The Role of User Experience in E-E-A-T

Reading Time: 5 minutes

User experience (UX) has become increasingly important for businesses to consider. 

With so many options available online, consumers expect websites to be easy to use and provide a seamless experience. 

The quality of a website’s UX can have a major impact on conversions, customer satisfaction, and overall business success.

UX also plays a key role in search engine optimization (SEO), specifically affecting user centric metrics like average session duration and dwell time. 

Good UX can also impact a website’s perceived E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) by the user. 

Google has emphasized the importance of E-E-A-T in providing quality content to searchers. 

While UX isn’t a direct E-E-A-T factor, it can definitely break users’ trust in a website when they don’t get a good experience.

What is User Experience (UX)?

User experience refers to how users interact with and perceive a product (website), system or service. 

It involves considering all aspects of a user’s interaction, including:

• Usability: How easy is it to learn and use the product? Can users accomplish tasks efficiently?
• Accessibility: Can users with disabilities access and use the product?
• Usefulness: Does the product solve a problem and provide value to users?
• Desirability: Is the product visually appealing and does it invoke positive emotions?
• Credibility: Does the product instill trust and appear credible?

The goal of UX design is to create products (websites) that are useful, easy to use, and delightful. 

This requires understanding users’ motivations, needs, and behaviors through user research.

What is E-E-A-T? (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

E-E-A-T refers to the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of a website, content, content creator, and brand. 

It is a concept promoted by Google to assess the quality and reliability of online information. 

The key elements of E-E-A-T include:

• Experience: The practical first-hand knowledge and skills of the author/website/company in the topic they cover.
• Expertise: The author’s/website’s/company’s recognized qualifications and skill in their field.
• Authoritativeness: How much the author/website is seen as a trustworthy source on the topic.
• Trustworthiness: How honest, credible and responsible the author/website is in their content.

Websites and creators with high E-E-A-T are considered trustworthy sources of information in their field. 

E-E-A-T is especially important for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics that can impact people’s health, finances or safety.

The Connection Between UX and E-E-A-T

There is a close connection between UX and E-E-A-T. 

Poor UX can undermine E-E-A-T, while good UX helps reinforce it. For example:

• Hard to navigate or cluttered design makes a website less authoritative.
• Broken pages or functionality damage credibility.
• Clear, readable content demonstrates expertise.

Optimizing UX is an opportunity to improve, or at least not break E-E-A-T. 

UX improvements like simplified navigation, mobile optimization, and faster load times can make a website appear more professional, usable, and trustworthy.

3 Main UX Elements Impacting E-E-A-T

There are three core elements of user experience design that can impact E-E-A-T.

Optimizing these three elements of UX is key to bolstering users’ perception of a brand’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Website Design

The design and layout of a website can impact user experience and perceptions of expertise. 

A dated, cluttered, or disorganized design may undermine credibility and make it difficult to find information. 

A clean, modern, responsive design demonstrates investment in the user experience.

Ease of use and navigation

The design and navigation of a website can greatly impact users’ ability to find information and accomplish tasks, affecting the website’s E-E-A-T. 

A website should be intuitive to use, with menus and internal links that help users easily navigate to desired content. 

Page layouts should be clean and well-organized. 

Design choices like font size and color scheme should allow for readability. 

Sites that are difficult to navigate or cluttered with distractions may seem less authoritative.

Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness

In 2016, more than 7 years ago, mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic in volume. 

Websites that are not mobile-friendly or fail to resize and reformat for mobile screens undermine their perceived E-E-A-T by the users. 

A website that displays poorly on smartphones and tablets feels outdated and behind-the-times, damaging credibility. 

Mobile sites should be streamlined, displaying the most important content while hiding non-essentials. 

Responsiveness and fast load times are also important on mobile.

Content Presentation

The way content is presented impacts how easily it can be consumed. 

Content should be well-formatted with clear headings, ample white space, an appropriate font size, and a readable font. 

Multimedia elements should complement rather than distract from the content. Clear presentation instills user trust.

Clarity and readability

The way content is presented impacts how easily users can consume and understand it. 

Text content should use proper grammar, punctuation and formatting. 

Font choices enhance readability. 

Well-written, engaging content demonstrates expertise. 

Overly complex language and style can make content difficult to comprehend. 

Presentation should also consider reading level based on the target audience.

Multimedia elements

Multimedia like images, videos and audio can enrich content when used purposefully. 

They should complement text rather than act as filler. 

Images should have descriptive alt text. 

Videos and audio should have transcripts available. 

Multimedia enhances content understanding and engagement when embedded effectively. 

But multimedia distractions may reduce E-A-T if overused or irrelevant to the content.

Site Performance

Fast page load speeds are critical, especially on mobile. 

Users expect pages to load quickly and may abandon a site if it is too slow. 

Optimizing images, minimizing server response time, implementing caching, and using a CDN helps improve performance. 

Fast load times signal expertise in site architecture.

How to Improve User Experience for E-E-A-T

Improving user experience involves optimizing website design, content presentation, and website performance. 

Even small UX enhancements can make a website appear more usable, professional, and trustworthy. 

Here are some tips to boost UX and E-E-A-T.

1. Enhance navigation and site structure for easy access to information

Clear navigation and site structure helps users quickly find desired information, improving E-E-A-T. 

Consider the following ways to enhance navigation:

• Use clear, descriptive menus and navigation links to help users quickly find information. Avoid overloading navigation with too many options.
• Structure the website logically and group related content together. Related content should be easy to locate from each page.
• Include site search and sitemaps to aid navigation.
• On long pages, use anchor links and tables of content to help users jump to sections on the page.

2. Improve mobile responsiveness for a seamless experience across devices

With more than half of traffic coming from mobile, having a seamless mobile experience is essential for E-E-A-T.

Make sure your site displays well on all devices with these tips:

• Optimize pages and site architecture for mobile. Avoid interstitials and popups that disrupt mobile use.
• Use responsive design and flexible images/video that adapt to mobile screen sizes.
• Check that tap targets like buttons and links are large enough for mobile use.

3. Use a modern and professional design to convey authority

A clean, modern website design demonstrates your expertise and enhances E-E-A-T. 

Keep these tips in mind:

• Choose a clean, uncluttered layout with ample empty space. Avoid amateurish designs.
• Use subtle, tasteful animations and visuals. Avoid excessive or distracting use of images, graphics, animations.
• Display credentials, certifications, awards, or other trust markers prominently.

4. Utilize multimedia elements such as images, charts, videos, etc. to supplement information

When used well, multimedia elements boost content understanding and engagement:

• Include relevant, high-quality images with descriptive alt text. Diagrams and charts can aid understanding.
• Embed helpful, properly attributed videos. Transcripts should be provided.
• Cite trustworthy external sources and link to high-quality reference material.

5. Optimize for loading speed

Fast page speeds indicate technical expertise and improve E-E-A-T. 

Some optimization tips include:

• Compress images and media files. Lazy load below the fold images/media.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, HTML files. Eliminate render-blocking resources.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) and cache static assets.
• Keep page weight and number of page requests low.

Conclusion

User experience and E-E-A-T have a symbiotic relationship. 

A positive user experience reinforces E-E-A-T, while strong E-E-A-T signals lead to greater user engagement and satisfaction.

By making UX a priority, brands can create websites and content that users trust and enjoy interacting with. 

This builds loyalty while also enhancing search engine reputation.

Some of the most important UX optimizations for improving E-A-T include:

• Simplifying navigation to make desired content easy to find.
• Optimizing for mobile users.
• Using a clean, modern website design.
• Formatting content for maximum clarity and readability.
• Incorporating relevant images, videos and multimedia.
• Speeding up page load times.

The more useful, usable, and delightful a website is, the more authoritative it will feel to users. 

UX and E-E-A-T have a mutually beneficial relationship. 

By making ongoing improvements to UX, brands can continue building trust and enhancing their E-E-A-T.

The key is to regularly gather user feedback and site analytics to identify issues and opportunities for better meeting user needs. 

With a user-centered approach to UX and E-E-A-T, brands can create websites that attract, engage, and convert their target audience.