The power of Search Engine Optimization cannot be easily disputed. It can help any business build credibility and promote its brand to the market, attract the type of traffic that can lead to more sales, and provide insight into the character of your customers. However, in order for a business to benefit fully from SEO, it needs to ensure that it has a website that promotes Search Experience Optimization (SXO).

But wait, what is SXO?

Search Experience Optimization refers to a new trend where marketers are starting to realize the importance of a more holistic approach, recognizing that site visitors need to be placed at the heart of the SEO process. SXO is a way of ensuring that the visitor to a website has a great experience resulting from a site that is user-friendly. There are a number of things that website designers can do to achieve this.

Provide Helpful Content

In order to move from just focussing on keywords, ensure that the content you provide is useful to the person who visits your website. You can achieve this by consciously writing for people and not machines. Write it not only to be short and straight to the point but write also to address the unique needs of your target market.

Design the Site to Enhance User Experience

While it is important to ensure that your content, whether it is for social media marketing, a blog series or drip email campaigns, is highly effective, you will also need to ensure that the site on which the content is located does not disappoint visitors. The site needs to load fast, while also displaying properly across different devices.

You will also need to ensure that the navigation is clear. What this means is that visitors are able to distinguish between different clickable buttons so that they are not subjected to the frustration of clicking the wrong ones.

The design of the site should also be simple. This doesn’t mean that you should not invest sufficient effort and costs. In actual fact, it takes more effort to ensure that the website contains no clutter that could easily leave visitors confused.

The website should employ sufficient use of white space. This ensures that visitors do not feel that the information on the site is overwhelming them. When white space is used effectively, the website comes across as not being cluttered. It also ensures that the central message you are attempting to get to the visitors can clearly be located.

Follow Users to Mobile Devices

According to Mike Templeman of Forbes, search optimized websites understand that most people are now using mobile devices to browse the web. This is a statistic supported by the Telegraph which indicates that by as late as 2015, the number of people browsing the web using mobile devices had already exceeded the number of people doing so using desktops. Hence, businesses should be investing more resources in ensuring that their sites are optimized for this increasing mobile traffic.