Table Of Contents
- What is SEO Web Design?
- What Is The Significance Of SEO Web Design?
- How To Use SEO Web Design To Build A Website?
- Conclusion
When trying to improve the performance of your website, keep in mind that you must consider a variety of factors simultaneously. Marketers have a tendency to focus solely on one or two key elements while overlooking something else that could be just as important.
It takes more than just SEO to improve your ranking in the SERPs. You must also make certain that your website is well-designed, or you risk losing all of your organic traffic. Many people are unaware of how well SEO and web design work together.
Their components blend and flow together so well that, if done correctly, you could reap unlimited rewards in terms of ranking in SERPs and organic traffic.
What is SEO Web Design?
Designing and developing SEO-friendly websites is referred to as SEO web design. An SEO-friendly website adheres to SEO best practices such as mobile-friendliness, quick load times, and descriptive URLs.
Businesses can make it easier for search engines to understand and rank their website in search results by using SEO website design, which can result in higher rankings and traffic.
What Is The Significance Of SEO Web Design?
Given that design is concerned with aesthetics and SEO is concerned with how a site is found, SEO and web design may appear to be two sides of the same coin. To some extent, this is correct. Designers and SEO experts have very different jobs to do, and you shouldn't expect one to do the job of the other. However, it doesn’t mean that SEO and web design don't complement each other.
When you combine the two, you can have a significant impact on the bottom line of your business. That's why, if you're thinking about having a website built or redesigned, you should know why web design and SEO are so important — and what that means for your site.
It's critical to pay attention to web design because it can, for sure, negatively affect your search engine optimization. Due to a failure to set up 301 redirects, many businesses will launch a new website — or rebrand to a new domain name — only to have their SEO progress vanish overnight. A 301 redirect instructs search engines where to look for a relocated page.
When it comes to SEO website design, skipping it can cost your company time, money, and rankings. It's better to combine SEO and web design because your website and its design can serve as a foundation for a long-term SEO strategy.
How To Use SEO Web Design To Build A Website?
Because web design and SEO are so intertwined, you must ensure that they complement each other. That's why the all-too-common practice of hiring a designer to design and build a site, then hiring an SEO expert to help with ranking should be avoided at all costs.
During the early stages of your project, both a designer and an SEO expert should coordinate and consider all the possible factors that would impact search rankings. This will assist the designer in creating an SEO-friendly site structure, as well as allow your SEO expert to see the intricacies of your site design.
You may believe that hiring one person to do both web design and SEO is the best way to ensure that your design and optimization work well together, but if that's the case, proceed with caution. Those are two distinct fields, and it's preferable to hire two people who are excellent in each rather than one person who is mediocre in both.
Hiring a full-service web development company or a web design company is definitely a better option if you don’t have a team in-house. Allowing a well-established team of designers, developers, and SEO experts to collaborate on your site ensures that not only will the end result be cohesive, but that each aspect will be handled by a specialized professional.
Let’s discuss some instances where SEO and web design intertwine to deliver optimum results in terms of user experience, website rankings, etc.
1. Mobile-Friendliness
Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO or web design should be aware of the importance of making your site mobile-friendly.
In fact, if you haven't taken the time to do so yet, you're already lagging. In 2015, Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor. That was more than a decade ago.
In 2017, the search engine giant launched mobile-first indexing. Although it's clear that Google values mobile-friendliness, many websites have yet to catch on.
For several years, the number of people searching on desktop computers has been declining, while the number of people searching on mobile devices has steadily increased.
Mobile devices account for more than half of all web traffic, which means that more than half of your audience is likely to be using their phones. You could be alienating half of your users by not having a mobile-friendly website design. That is enormous.
A high bounce rate on a website caused by it not loading properly on a phone or tablet will send negative signals to Google, and your rankings may suffer as a result.
2. Easy-to-Read Design
If you've been working on improving your SEO, you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about content.
Some people may not realize how much of an impact a website's design has on your content strategy, or at least how your content is presented. Users may be unable to read your content due to poor web design.
Any audience that you managed to bring onto your site is essentially erased by pages with blocks of content in strange places and too many hyperlinks that don't serve a clear purpose.
You've probably been on a website with text that was difficult to read due to the page design at some point. It could have been a light color on a white background or a dark color on black. Such designs harken back to the often dreadful websites of the mid-to-late 1990s.
However, color isn't always the issue. It's also possible that the text is too big or small, or that it's written in a difficult-to-read font.
People will quickly abandon websites that are difficult to read on any mobile device or desktop, just as they will abandon websites that are not mobile-friendly.
Web designers know how to create websites that make it simple for users to consume your content, ensuring that you get the most value for the money.
White space, line length, and any additional elements like images can all influence how people interact with your website. Also, keep in mind that people with disabilities should be considered when choosing a web design format. This could potentially help garner increased interest.
3. Website loading time
Do you know what's slowing down your site? It's possible that it has something to do with your website design. One of the most important aspects of technical SEO is website speed, which is a major flaw for numerous websites.
If you haven't been ranking well, it's possible that your website is simply too slow, causing visitors to leave quickly and increasing the bounce rate. Remember that page speed is a known ranking signal, so spend time optimizing your images, removing unnecessary plugins, enabling browser caching, and so on to increase your website’s speed.
Now, you may believe that your website loads quickly enough, but you have no idea how long people are willing to wait. Your website should load in two seconds at the most.
When your site takes longer than three seconds to load, up to half of your visitors are likely to abandon it. On mobile devices, page speed is even more important because people are less likely to wait.
Not only are users concerned about page speed, but Google is as well. Google's ability to crawl your website is influenced by its speed. You won't have as many pages indexed if your page speed causes Google to crawl fewer pages. It will be impossible for these pages to rank at all if this happens.
4. Use of Slugs
The slug is the URL for each of your website's pages. You should use short slugs that contain the keywords you want to rank for when optimizing your website. Use the keyword as the blog's URL, for example, if you're publishing a blog on your site. This will help algorithms recognize the blog as relevant. This is true for all of your website's other pages.
5. Use of Sitemaps
When it comes to search engine bots crawling your website, web design can help in a variety of ways. A sitemap is an important component to have in place if you want search engines to crawl your website more intelligently and efficiently.
Your sitemap gives search engines a map of all of your website's pages and content. This allows you to tell search engines which pages on your site are the most important. For bigger websites with loads of content, as well as newer ones that may not yet have any external links, it is especially important to get this part right.
Sitemaps not only help search engines but also help users navigate easily. A new visitor to your site can use the sitemap to find their way around. Sitemaps also include important metadata about your web pages, which can help them rank higher in search results.
6. Importance of Site Structure
When it comes to website design, user experience (UX) is critical and in order for SEO and web design to work together, you must have a proper site structure in place so that all of the details are easily digestible.
Make your copy, for example, succinct. You don't need to write a long litany on your homepage; you can go into greater detail on your product pages. For your website to appear in search engines, strategically use the most important keywords. This is why structure is critical so that users can scroll from top to bottom without getting lost.
7. Developing Trust
You can't really measure how much people trust you or your website, unlike some other SEO factors. Gaining trust, on the other hand, is still an important part of improving your website's ranking. There's no denying that most people form opinions quickly, and once they do, it's difficult to change their minds.
We've grown accustomed to seeing flawless websites that deliver exceptional user experiences. Whenever we visit a website, we expect to see the same top-notch quality. We want something that is simple to use, easy to navigate, and can provide us with the information we need quickly. People generally believe that websites with flowless site structure are trustworthy.
Most people will have a negative impression of a website if it appears old and outdated or is too difficult to navigate, and they may leave and never return.
Your website may have a product or service that is exactly what people are looking for, but if it does not communicate it well enough, people would simply ignore it and not put in the effort to find it out, eventually leaving the website. This is why it is so important to take time and strategically design your website, not ignoring search engine optimization. It would definitely take a lot of effort, but the results are amazing.
Conclusion
This is it for today’s blog. I hope you liked it. Don’t forget to share your thoughts and share it with your friends as well so that they could also benefit. Reach out to me if you have any queries and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
If you want a corporate website that looks, works, and ranks better, reach out to the experts at Prism Digital, the best web development company in Dubai, and our talented team of designers, developers, and SEOs would be delighted to work with you to create a site that is both functional and appealing to the eye.
About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth
Lovetto Nazareth is a digital marketing consultant and agency owner of Prism Digital. He has been in the advertising and digital marketing business for the last 2 decades and has managed thousands of campaigns and generated millions of dollars of new leads. He is an avid adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter. Follow him on social media on @Lovetto Nazareth