UX For SEO: Web Accessibility, Information Architecture, and Usability

Why UX foundations matter for SEO

SEO professionals often focus on technical implementation—meta tags, structured data, crawl budget—without understanding the foundational disciplines that inform best practices. Web Accessibility, Information Architecture (IA), and Usability aren't tangential to SEO; they're the conceptual bedrock that explains why certain optimisations work.

These disciplines predate the commercial web. They emerged from library science, cognitive psychology, ergonomics, and human-computer interaction research. When you understand these foundations, SEO decisions become more intuitive: you're no longer memorising rules, but applying principles that serve both humans and machines.

The relationship is straightforward: search engines are software with significant access limitations. They can't see images, struggle with complex JavaScript, and interpret content through constrained parsing. Users with disabilities face similar barriers. Solving for one audience often solves for the other. This is why technical SEO work often overlaps with accessibility remediation.

Information architecture: Organising for understanding

Information Architecture is the practice of deciding how to organise the parts of a system so everything is understandable. When you design a website, determining what things are, where they should go, and how they connect to everything else is no trivial task. As humans, we only understand things when there's a relationship between them.

The components of information architecture

According to Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, IA comprises four main systems:

These components must work together. A site with brilliant content but incoherent organisation will frustrate both users and crawlers. Internal linking patterns, URL hierarchies, and navigation structures all emerge from IA decisions.

LATCH: The five ways to organise information

Richard Saul Wurman, who coined the term "information architecture," proposed that information can only be organised in five ways:

• Location: When information comes from different places (French wines, Argentinian beef)
• Alphabetical: When dealing with large volumes of similar items (directories, dictionaries)
• Time: When chronology matters (news archives, event schedules)
• Category: When items group naturally (product types, content themes)
• Hierarchy: When magnitude or priority matters (price tiers, importance rankings)

Every site architecture decision maps to one of these patterns. Understanding which pattern fits your content prevents the common mistake of forcing structures that don't match user mental models.

Common IA and SEO misconceptions

The most persistent misconception is conflating URL depth with click distance. SEO professionals often assume long URLs indicate buried content, but these are independent concepts:

URL structure:     /category/subcategory/product-name
Click distance:    Could be 1 click if linked from homepage

URL structure:     /p/12345
Click distance:    Could be 5+ clicks if only accessible through pagination

A product nested three directories deep can still be one click from the homepage through navigation or internal links. Conversely, a short URL can be effectively buried if it's only reachable through a long click path.

IA decisions should prioritise user understanding and crawl efficiency, not arbitrary URL length preferences. What matters is that:

1. Users can predict where they are from the URL
2. Search engines can discover important pages efficiently
3. The hierarchy reflects genuine content relationships

IA implications for crawl budget

Poor information architecture creates crawl budget waste through:

• Faceted navigation explosions: Unbounded filter combinations creating millions of thin URLs
• Orphaned content: Pages with no internal links, invisible to crawlers
• Duplicate paths: Multiple URL routes to identical content
• Deep pagination: Important content buried behind sequential page loads

A well-structured IA naturally solves these problems by establishing clear hierarchies and consistent linking patterns. Before implementing technical fixes like robots.txt blocks or canonical tags, ask whether the underlying architecture makes sense.

Usability: Making things work

Usability focuses on rules and best practices that assess how users learn and use a product to achieve their goals. It evaluates the satisfaction users experience during this process. This isn't just about making things "user-friendly"—it's about systematic design that reduces friction.

Nielsen's five usability components

Jakob Nielsen defined five qualitative components that make something usable:

Search engines increasingly model user behaviour. If users struggle with your interface, engagement signals reflect that. Usability problems become ranking problems.

The ten usability heuristics

Nielsen and Molich established ten heuristics for heuristic evaluation. Several translate directly to SEO considerations:

1. Visibility of system status
The system keeps users informed through appropriate feedback. For SEO: loading indicators, progress states, and clear signals about page status (404s, out-of-stock, etc.) help both users and bots understand what's happening.

2. Match between system and real world
Use language users understand, not internal jargon. For SEO: keyword research identifies how users actually describe things, not how you describe them internally.

3. User control and freedom
Provide clear "emergency exits" for mistakes. For SEO: proper canonicalization, pagination controls, and filter reset options prevent users (and crawlers) from getting trapped.

4. Consistency and standards
Follow platform conventions. For SEO: standard HTML semantics, predictable URL patterns, consistent schema implementation.

5. Error prevention
Design to prevent problems before they occur. For SEO: input validation, form guidance, and defensive programming prevent soft 404s and broken user journeys.

6. Recognition rather than recall
Make information visible rather than requiring memory. For SEO: breadcrumbs, clear navigation, descriptive anchor text—don't make users (or search engines) guess where links lead.

7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
Accommodate both novice and expert users. For SEO: multiple paths to content, search functionality, shortcuts via structured navigation.

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
Remove irrelevant information that competes with relevant content. For SEO: content clarity, signal-to-noise ratio, focused page topics.

9. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors
Express errors in plain language with solutions. For SEO: helpful 404 pages, clear error states, search suggestions.

10. Help and documentation
Provide accessible guidance when needed. For SEO: FAQs, help content, and supplementary information add topical depth.

Usability testing reveals crawling issues

When you conduct usability tests, you often discover the same barriers that affect search engine crawlers:

• Users can't find content → crawlers can't discover it either
• Users get confused by navigation → crawlers waste budget on irrelevant paths
• Users abandon slow pages → crawlers may time out or deprioritise
• Users can't complete tasks → engagement signals suggest poor quality

Usability testing is diagnostic work that benefits both audiences.

Web accessibility: Access for all

Accessibility means access. It refers to the ability of all humans, regardless of disability or special needs, to access, use, and benefit from everything within the environment around them. In digital contexts, accessibility specifically addresses how electronic documents can be understood by any user, and how web developers enable sites to function with assistive technologies.

The four accessibility concerns

Web accessibility primarily addresses:

Search engines face constraints similar to users with disabilities. Googlebot can't see images, hear audio, or process content that requires complex interaction. What works for accessibility often works for SEO.

WCAG principles

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) establish four principles. Content must be:

Perceivable
Information must be presentable in ways users can perceive. For SEO: text alternatives for images, captions for video, colour contrast that doesn't obscure information. If content isn't perceivable to assistive technology, it's often invisible to search engines too.

Operable
Interface components must be operable. For SEO: keyboard-navigable elements, no keyboard traps, sufficient time to complete interactions. Search engines simulate navigation; if they can't "operate" your interface, they can't index it.

Understandable
Information and operation must be understandable. For SEO: readable content, predictable behaviour, error guidance. Search engines assess content comprehension through various signals.

Robust
Content must be robust enough to be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents. For SEO: valid HTML, proper element nesting, compatibility across parsing methods. This is essentially the same as saying "follow web standards."

Accessibility overlaps with technical SEO

When you implement accessibility properly, you're simultaneously improving technical SEO fundamentals. An SEO audit often reveals accessibility issues because the diagnostics overlap.

JavaScript and accessibility

Pages that require JavaScript for essential content present identical challenges for accessibility and SEO:

• Screen readers may not execute JavaScript identically to browsers
• Search engines may render JavaScript differently or not at all
• Both need content to be accessible without complex interaction

The accessibility principle—content should be available without scripts—maps directly to SEO guidance about ensuring content is accessible to crawlers regardless of rendering capability.

The UX honeycomb and SEO

Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb illustrates how different UX qualities interconnect. For SEO practitioners, understanding this model explains why certain optimisations work:

SEO (findability) sits within a matrix of interconnected qualities. Optimising for findability while ignoring usability, accessibility, or credibility creates an unstable foundation. Sites that rank well but provide poor experiences don't retain those positions.

Practical integration

Start with structure

Before writing content or implementing technical SEO, establish:

1. Site taxonomy: How content is categorised and related
2. URL architecture: How structure maps to URLs
3. Navigation patterns: How users and crawlers traverse the site
4. Labelling conventions: How things are named consistently

This is information architecture work. It prevents later problems that require expensive remediation.

Evaluate against heuristics

Periodically review your site against:

• Nielsen's usability heuristics
• WCAG accessibility guidelines
• Core Web Vitals thresholds

Issues in any category often indicate SEO problems too.

Test with real users

Usability testing reveals barriers that affect both humans and crawlers:

• "I couldn't find X" → crawlers may not find it either
• "I didn't understand what this page was about" → relevance issues
• "The page took too long" → performance problems
• "I kept ending up in the wrong place" → navigation/linking issues

User research complements technical SEO audits.

Use accessibility tools

Tools like axe, WAVE, or Lighthouse accessibility audits identify issues that affect SEO:

• Missing alt text
• Broken heading hierarchy
• Insufficient colour contrast
• Missing form labels
• Poor keyboard accessibility

Many accessibility violations correlate with SEO problems.

The fundamental insight

These disciplines—Information Architecture, Usability, and Web Accessibility—share a common goal with SEO: making information accessible and useful to those who need it. Search engines are simply users with extreme constraints.

When SEO professionals understand these foundations, decisions become clearer:

• Why semantic HTML matters (accessibility → SEO)
• Why clear navigation helps (IA → crawlability)
• Why page speed affects rankings (usability → engagement)
• Why alt text exists (accessibility → indexability)

Rather than chasing algorithm updates, focus on these fundamentals. Optimise for constrained users—those with disabilities, those on slow connections, those using assistive technology—and you'll naturally optimise for search engines too.

Key takeaways

1. Search engines are users with extreme constraints: They can't see images, hear audio, or interact with complex interfaces, just like users with certain disabilities
2. Information Architecture determines crawlability: URL structure, navigation, and internal linking all emerge from IA decisions
3. URL depth ≠ click distance: A deeply nested URL can be one click from the homepage; a short URL can be buried behind pagination
4. Usability problems become ranking problems: Search engines increasingly model user behaviour; poor UX surfaces in engagement signals
5. Accessibility fixes are often SEO fixes: Alt text, heading hierarchy, semantic HTML, and keyboard navigation benefit both audiences

Further reading

Information Architecture

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
• The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
• The Information Architecture Institute
  Professional organisation with resources on IA practice and methodology

Usability

• Don't Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug
• Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
• Nielsen Norman Group
  Research-based UX guidance from usability pioneers

Web Accessibility

• Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by Richard Rutter
• A Web for Everyone by Sarah Horton
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
  Official accessibility standards and implementation resources
• WCAG Quick Reference
  Filterable checklist for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines