Is Usability or SEO More Important?

When designing pages and creating content for them, web site owners must decide upon the best balance of usability and SEO (or Search Engine Optimization). Many favor one or the other and put more emphasis on it. But which is more important to your web site’s success, SEO or usability?

First, it should be made clear why such a decision has to be considered. When web pages are created with SEO in mind, keywords people search for must be picked out and used repeatedly in the page’s content. However, to achieve an appropriate density of keywords, some web site owners use awkward or redundant sentences, which reduces usability. Features like menus or user comment areas are sometimes left out to prevent them from negatively impacting the page’s SEO, as well.

It is important not to go too far on either extreme. It’s unlikely that many people will find a very well-written web page with rather poor SEO keyword density and words which hardly anyone searches for, so its usability becomes irrelevant. On the other hand, a page which has been perfectly keyword-optimized for SEO but is barely readable won’t produce many sales or advertisement clicks.

SEO oriented efforts can harm usability in less obvious ways as well. Some readers will find it obnoxious if a large percentage of the words on a page are linked to other pages (related to each word), and the link codes will make the page take longer to load. Adding a large number of words to the keyword META tag (or using large amounts of other code which is only read by search engine spiders) will also increase the page loading time, reducing usability.

However, some changes can benefit both search engine optimization and usability; using text-based links in your web site’s menus both makes it easier for search engine spiders to navigate your web site and enables people who are visually impaired, using older web browsers, or have images turned off to use the site. Adding a Site Map is another measure which is important for improving usability and SEO at the same time.

Generally, it is best to prioritize usability, but not excessively at the expense of SEO. While efforts aimed at SEO are important, it must be kept in mind that (in most situations) you want visitors on the web site to use it, not just click a search result for it.