they have to create an experience for their user in such a way that the user is likely to engage in a call to action (click a link, buy a product, sign up for a mailing list etc) and thereby meet whatever goals the business has hired the designer to help them achieve.

SEO on the other hand, has a heavy focus on data and content availability. As the search engine crawls through a website it’s looking for certain pieces of information that can help it discern where to rank that website so that people can find it. In its own way, it is also trying to help the user and the business, but with a relatively one dimensional understanding of what human beings want. This causes companies like Google continue to try and improve their search engines, ending up with what we like to call, the cycle of SEO:

Also known as, “the never-ending loop of death.”

Challenges At Hand

The differences between how an SEO expert and a UX expert see the same problem is understandably divergent. SEO experts have to consider the point of view of the machine in order to get the product to be visible to the users. They know the search engine prioritizes key words, images, responsive design, and links (among many, many other factors) and so they will try to add these into the product/website, sometimes to the detriment of the design itself.

On the other hand, designers often have a mindset of “if we build it (well) they will come.” No, they won’t come because they don’t know your site exists if it doesn’t show up early enough in a google search. It is our job as UX designers to find a way to properly unite what can be intrusive aspects of SEO methods with the design, in such a way that neither the user nor the search engine feel like they are being manipulated. For example, people don’t like having things repeated at them over and over again- and the search engines have started to notice this and penalize sites that engage in activities like keyword stuffing.

Coming Together

Although the approach to the problem solving is different, both SEO and UX have the same shared goals: identify the problem a user is having and solve it. An Optimization specialist wants people to find your website and stay there. A designer wants people to enjoy being on the website so much that they engage with it for whatever the end goal is. At the end of the day, they both need each other- SEO is the ying to UX’s yang. SEO brings people to your product, but UX keeps them there and gets them invested. The glue that holds these seemingly diametrically opposed disciplines together, is that with both UX and SEO, the user always has to come first.

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UX vs SEO

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