There’s more to SEO than content

Most people these days talk about SEO as being content, content, content. But, the major search engines  are moving more and more away form pure content and keywords and into a territory dominated by user experience. This means that building your website correctly from the very beginning is extremely important.

Loading Speed
Speed is growing into a huge factor for SEO as Google realizes that it’s a huge factor in bounces. A good time to shoot for here is 3 seconds or less. Anything over and you’re going to start seeing a huge number of bounces and people leaving the site. No one likes waiting and the patience threshold lowers on a device.

User Experience
This one is a lot harder to peg down, but generally you’re looking for easy navigation, big easy buttons, and readable text. Basically, if a user bounces because they can’t figure out what to do, you have poor usability. Clear this up by making it really obvious to a visitor what it is that you want them to do. It’s easier than you think.

Stats
Stats are how Google is measuring all of these factors in usability. They can’t see how readable your text is or how easy your navigation is so it looks at your bounce rate, your new vs. returning visitors and the length of stay. You need to watch these yourself and cut off any problems before Google sees them.