User experience (UX for short) is about what happens to people while they are on your website. Did they manage to do the thing they came to do? Does every element on the page work, and does using the site feel good on the whole, or is something quietly going wrong?
Seen from a marketing angle, UX is an important and valuable part of the work. It takes over the moment traffic lands on the site. On one side UX is a ranking factor in organic visibility (SEO). On the other it decides whether visitors turn into paying customers or long term partners.
There are plenty of good reasons to look at UX closely.
This Türk SEM guide sets out the groundwork of user experience in online marketing: which aspects matter, which measures move the needle and which tools are worth your time. We also go through what you can change on your site today to make it friendlier.
Grab a coffee, and let us begin.
What is UX, and why does user experience matter so much?
Under ISO standard 9241, the term user experience (UX) covers every effect that using an interface has on people, before, during and after the use itself.
That makes user experience deeply subjective and tied to the individual: personal taste, earlier experiences and mood all shape it.
The definition is broad, so in online marketing it helps to work with models that break user experience into concrete factors. The two you will meet most often are these:
- the User Experience Honeycomb by Peter Morville
- the UX impact model by Facit Digital
Good user experience decides whether everything you do to bring people to the site (paid search, SEO, display advertising and the rest) ends up producing anything. If the site behind the campaign does not turn users into customers, the advertising is inefficient by definition. Where the experience is weak, the money and the hours you put into digital marketing burn away.
If you want conversions, you have to design a web experience where people feel comfortable and convinced. There is no way around it.
User experience rarely means a single website. It usually covers the whole journey a person takes with you, and that includes live chat, phone support and every other point of contact.
UX, UI and usability: the differences
UX, UI and usability sit close together and get mixed up constantly, often used as if they meant the same thing. They do not:
- UX (user experience) is the whole of what someone goes through with you. Usability is part of it, but so are psychological and emotional factors and whatever the person brings with them from earlier.
- Usability is narrower: can the interface be used? The question behind it is did the user reach their goal, on this site, with reasonable effort and in reasonable time, and were they satisfied with it? If they went pogo sticking back to the results, usability failed.
- UI (user interface) is the surface handed to the user to operate a website or a piece of software. It is the visible part of an application, the part people talk to, and it is where the experience takes shape.
How user experience connects to customer experience
User experience (UX) is often treated as the same thing as customer experience (CX). They are two different ideas.
User experience (UX) is what a customer goes through while using a product: how friendly it is, how it is designed, whether it does what it should. A positive user experience means people can use the product effectively. They reach their goal without hitting walls and without feeling swamped.
Customer experience (CX) is everything a customer goes through with a company. It starts at the first contact and carries on long after the purchase. Customer service, product quality and branding all feed into it. A positive customer experience leaves people feeling valued, and people who feel valued tend to buy again.
That is why UX and CX are tied together. A good experience with a company's product, website or advertising feeds straight into a good experience of the company itself. It works the other way round too, and users happy with a product will often recommend the company or buy something else from it.
So: if you want customers who stay and eventually champion your brand, give UX and CX equal attention.
How do you optimize UX?
Improving the user experience of your site can send your conversion rates through the roof. UX optimization is not something anyone can do from the outside, though: it is entirely a matter of what happens inside the site. If you have never given your UX strategy much thought, the first round will cost you some effort. It pays for itself.
The user experience audit
The best place to start is a UX audit of your own site. A handful of UX tools will show you where it is weak and where the potential sits. Watching real users is usually the part that gives you ideas. These are the tools to do it with:
- Hotjar
- Yandex Metrica
The user experience concept
The next step is a plan of work for improving the experience. Put the measures in order by what they return, what they cost you and how much they matter.
Because user experience is a whole rather than a set of parts, it is usually worth improving your pages and subpages together. Content and functionality should be coordinated so that, taken as one, they add up to a coherent journey.
What that journey should look like on your site is the heart of your UX concept. Which elements and which content carry it depends heavily on your conversion goal, so treat it as your own question rather than a template. Everything downstream, the concept, the design, the copy and the code, has to be coordinated around those goals.
Be clear about what the site you are working on is for and how it is meant to get there.
There are proven UX concepts, and you can put them into a format that fits your own site or project. From there the work splits up and everyone can start: a designer drafts the page as a wireframe, while a copywriter prepares content around a shared topic with a sound heading structure and the right keywords. The behavior of individual elements should be sketched out too, so that everyone involved knows how the page is meant to be built and how it should work.
One of the most useful inputs to a UX concept is the audience you are speaking to. It tells you about structure, about content, and about whether this page will mostly be seen on a phone or on a desktop. The next section covers how to work out who your audience is and how to speak to them properly.
Define your audience, understand it and speak to it properly
Good user experience starts with knowing your visitors. The real question is “who exactly are you designing this page or this piece of advertising for?“
The first step is a detailed description of that audience.
Part of it is knowing which market you operate in. Do you want to speak to people personally, or in their professional capacity? Are they B2B customers or B2C customers?
Depending on the market segment, marketing separates the characteristics that build an audience like this:
Audience characteristics in a B2C market
- demographic characteristics (age, gender, marital status, where they live and so on)
- socio-economic characteristics (level of education, income, occupation and so on)
- psychographic characteristics (attitudes, motivations, opinions and so on)
- behavioral characteristics (buying behavior, browsing behavior, price sensitivity and so on)
Audience characteristics in a B2B market
- basic company characteristics (company size, location, market share and so on)
- economic characteristics (finances, liquidity, stock levels and so on)
- the company's buying behavior (how buying centers are put together, supplier loyalty, when they buy and so on)
- the personal traits of the people who decide (how they gather information, time pressure, appetite for something new and so on)
An audience you define this way can turn out to be a mixed crowd. Keep in mind that it will be heterogeneous in some characteristics and homogeneous in others; the homogeneous ones are what we build on here. Take a site selling exam preparation books: the audience is likely to be
- heterogeneous in gender
- homogeneous in age
- heterogeneous in location
- homogeneous in behavioral characteristics.
Sharper targeting with personas
Working with buyer personas has proved particularly practical. A persona stands for the ideal representative of your audience, and this imaginary person makes it far easier to work out how the real audience behaves. Treat your audience as one person and draw a full psychological map of them.
Psychology for a better user experience
Approaches from psychology and neuroscience have proved useful in UX design, both for understanding an audience and for speaking to it.
Perceptual psychology studies how information is taken in, processed and stored. Which elements of a landing page get noticed in the first few seconds, or noticed at all, and which pieces of information register and make sense, come out of that field. Is your logo, your product or the benefit it offers understood immediately? Can the user tell what to do next, and is your call to action recognizable, readable and clear?
Perceptual psychology sits very close to the Gestalt approach, one of the foundations of how we work at Türk SEM. If we write up how we use the Gestalt approach in our SEO work, we will share it here.
Behavioral economics combines methods and findings from psychology and neuroscience with other disciplines: sociology, biology, economics, law and politics. It tries to understand how people actually decide, emotions included, and to put that understanding to work on economic questions.
Your aim here is to understand what people want, what they need and how they decide, as a whole rather than in pieces.
Buying decisions are never entirely rational. They rest on unconscious processes known as heuristics and biases. Those automatic patterns can be triggered in ways that carry people towards your goals.
Using those patterns is therefore a real opportunity to lift your conversion rate and improve the experience at the same time. That is why they are also called UX patterns.
Conclusion
UX design is a process, and watching how your visitors behave in Hotjar can tell you a great deal. User experience belongs at the front of any project you take on. It feeds your SEO work and it makes every other kind of digital marketing perform better.
