How SEOs can Benefit From the Crossover Between CX, UX and SEO

Whether you work in SEO at an agency or in-house, you likely work alongside people focused on customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX). While I firmly believe that in the future CX, UX and SEO roles will be best fulfilled when individuals are responsible for more than just one of these disciplines, there’s a necessity today of divvying up these responsibilities.

Today CX, UX and SEO are traditionally defined in three different ways.

Customer Experience is focused on business goals. It emphasizes the entire customer journey, both online and offline.

User Experience is focused on user goals. It emphasizes the digital journey of the customer upon his or her arrival to your website or digital experience.

Search Engine Optimization is focused on both business goals and user goals. It emphasizes the digital journey of the customer before and after he or she arrives to your website or digital experience.

As SEOs, we can gain great benefits from better understanding the roles and motivations of the CX and UX partners we work with on a regular basis.

Our partnership with CX

If we understand what makes our CX counterparts tick, we have the opportunity to be more successful at driving the right types of customers and potential customers to our digital properties. CX is concerned with business goals and ensuring that the customer achieves them. Whether that means selling more of a particular high-dollar product or increasing the number of positive reviews for a particular piece of media the company has produced, there is always a business-driven motivation driving your CX counterpart.

CX insights can help SEOs determine how to focus our “business as usual” efforts, new opportunities and unique solutions. By understanding the overall business goals that CX is focused on, we can better understand what to tackle next and how to do it. That could take form by means of creating a list of long-tail keyword phrases that could drive business or determining a content strategy to help amplify our brand and support a goal that is set for a later part of the fiscal year.

Our partnership with UX

If we understand the research and driving factors of our UX teammates, we can help ensure the customers and potential customers we drive to our digital platforms have a pleasant experience. UX is primarily concerned with the experience of the user on the site and how he or she is able to find the information needed to accomplish key tasks. This might mean paying close attention to heat maps, scroll depth or time on page. UX professionals also lean on real user data through qualitative methods such as user tests and focus groups.

By paying attention to the metrics our UX partners use to make decisions and thinking more like UX experts we can make more educated changes to on-page elements of our SEO strategies. Understanding things like heat map and scroll depth data can help us prioritize what content or onpage elements are most important to users. This allows us to make page updates that optimize for both high-volume keywords and customer preferences.

Qualitative data like user tests can help us decide how content or navigation should be structured to help prevent users from having a poor experience. If we can provide users with a more positive experience (and thus improve negative experience indicators like bounce rate, pogo-sticking and low time on page) we’ll also reap the benefits from search engines.

The more knowledge you have to inform your decisions, the better SEO you will be. And until we reach a point where we’re responsible for the KPIs owned by each of these roles, it’s best that we work together closely so that we get the right kind of traffic to our digital properties, please the user when they arrive and convert and delight the customer time and time again.