‘Build websites for users, not search engines’ is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we’re used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there’s a fairly big overlap between what’s helpful for a user and what’s helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other. That means that it’s often worth carrying out user testing research in the initial stages of your SEO project to gain valuable insights into how real visitors view and use your site.
