Your website’s out of date. You need to modernize its look and feel, add better navigation, spiff up the video content, add more images and interactive features… The list is long and you’ll get to it all, eventually, but in the meantime you need to increase traffic and conversions. Is calling in an SEO expert the solution?

Yes and no. Researching keywords and key phrases and then optimizing pages for those terms where they are appropriate is never a bad investment. Google changes its algorithm so often, though, it can be a full-time job just keeping up.

With good SEO, can an ugly website rank well in Google search? Yes, it can. Should you rely on SEO alone to keep your site at the top of the heap for the search terms that mean the most to you? No, you should not.

Both Google and web users are much more sophisticated than they were even two years ago, and both become more demanding all the time. Ask mainstream SEO mavens, and they’ll tell you all the excruciatingly perfect SEO in the world is a poor substitute for good website design. Good design isn’t simply how a website looks. The biggest contributor to “good design,” in Google’s mind, is user experience.

Making consumers happy may lead to increased conversions and revenue, but making Google happy leads to increased opportunities to convince consumers your website can make them happy.

According to Travis Bliffen, founder of mainstream firm Stellar SEO, design and conceptual issues may be holding your website back.

Too much content
Yes, there can be too much of a good thing. Surfers are there for porn. We get that. But are they engaging with all the porn on your site, or just some of it? Have you checked your server logs to see which content is attracting the most engagement?

If surfers have to trip over “old” material or content that doesn’t interest them to get to “the good stuff,” they’ll leave. Make it easy for users to find exactly what they’re after. Better yet, prune the material that isn’t getting any views. Got a section devoted to midget mud-wrestling on Mars that gets only five views a month? You might be better off mothballing the content, at least for a while. Google’s algorithm takes overall site engagement into account. “Dead” areas or content drag down the overall rating.

User experience trumps almost everything else
According to Google, the two most important factors in site rank are content and inbound links. (Remember link lists? Don’t go there. Google got wise to that tactic long ago. Googlebot is smart enough to distinguish legitimate links from link trades.)

The third most important criterion for good pagerank is user experience. User experience is calculated by an arcane Google system called RankBrain, which determines how well your website delivers what it promises to deliver in a way users will appreciate.

Here’s what Bliffen says about RankBrain:

RankBrain cares about how long most of your traffic stays on your site.

RankBrain cares about number of clicks, searches, downloads, pages viewed.

RankBrain cares very much about the click-through rate (CTR).

This is why pruning less-engaging content can help your website’s search engine results pages ranking.

Looking ahead
Google adjusts its algorithms all the time. Sometimes, the changes make sense; sometimes, they leave everyone scratching their heads.

While no one can know exactly what evil plan Google will dream up next, one thing is certain: User experience will only increase in importance. If you think about it, everything else that figures into Google’s pagerank is user-experience-oriented.

Inbound links indicate other site owners found value in your site: They’re recommending their users visit because your site has something they think you’ll like. That’s an indication of good user experience.

Content, of course, is the reason surfers visit a site in the first place, so that’s a huge determiner of user experience. Give surfers what they came there to find, and they’ll be happy.

Make surfers happy by providing the easiest, quickest, most entertaining access to great content, and Google will notice. And that is the way to increase your profile in the SERPS.