> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited
IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.
A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.
"Good UX" is dynamic, and depends on the search query, and the UX metrics of the websites you're competing with.
Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"
I also kindly disagree with your assessment.
All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.
Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.
But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.
For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that
1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle
2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.
So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.
IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.
A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.