Why Having A User-First Approach To SEO Is Important • TotalWeb Partners

In the search engine optimization business, we spend so much time thinking about Google algorithms, sitemaps, and backlinks that we sometimes lose sight of the primary goal: providing useful information to human visitors.

In the past, it was easy to understand why. You could cram your page with keywords, slap on a few meta tags, and voila! Your page was on the first page of search engine results.

Google rightfully recognized this wasn’t the best way to provide top-quality answers to search queries, so it adapted its algorithms. Evidence of Google’s interest in improving user experience (UX) is found with updates like Panda in February 2011, Core Web Vitals, and other core updates that happen regularly.

That’s not to say you can completely forgo aspects of traditional SEO and that keywords no longer matter. Search engines still take foundational SEO attributes into account.

But organic search now also depends on implementing a user-first approach.

So how do you do that? Here is a list of five steps you can take to make your site more user-friendly, and hopefully climb further up the search engine results page rankings.