🔍 What Are UX Signals?
UX signals are measurable indicators of how real users experience your website. Search engines use these signals to evaluate page quality and determine rankings. Key UX signals include:
- Core Web Vitals — page speed, visual stability, and interactivity (LCP, CLS, INP)
- Bounce rate and dwell time — how long visitors stay and whether they return to search results
- Mobile usability — how well your pages perform on smartphones and tablets
- Page experience signals — HTTPS security, absence of intrusive interstitials, and safe browsing
Strong UX signals tell search engines that your site delivers real value to visitors, which supports higher rankings and sustained organic traffic.
⚙️ What OTTO Currently Does With UX Signals
OTTO evaluates your site across multiple pillars — including a UX Signal pillar — as part of its overall SEO health assessment. At this time, OTTO's UX Signal pillar provides a high-level score to help you understand where your site stands relative to page experience best practices.
Important: The UX Signal pillar is actively being improved. Our engineering team is rebuilding it to replace placeholder metrics with genuine page experience signals such as Core Web Vitals data and real user interaction indicators. This means the scores and recommendations in this pillar will become significantly more detailed and actionable in an upcoming release.
OTTO does not directly modify your site's server configuration, image compression, JavaScript execution, or other technical factors that affect Core Web Vitals. Improvements to those areas require action on your end or by your development team.
🛠️ How to Improve Your UX Signals Today
While OTTO's UX pillar continues to evolve, you can take the following steps to improve your site's page experience right now:
- Run a Core Web Vitals audit — Use Google Search Console (under the "Experience" section) or Google PageSpeed Insights to identify which pages fail LCP, CLS, or INP thresholds.
- Optimize images — Compress images, use modern formats like WebP, and add explicit width and height attributes to reduce layout shift (CLS).
- Reduce render-blocking resources — Defer non-critical JavaScript and CSS to improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
- Improve server response time — Use a reliable hosting provider and enable caching or a content delivery network (CDN).
- Ensure mobile-friendliness — Test pages with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool and fix any viewport or tap-target issues.
- Secure your site with HTTPS — All pages should be served over HTTPS. Mixed-content warnings negatively affect page experience scores.
- Remove intrusive interstitials — Avoid pop-ups that cover the main content immediately on page load, especially on mobile.
- Improve internal linking and content relevance — Keeping visitors engaged longer signals quality to search engines. Use OTTO's Content and Topical Authority recommendations alongside UX improvements.
💡 How OTTO's Other Pillars Support UX Indirectly
Even while the UX Signal pillar is being rebuilt, other OTTO pillars contribute to a better user experience:
- Content Quality — Well-structured, relevant content keeps users on your pages longer, reducing bounce rate.
- Topical Architecture — Clear site structure and internal linking help visitors find related content easily, improving dwell time.
- Authority Score — A strong, trustworthy domain profile reinforces credibility signals that align with user trust.
- Technical SEO — Fixing crawlability and indexation issues ensures users land on properly functioning pages.
Addressing OTTO's recommendations across all pillars creates a cumulative improvement in how both users and search engines perceive your site.
🚀 What's Coming Next for OTTO UX Signals
The Search Atlas engineering team has several improvements in progress:
- Replacing the current UX Signal score with real page experience data, including Core Web Vitals measurements
- Expanding the pillar architecture so UX signals are tracked with greater granularity alongside content and authority metrics
- Introducing clearer, task-level recommendations tied directly to page experience failures
These updates will give you a much clearer picture of which specific pages need attention and why. Watch for release notes in the platform for announcements.
💬 Need More Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.