How to improve user experience (U.X) on a website (A 2026 Guide)

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How to improve user experience (U.X) on a website (A 2026 Guide)

How to improve user experience on a website

Author: Ryan Christopher Walsh

Table of contents:

• Why good site structure matters
• How to use H1 through to H6 tags correct
• How good web design can help to improve dwell times
• How to improve page speed
• Why reducing bounce rates matter
• How to better optimise your website for smartphones
• How to improve the user experience on your website

You could honestly hire the best SEO consultant on the planet, yet if the web design is poor, then you won’t generate any more sales.

Good web design and offering a good user experience is therefore so important. The search engines, such Google are using RankBrain, which is powered by AI to monitor engagement signals.

Google’s RankBrain therefore asks questions such, how long has that shopper spent on the website (dwell times)?

How many visitors visited just one page, without visiting another? Then they left after a short period? That’s what we marketing consultants refer to as the bounce rate.

 

There are so many things that you could do, to improve your websites user experience, here’s just a few:

• Good website architecture- this means how have all the pages been arranged?
• Do you know how to add page titles, and use H1 to H6 to better optimise the content?
• Have you used Google Page Speed Insights to speed up the page
• Have you used spit testing to improve your websites mobile design?
• Do you know to implement web design to improve the user experience?
• What is website architecture? What does this mean?

 

Have you ever visited a website, where the layout is just not logical?

For example, the e-commerce website may sell thousands of products, trying to get to that product you want seems like trying to find a needle in hay-stack?

This poor website architecture.

It simply means that marketing agency and the web design agency haven’t thought about how shoppers flow through the website.

Is it an absolute breeze to get to the products you want?

Or is it, like an endless loop, where some visitors might even get frustrated leaving the website, increasing the bounce rate?

Therefore, you need to improve the page layout, here’s how you that.

Consider how leading companies in your business sector have arranged their products or services

• Are there redundant pages that could be redirected or removed?
• Could the main navigation be improved further?
• Could there be greater use of visual elements to direct shoppers to the right page, such as for example a picture of fridge freezer?
• Could some products be grouped together?
• Could you help the customer to better find what they need by adding more sort options, such as arrange products by cheapest or most expensive?
• Do you new product pages need to be added?

Make sure you add an XML sitemap. Plus, if you have modified and improved any pages, then do ask Googlebot to manually crawl and index that page.

Good use of page titles (H1-H6)

Sometimes, businesses just focus on word count when they are writing an article.

This is not a good idea, because, well you end up with 2,000 words in a giant block of text, which Googlebot, doesn’t know what the page is about.

Plus, people today are in more of a rush that ever, if they can’t get to the information they want, well they will just leave.

They leave, and perhaps visit a competitor’s website, where there are good use of page titles, they may skip to section they want to read more about.

They could then follow an internal link, and perhaps even purchase an item from that business.

Therefore, titles are important, they should have a logical flow throughout your businesses content marketing.

A lot of copywriters and marketing agencies refer to this, as the work having a “back-bone”.

This just means that you should use titles, such as H1 through to H6, and you can use these to structure your work.

Not only do they send a crystal clear message to the search engines such Google or Bing what the page is about, they also, help the shopper or the reader to skip to the section they really want to read more about.

Therefore, instead of writing huge slabs of text, which might be off putting to a reader, as they may not want to read entire 1000-word article.

They may just want to skip to part where they want there question answered.

Therefore, a top tip, especially now marketing agencies are optimising for GEO as well, is to write in a more conversational way.
Actually, we would recommend, not just writing in a conversational way, we would recommend actually setting the page up using FAQ style of writing. Then if you are using a quality CMS, such as WordPress, well you can just mark-up the titles using H1-H6 mark-up tools, which are in-built into the WordPress editor.

 

Improve page speed

Is your website like a Japanese bullet train- always on time and fast, and reliable?

Or is it more like a slow moving, coal burning locomotive.

You want your company website to be as fast as possible, as no shoppers want to visit a slow website.

Therefore, to improve the websites U.X, you want the website to load faster. You will want to reduce the server response times; a slow response time often increases the businesses bounce rate.

 

Therefore, top web design companies, work hard to make the website faster. You can use tools such as Google’s Page Speed insight tool, or

GTMetrix, to gain an understanding of how you can speed the website up.

A lot of marketing agencies understand that JavaScript can slow a website down, often web developers use Google Page Speed Insight tool, to understand where they can speed the website up.

 

Optimised for smartphones.

A huge number of shoppers will now use there smartphones to purchase products, its therefore important that the website is optimised for smartphones.

Therefore, its important to have a responsive design, where the main navigation is simple to use.

What else should we think about when improving a websites U.X?

Think about the font you use, and the colour contrast. For example, is the text a piece of cake to read?

Or does it mean that your eyes are strained, when you read the text, because the font or the colour constant, such as black background with a hard to read font, will strain the readers eyes.

This could itself cause a jump in the websites bounce rate, just based on the font used.

How can Ryan Christopher Walsh SEO help?

Well, we are one of the most established SEO companies. As part of our monthly SEO work, we can work hard to improve your businesses user experience.

We have some of the best SEO consultants working for us. If you would like a free, quote, why not call us?
 

What is generative engine optimization & how does it work?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on What is generative engine optimization & how does it work?

Tell more about Generative Engine Optimisation- what is it? How does it work?

We know about search engine optimisation, aka SEO, it’s something that businesses understand that they need. It doesn’t matter if you are a sole trader, or run a huge global business, SEO has become a fundamental part of a business’s marketing efforts.

But what is GEO, what is this latest digital type of marketing?

Well, go and get a nice cup of tea and we will explain more.

 

In this article we will be discussing the following:

• What exactly is generative engine optimisation
• What is the main difference between GEO and SEO
• How exactly do generative AI systems, such as Google AI Overview work exactly?
• Tell me more about the benefits of using GEO
• How can our business better optimise our content for the LLM’s

Tell me more about generative engine optimisation

There are now so many new AI platforms out there it’s hard to keep up with the changes.

You have Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot just to name a view. How these AI driver search engines work is very different from how

Google presents organic results.

Therefore, have a nice sip on that tea, let us talk more about generative engine optimisation.

 

How Google works:

When we think about how the traditional search engines work, they for decades have completed the same process.

That is crawling, indexing and then ranking websites in the organic search results.

Now, this meant to some extent that the shopper, or person wanting to find an answer to query, what they had to do was sift and wade through the information to find an answer.

One the many reasons we believe AI Overviews in Google plus also leading AI platforms like ChatGPT are becoming so popular, is because right in front of your eyes you gain a answer straightaway to your query.

No “pogo-sticking” from page to page, no jumping through different business websites to get the answer you want.

The answer is there right Infront you.

 

Multiple data points are used

When you want to gain answer from a friend down the pub, is it better to get just one answer, or all your friends tell you what they think.

A lot of people therefore like to gain multiple perspectives to a question; this allows them to make more informed decision.

Again, what is great about the AI platforms is most of them, when “synthesising” a answer to a question, what they do, is they pull an answer from multiple data points.

For example, the answer might come from Bloomberg, come from also say The Guardian and also the Financial Times website.

What this means that the synthesised answer, is an answer that’s come multiple different websites.

 

Tell me more about the difference between GEO and SEO

In regards to SEO, web pages are ranked according to relevance and quality. The 200 plus ranking factors can often be placed into one of the

Google EEAT guidance. Now GEO is totally different, in real time you’re getting an AI generated response, which is most summarized information that’s been rehashed from the training data that was fed to the LLM in first place.

 

Authority vs Keywords

We are SEO experts, so what we would say is one of the main differences between SEO and Geo is that SEO is more reliant on keywords.

Therefore, the page is crawled and its indexed, and what this does, it uses keywords to understand what the page is about. Technical SEO also helps with this.

However, GEO is more about pulling answers into its training data, where it has selected the information because it believes that page is authoritative content marketing.

For example, if you want to gain information about the UK financial economy, the LLM’s might be trained to pull data from The Bank of England’s own website for example.

Because the training data and the LLM’s have deemed that as the most authoritative place to go and obtain information relating to the economy.

 

Different way of measuring performance

There is totally different way of measuring performance that the marketing managers will need to get customised to.

The main difference is with SEO you are focused on the businesses rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.

However, with GEO the goal posts are totally different, for example, now businesses are how often the LLM’s are reference the content through a citation. Then how much traffic comes via those citations, its not therefore a matter of rankings any more, when it comes to GEO optimisation.

 

Continuous improvement, machine learning, custom built systems

What you have to appreciate is that the LLM’s are custom built systems. They all have their own type of architecture and some are set to incorporate machine learning.

For example, when you ask a question such as how high is the Eiffel tower, when does the restaurant one? If you receive a satisfactory answer, you may press the thumbs button, to symbolise that your happy with that answer that has been provided.

This satisfory response gets fed back to the LLM’s.

However, for example if you were to ask another question, and thousands upon thousands of shoppers are dissatisfied with the response, then the machine learning model is likely to modify the results. Then measure how satisfied the shopper is with the new answers, so that the LLM’s are now constantly learning.

What are the advantages of optimising our content for GEO?

The advantages are absolutely massive.

However, getting there is extremely hard.

The advantages are, when somebody is asking a question about the products or the services that your selling, your business time and time again could be quoted as the answer.

A clear citation then could take those shoppers to your store.
Instead of like with Google organic results, where you’re competing with 10 other organic links, often the LLM’s such as ChatGPT often quote a lot less businesses.

This means less competition.

This means that if you get it right, you could be funnelling potentially tens of thousands of shoppers to your website.

However, because less citations are shown, this means that it’s hard to get your business shown there.

 

Quality content marketing is still key

What is abundantly clear is this, a business stands no chance of appearing in GEO results or SEO unless you have really high-quality content marketing.

The LLM’s through their training data, plus, also the search engines such as Google, have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages that they could select for displaying in the SERP’s or the LLM’s.

 

So why should they choose your work?

The answer is, therefore the content marketing needs to be very high quality.

Therefore, whether you are optimising for GEO or for SEO, what you have to think about is Google EEAT.

How can you show in your written work, you have experience and expertise in terms of what you are talking about?

How can you then improve the authority of that page?

How can you demonstrate that the work is trustworthy?

When you do this, and you produce very high-quality content marketing, which offers a far superior answer than the competition, then you can rank higher in Google’s serps.

Also, you are more likely to be displayed as answer in the LLMs if you constantly writing good quality content marketing, such as what you are reading here.

 

What constitutes as high quality content marketing?

Better than the competition

In this article, we discussing GEO, however, here’s something that our marketing agency has done for many years.

That is, look at the question that you want to write about in Google’s Organic Serp’s.

Then ask yourself how can you make your work even better?

How can you write a better article than the competition have written?

Then you have to add the following on-page SEO factors, now these are good for both GEO and SEO.

That is, ad structured data.

Add structured data to your website

Take the time to add structured data, this will help the search engines, and GEO to understand what you are writing about.

 

Content distribution

If you are regularly reader to our blog, you will know that we have been blogging about semantic SEO for many years.

There is good reason for this, as it can help improve the businesses organic rankings, and the GEO.

Therefore, in terms of the semantic SEO, get your business mentioned on high quality websites.

 

This could mean the following:

• Business mentions, so brand mentions
• Gain high quality links
• Also NAP mentions.
• Google EEAT

In this article we talk about Google EEAT, the reason is, if you get this right, your website will rank higher organically.

However, because its ranking higher organically, then its more likely to be cited by Google AI Overviews.

Also many of the worlds leading SEO experts, what they say is, if your website is ranking high organically, then this text, such as blog post is more likely to be read by the LLM’s.

If your website is read by the LLM’s, then it’s more likely to be cited as an answer.

 

Improve brand authority and also semantic web

Its also important to improve your businesses brand authority, now we do fully appreciate that this is easier said than done.

However, what we have read at this agency, is that businesses which have say more backlinks, cited as a brand more often, these are the websites more authority.

And as any top SEO consultant from around the whole world will tell you, for ages now to improve your businesses organic SEO you needed backlinks.

Google when first was invented, by the great Larry Page, they created PageRank.

Now this meant that to rank higher organically, a business needed a number of quality links.

However now in 2026, its still thought that backlinks are very important. The reason for this simple, backlinks improves the authority of website, they said more link equity through to the domain, if the inbound links are high quality backlinks.

Therefore, it just stands to reason that in the new era of GEO optimisation, that the AI platforms such as Perplexity are going to take answers cited from the first page of Google.

Even if you run a marketing company, and yoru thinking there’s no coloration between the first page Google results, and the AI results, well what about Google AI Overviews?

Its widely thought that if you rank highly organically, Google will cite your business more often in Google AI overviews.

 

Good technical SEO is more important than ever

It used to be the case that web designers and SEO agencies around the globe, were just checking to see if Googlebot could crawl and index the page.

Because the reason is, businesses, plus their appointed SEO experts, often they were only asked to optimise just for Google.

So, they were just focused on whether Googlebot could crawl and index that page.

However, times have changed, the LLMs now need to read the work, therefore its important to make sure that the AI models can easily crawl and index your businesses content marketing.

The technical SEO needs to be set up right, for this we would recommend hiring an agency.

 

They need to make the following:

• The website is mobile friendly
• Implemented SLL
• The website has a clear site structure
• The GEO bots can crawl the page
• That the website hosting is reliable, and doesn’t go off often
• Make sure that there’s an XML site map
• Have a read of the robot.txt to insure there’s nothing stopping the page from getting indexed
• Optimise the website so it fast
• Mobile friendliness to ensure that the mobile version of the website can also get crawled and indexed
• Internal links should be added, so that the bots can crawl the website.

 

How can we better optimise our website for ChatGPT?

Gain brand mentions:

What especially important for optimising for ChatGPT is gaining mentions, that’s brand mentions on high quality websites.

If your brand is regularly quoted on high authority websites, which relevant to your business niche, then your business will often be cited more ChatGPT.

Therefore for example, if you run a business say selling e-bikes, if your regularly cited by the top bike magazines, then your business is going to be cited more by the LLMS.

 

Relevancy

The websites, we believe that are more focused on selling a particularly product or service, do better in ChatGPT.

This means the businesses which are more focused on say product line, such as selling Jacuzzis online, these will be cited more often.

However the content marketing needs to answer commonly asked question, it needs to addresses the questions your customer frequently asks.

Therefore, if the content is relevant, then your business more likely to be cited.

This is why our top SEO business always says that if you optimise for Google organic results, and focus on improving your businesses Google EEAT score, you can also at the same time increase your businesses chances of being cited more in the LLMS, such as ChatGPT.

 

Domain authority

If you were to have a chat, with the best GEO agencies in the world, they will say to optimise for ChatGPT you have to also focus on improving your business domain authority.

To do that it’s the same as traditional SEO, meaning more quality backlinks.

Conversational tone, plus don’t use AI copy

If you want to increase how often your business is cited in the LLM’s, you often have to write using a conversational tone.

We always at this agency, describe this as offering advice to the reader, as if you were talking to a real person in a shop.

Now you must use a conversational tone.

However, don’t use AI text, it’s far better that you write this text yourself. Remember the guidance of Google EEAT, that is, the work should show that you’re an expert in terms of what you are talking about.

Whether your talking about luxury aftershave, or perhaps the best hyper car on the market right now, you have to show you’re an expert on what you’re writing about.

 

Keep your written work up-to-date

Whether its training data, that’s been used to train the LLMS, such as ChatGPT.

Or perhaps it’s a blog post to offer an in-depth answer to query that your customer regularly asks, that you want to rank high for within

Google’s organic SERPs.

Its important to keep your content marketing up to date, the reason is both ChatGPT and Google want to cite an up-to-date answer to a question.

How Many Backlinks Does It Take to Rank on Page 1?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How Many Backlinks Does It Take to Rank on Page 1?

Can you tell me how many backlinks are needed to a get business on page 1 of Google?

Building backlinks can be massively time consuming, therefore naturally the link builder will want to know how many backlinks they need to build.

However, lets answer this question right at the top of the article, that is there’s no fixed number of backlinks a business can build to get on page one of Google.f

This means that there is no magic set number.

The reason being is that there are so many other factors to consider.

In SEO we call these factors, ranking factors, and in matter of fact there are over 200 ranking factors to consider.

Therefore, you could be building backlinks until your blue in the face, however, you have to work on improving the other SEO areas as well.

Why competitor backlink analysis is like comparing apples with pears

When you use a quality backlink checking tool, you can have a look at what backlinks your direct competitors have been building.

If they have been busy bees, then they might have built a ton of backlinks.

However, here’s why comparing your businesses backlinks with your direct competitors is a bit like comparing apples with pears.

The reason is, often businesses have a few or many really good backlinks. These might pass a lot of link equity, and are like the jewel’s if you like in the crown. Meaning that these are the many links that are giving that business so much domain authority.

However, here is the slight dilemma, that is, sometimes these links can’t be replicated.

If you run a restaurant, and it’s been voted the best restaurant in the whole country for what you do, you might gain a backlink from a national newspaper.

However, you direct competitor that’s just down the road, who also owns a restaurant doing the same kind of food can’t easily replicate that link. Because, well, the link has been given on the basis of a food award.

This is why comparing competitor’s backlink profiles is a bit like comparing apples with pears- as sometimes, you see that your direct competitors have good links, however replicating them is difficult.

 

Naturally built

Therefore, if you approach backlink building, from a mere mathematical perspective, often this approach to link building just doesn’t work.

The reason is, well you might say our direct competitors have 100 backlinks, I need 101 and I will then outrank them.

It really honestly does not work like that, and we shall explain why.

The reason that we think that is quite simple, that is the best backlinks come when you build a natural backlink profile.

Now what this means is, rather than just trying to replicate the same links most of your competitors have, the best links come from publishing superior quality content marketing.

 

Google EEAT and standing out by being better

Therefore, we would highly recommend having a good read of Google’s Helpful Content update as well as having a good read of Google EEAT advice.

Now what that will tell you is, if you offer top quality superior advice, and you answer that question better than any other business on the planet, then Google will rank that page highly in the SERP’s.

Now if you answer the question really well, then you can rank higher than the competition.

Perhaps if you have answered the question really, really well, then you might rank in the top 5 globally for that question.

Now, as perhaps millions of people might find that page super useful, they will naturally want to link to you.

For example, imagine you offer some DIY advice, which paint brushes and varnishes should be used on floorboards to achieve a transparent finish.

Imagine how many DIY websites, bloggers, interior design websites might link to you. Then rather than just replicating the competitor’s same links, well, you’ve potentially opened the flood gates for a lot of relevant websites to want to naturally link to you, therefore, if the content marketing is really helpful you can earn links this way.

Quality is far better than quantity

Think of it like this, you can stuff yourself on pizza and garlic bread and feel rather bloated!

Yet at the same time, a short period after you can feel hungry.

The reason being is that food offers no nutrients, its just empty calories, that are going to expand your waist line!

Now building backlinks, can do the exact same thing- that is you can have a backlink profile as long as your arm, but if there not quality links, then this could actually be harming your businesses organic SEO.

Therefore, think of quality links, the same way you would think about quality food. You want to obtain quality links; therefore, quality is far better than quantity.

How do I earn quality backlinks?

The best way to earn quality backlinks is to gather your most experienced and knowledgably staff all in one room.

Then put the kettle on, work with your SEO agency to come up with a “content calendar”.

What this will do is set out for the months ahead, what you are going to be writing about.

Then you want your staff, who have the most experience and expertise in that area to help write the content marketing.

Pour their knowledge and expertise into the work, just the same way you pour a large glass of wine on Friday evening!

This means, work with the person that’s the expert on that product, and incorporate their knowledge into the article.

This will then improve the Google EEAT score of the work, because Googlebot when indexing it will instantly know that the person who has published the work, knows what they are talking about.

Plus, think about how you can improve the Google EEAT score for that page, so if that person is say an expert on employment law, then do get their opinion and incorporate that into the employment law article.

 

Link diversity

Now, it is possible with link building too have too much of a good thing.

Now what we mean by that is, let’s say you use a backlink checking tool, you see that you have a good quality backlink that has just linked to say the homepage on the website.

Now you might think, that’s good, lets reach out and contact the website that’s linked to you, and see if we can get some more, then some more, and some more links from he same business.

However, this is a flawed strategy.

The reason why it’s a flawed strategy is simply because you’re going to then obtain far too many links all from one place.

Ideally, the best backlink profiles, a business can get is when you have quality links, from websites with high DA score, but from a wide range of different businesses.

Therefore, you have say 100 links, but all of those links come from say 100 different websites.

 

Don’t buy or use spam links

Our top recommendation to you, would be never, ever buy links.

Spam links are a total false economy, waste of time, and even mean that the website obtains a Google penalty.

This means that Google doesn’t link businesses which build spam links, what can happen is that the business is removed from the index.

Which means that the website can disappear, it could be ranked say 3rd, then because the SEO company has built so many spam links, it then gets removed.

This means that its de-indexed because of say a Google Penguin penalty.

Then it can be a very long road to recovery.

In matter of fact the business may never sometimes get back on page one of Google, because of it building spam links.

It damages Google’s trust in that business.

So, this is why you have to choose your SEO agencies wisely!

 

Backlinks are not everything!

As we mentioned right at the top of this article, backlinks are not everything!

There are a lot of other ranking factors which Google uses to work out which businesses should be ranked on page 1.
Content quality is key.

Therefore, if your website has a lot of content thin, duplicated pages, or AI written text, well this means that even if you have been building a ton of links, if the content marketing is low quality, often you will never rank on page 1.

 

How do I find quality links to build?

The best way to gain links is to earn them.

This is why even the biggest brands in the whole world, why they still spend millions on creating content marketing.

Whether this be blog posts, infographics, on embedded video.

What the businesses want is to offer helpful advice.

Whether that’s why a particular running trainer is the best in the world, or someone sat at a desk explaining why they are the best solicitor in that area.

This can help create links, because your suppliers, other businesses, people who have found the work useful and helpful can then link to it.
So therefore, by being super helpful, you can gain links.

 

Does link building ever come to an end?

No, not really.

Links are always being deleted, plus, the competitors are always building brand new links.

So, in that respect it’s a bit like building sand castles when the tide is coming in!

Therefore, this is why it’s a balance between competitor backlink building, however, we think at this SEO agency that more emphasis should be placed on creating high quality, helpful content marketing.

This work should have a super high Google EEAT score, which can then help to raise that page in Google’s SERP’s.

When you do this, quite simply more people will read the work.

The more people that read you work, some of them might have their own blogs, business websites and choose to mention your work.

Why is my website ranking lower if I have better links?

This comes back to the point that we made a little earlier on.

That is Google’s algorithm doesn’t just use backlinks in isolation to work out where a business should rank in the SERP’s.

It uses over 200 various ranking factors, backlinks, sure they are important, the right ones are really valuable.

However, the rest of the ranking factors must also be improved.

 

How much should we pay for link building?

Here at Ryan C Walsh, we offer fixed-priced monthly packages. As part of this work, we can help to improve your backlinks.

How can Ryan C Walsh help?

 

We are one of the best most experienced SEO companies in Wales, for a quote why not call us?