# **📌 What Are UX Signals?**

UX signals are behavioral metrics that indicate how visitors experience your website. Search engines use these signals as quality indicators when ranking pages. Common UX signals include:

- **Page load speed** — how quickly your pages render for users
- **Core Web Vitals** — Google's set of performance metrics (LCP, INP, CLS)
- **Mobile usability** — how well your site functions on mobile devices
- **Bounce rate and dwell time** — whether visitors stay and engage with your content
- **Interactivity** — how smoothly users can click, scroll, and navigate

# **🤖 What OTTO Does and Does Not Optimize**

OTTO is Search Atlas's OTTO SEO automation engine. It is designed to handle on-page and technical SEO tasks that can be managed through content and metadata — not through changes to your website's underlying code, server configuration, or design.

**OTTO can optimize:**

- Title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structure
- Internal linking and anchor text
- Schema markup and structured data
- Content gaps and keyword targeting
- Image alt text
- Canonical tags and robots directives

**OTTO cannot optimize:**

- Page load speed or server response times
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS scores)
- JavaScript rendering performance
- Mobile layout and responsive design
- Font loading, image compression pipelines, or CSS efficiency
- Hosting infrastructure or CDN configuration

UX signal improvements require changes at the website level — in your code, design, hosting, or development stack. These fall outside OTTO's automation scope and must be addressed directly on your site or with the help of a developer.

# **🔍 How to Find Your Current UX Signal Scores**

To review your site's UX signals inside Search Atlas:

1. In the left sidebar, navigate to **OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation)**.
2. Select your project and open the site audit or performance overview.
3. Look for Core Web Vitals, page speed scores, and mobile usability flags in the audit results.
4. Each flagged issue will include a description of what is underperforming.

You can also use Google's free tools — **PageSpeed Insights** and **Google Search Console** — to get a detailed breakdown of your Core Web Vitals and mobile usability issues alongside field data from real users.

# **🛠️ How to Improve Your UX Signals**

The following changes are the most impactful for improving UX signals and must be implemented at the website or hosting level:

**Improve page load speed:**

- Compress and serve images in next-gen formats (WebP, AVIF)
- Enable browser caching and GZIP or Brotli compression on your server
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency for global visitors

**Improve Core Web Vitals:**

- **LCP (Largest Contentful Paint):** Optimize your largest above-the-fold element — usually a hero image or heading. Preload critical resources and eliminate render-blocking scripts.
- **INP (Interaction to Next Paint):** Reduce JavaScript execution time and break up long tasks that block the main thread.
- **CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift):** Set explicit width and height attributes on images and embeds so the browser reserves space before they load.

**Improve mobile usability:**

- Use a responsive design framework and test all pages on multiple screen sizes
- Ensure tap targets (buttons, links) are large enough and spaced apart
- Avoid intrusive pop-ups or interstitials on mobile

**Improve engagement signals:**

- Make sure your page content matches the intent of the search query driving traffic
- Improve readability with clear headings, short paragraphs, and relevant visuals
- Reduce time-to-first-meaningful-content so visitors see value immediately

# **✅ Recommended Workflow**

1. Run a full site audit in Search Atlas (**OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation)**) to identify specific UX signal issues.
2. Cross-reference findings with PageSpeed Insights for lab and field data.
3. Prioritize fixes by impact — Core Web Vitals failures tend to have the largest ranking effect.
4. Work with your developer or hosting provider to implement the required changes.
5. Re-run the audit after changes go live to confirm improvements.
6. Let OTTO handle all on-page SEO tasks in parallel so both tracks progress simultaneously.

# **💬 Need 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.