When you’re trying to improve your website’s performance, it’s important to remember that you have to focus on numerous factors simultaneously.
In both life and digital marketing, we tend to give all of our attention to one or two important elements while neglecting something else that can turn out to be equally as important.
If you want to do better in the SERPs, it takes more than just SEO.
Your website also needs to be designed well, or you risk squandering all of that organic equity you have been building.
SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than many people might realize.
Their components mingle and flow together so well that, when executed correctly, your website visitors should not actually notice anything about what you have created; they should simply start navigating through your site.
So, what are those elements where SEO and web design collaborate? Check out these five ways they are used together.
1. Mobile-Friendliness
Anyone who’s even slightly familiar with SEO or web design should already know the importance of making your website mobile-friendly.
In fact, if this isn’t something you’ve taken the time to do yet, you’re already a few years behind.
Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor in 2015. That’s half a decade ago.
The search giant then introduced mobile-first indexing in 2017. It’s clear to see how importantly Google views mobile-friendliness, but many websites still haven’t caught on.
The number of people searching on desktops has been declining for a few years now, while the number of people searching on mobile devices has been steadily increasing.
More than half of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices, which means that more than half of your audience is also likely to be on their mobile phones.
Without a mobile-friendly website design, you could be accidentally alienating half of your users. That is massive.
A website with a high bounce rate due to not loading properly on a phone or tablet is going to send bad signals to Google, and your rankings could plummet.
2. Easy-to-Read Design
If you’ve been working on improving your SEO, content is likely something that you have spent a lot of time on.
Some people might not realize what a huge impact the design of a website can have on your content, or at least the presentation of it.
Poor web design can make it impossible for users to read what they came to your website to do.
Pages with blocks of content in strange places, with too many hyperlinks that don’t serve a clear purpose, essentially erases any audience that you managed to bring onto your site.
And if no one can get the information they want, what’s the point?
At some point, you’ve probably been on a website that had text that was impossible to read because of the page design.
Maybe it was a light-colored text on a pure white background or a dark color on black. Those kinds of designs recall the often terrible websites of the mid- to late 1990s.
But the issue is not always color. The text may also be too big or small, or written in a hard-to-read font.
Like websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, sites that are difficult to read on any device or desktop are going to turn people away quickly.
Web designers understand how to create websites that make it easy for users to take in your content so you get the most for your money.
White space, line length, and any extra elements such as images can all affect how people pay attention to your site. Also, remember to consider people with disabilities by going for an inclusive web design format. – Read more
