Let’s have a quick moment of honesty. When was the last time your website made someone smile? Not just load properly—actually made a person say, “Hey, this is easy to use, and I kinda like it here.” If the answer is somewhere between “Never” and “Not Sure,” it might be time to ask a hard question: Was your website built for humans… or just to impress search engine bots?
In the early days of SEO, things were weird. Like “stuff a page full of keywords and call it optimized” weird. Pages used to read like someone trained a parrot to talk about plumbing: “New Orleans plumber plumbing service pipe unclogging emergency pipe plumber near me.” It didn’t make sense to humans, but the Google bots gobbled it up like leftover king cake during Mardi Gras.
Fast-forward to 2025. The bots have gotten smarter, and here’s the kicker—they’re trying to act like people now. Google doesn’t just read your content anymore. It watches what visitors do with it. Do they stick around? Do they scroll? Do they bounce like a Super Ball off Bourbon Street pavement? If your site doesn’t pass the human sniff test, rankings drop faster than a crawfish into boiling water.
So let’s talk about User Experience, or UX for short. It’s not just a design buzzword anymore—it’s the backbone of visibility online. UX is the difference between someone spending five minutes on your site or five seconds. It’s the difference between clicking “Schedule Now” or slamming the back button like it owes them money.
And no, UX doesn’t mean slapping a pretty font on the homepage and calling it a day. It means asking real, sometimes uncomfortable questions about how people interact with your site:
- Is the text legible without a magnifying glass?
- Does the menu look like a menu or an abstract art installation?
- Can a normal human on a mobile phone find what they need before their coffee gets cold?
The days of designing for robots are gone. The robots are now judging how well you treat the humans.
And don’t forget Google’s Core Web Vitals—those little metrics that sound like something your mechanic should check, but are actually about how fast your site loads, how stable it is when it does, and how quickly people can start interacting with it. If your homepage jumps around like a caffeinated squirrel while the content loads, you’re gonna have a bad time. If your buttons take longer to react than your uncle at a red light, same deal.
Let’s take a walk through the typical website tragedy. You’ve got pop-ups covering pop-ups, social share buttons the size of dinner plates, and a hero image that takes longer to load than your grandma’s Facebook feed. Add to that a contact form buried six clicks deep, and congratulations—you’ve built a digital escape room.
Here’s a wild thought: maybe the best SEO strategy now is… just being nice to your users.
Make the page load fast. Make the buttons make sense. Don’t make people hunt like Indiana Jones for the “Buy Now” button. And for heaven’s sake, test it on a phone. Most traffic is mobile now, so if your site still looks like it’s trying to cram a billboard onto a business card, that’s a problem.
And yes, content still matters—but not just for keywords anymore. If your blog reads like it was written by a fax machine, it’s time to bring in a little humanity. Write like a real person talking to another real person. Break up long paragraphs. Use subheadings. Sprinkle in humor if that’s your thing (clearly, it’s mine).
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just stop making the wheel square.
Also, let’s talk navigation. If your menu has 37 options, it’s not a website—it’s a buffet. People don’t want options, they want direction. Show them where to go and make it easy to get there. The internet is not the place for existential decisions. (“Do I click ‘About Us,’ ‘Our Team,’ ‘Our Mission,’ or ‘The Journey’? Just tell me if you fix air conditioners.”)
Now let’s address the crowd that’s still optimizing for the bots. Keyword placement, backlink strategy, meta descriptions—sure, those things still matter. But they’re the seasoning, not the gumbo. If you start with a good user experience, Google is more likely to reward you for it. That’s because the algorithm is basically a big popularity contest now, and the best way to win it is by making people actually like your site.
So if you’re wondering why traffic is flat, bounce rates are high, and conversion feels like a ghost town… maybe the bots aren’t the problem. Maybe the problem is that no human wants to hang out on your site for longer than it takes to mutter, “Nope.”
Design for people. Write for people. Build with real users in mind, and the robots will follow—because in 2025, the robots are watching how the humans behave.
And they know when someone’s had enough of trying to click a button that doesn’t work.
