Does motion help SEO?

Motion and interactive elements don’t raise your search ranking by themselves. They can help indirectly by keeping people on the page. Built carelessly, they can also hurt.

On a home page I designed recently, the top section is an interactive portrait. The peptides that can help are marked on her face like a camera finding focus, and the boxes move toward your mouse. Below is the research behind that choice and the guardrails I kept.

Google learns from what people do

At the 2023 U.S. antitrust trial against Google, search executive Pandu Nayak testified that Navboost is one of Google’s important ranking signals. It’s trained on 13 months of user clicks. Court exhibits described a related system that also counts hovers, scrolls and swipes (Search Engine Land).

Google doesn’t see the time-on-page number in your analytics. It does see whether people click your result and stay, or come straight back to search. That behavior is what these systems learn from.

People decide fast whether to stay

Microsoft researchers Chao Liu, Ryen White and Susan Dumais studied how long people stayed on more than 200,000 web pages. On 98.5% of them, the longer someone stayed, the less likely they were to leave (Liu, White and Dumais, SIGIR 2010). People size up a page quickly. Once they’re past that first look, most keep going.

Motion helps get them past it, because it’s hard to miss. In experiments by Lyn Bartram, Colin Ware and Tom Calvert, people spotted moving icons nearly every time, even at the edge of their vision, in about a second. Color changes in the same spot took about 4.6 seconds to notice and were missed 24% of the time (Bartram, Ware and Calvert, 2003).

Interactivity may help conversions too. In a Demand Metric survey of 244 marketers, interactive content converted well 70% of the time, compared with 36% for static content (Upland Kapost). It’s a survey of marketers rather than a controlled test, so I treat it as a hint.

Ways motion can hurt search

Hidden content may not get indexed. Google’s Martin Splitt has said Googlebot doesn’t click buttons (Search Engine Journal). Anything that only shows up after a click or hover may never reach search results. Keep the real content in the page, and use interaction to reveal it.

Slow, jumpy pages score worse. Google’s Core Web Vitals ask for the main content to load within 2.5 seconds, for the page to respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and for the layout to stay put, with a shift score under 0.1 (Google Search Central). Heavy animation can hurt all three.

Some people get sick from motion. People with vestibular disorders can feel dizzy or nauseous when things move on screen. Accessibility guidelines ask that motion triggered by interaction can be turned off (W3C, WCAG 2.3.3).

How I use motion

1. Use it once. Save motion for the spot that needs attention most, usually near the top.
2. Keep it slow and in place. In Bartram’s study, objects that traveled across the screen were the most distracting, and slow movement in place was among the least (Bartram, Ware and Calvert, 2003). The boxes on my portrait drift a few pixels and never travel.
3. Put the content in the page. Every word and link lives in the page’s HTML, so search engines and screen readers get all of it with or without the animation.
4. Animate the light way. Move things with transforms and fades so nothing else on the page shifts or stalls.
5. Respect reduced motion. When someone’s device asks for less motion, the page holds still.
6. Measure it. Compare time on page and sign-ups before and after. Research says motion can help, and your own page is the real test.