E-commerce and payments
What is Search Experience Optimisation?
SXO treats the search result and the landing experience as one journey. A ranking is worthless if the page that ranks does not answer the query or cannot be used on a phone, so SXO is where SEO and conversion work stop being separate disciplines.
Also called: SXO · search experience optimization
What it covers that SEO alone does not
- Whether the page delivers what the title and description promised
- Whether the next step is obvious within a screen of arriving
- Whether the page is usable on the device the traffic actually arrives on
- Whether the visitor can complete their task without leaving to find something
The signal loop
A visitor who arrives, fails to find what they wanted and returns to the results has told the search engine something. Whatever weight is placed on that behaviour, the commercial cost is unambiguous — you paid in rankings for a visit you wasted.
Cheap SXO wins
- Answer the query in the first paragraph, before any preamble
- One obvious primary action per page
- Remove interstitials and pop-ups on entry, which are also a mobile ranking issue
- Make the phone number tappable and the form short
- Fix layout shift, so the button is not moving when it is pressed
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.