5 Ways Your Web Design Affects SEO |
Posted: August 20, 2021 |
Web design plays a major role in promoting your online presence and increasing your brand awareness. It also has a particularly big impact on SEO (search engine optimization) – Google started giving preference to optimized and responsive websites in 2015. To get the best results you need to make sure you build a search engine optimized website that is user-friendly — these two factors will significantly affect your online presence. Your website is the first thing your visitors and potential customers will see when they search for your brand online. To increase your visibility and increase your chances for ranking higher in search, you need to create a web design that appeals to search engine crawlers and humans as well, and implementing SEO practices is essential if you want to achieve this. Here, we’ll explain five ways that your website design influences your SEO and provide tips on how to make the most out of your optimization efforts. Why Is SEO Important? In order to broaden your audience reach and boost brand awareness, it’s important to understand how SEO works and what it means for your website. Optimizing your website for search engines has the following benefits:
5 Factors To Consider When Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many different factors that play a role in search engine optimization. Here, we’ll list five key factors to consider when optimizing your site for search. #1: Website Navigation Structure The navigation structure of your website has a strong effect on a variety of metrics including engagement rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and average time on page. These factors do not only affect search rankings but they can also have a direct impact on your profits and overall revenue. If your visitors come to your site and don’t know where to go next, they will leave your site which will increase your bounce rate and decrease your revenue. To keep visitors on your site and reduce the risk of a high bounce rate, make sure you create a simple navigation structure using the following tips and tricks:
Optimizing your website navigation for your users doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your creativity. If you think outside the box, you can stay true to your brand while putting your visitors first. If you need help with your website navigation, a professional New York web design agency can help you create a dynamic design while staying true to your brand and keeping your target audience in mind. #2: Page Speed
Another important search engine factor is page speed, meaning how fast your website loads. The way your website is designed plays a major role here. If your multimedia is overwhelming or your page structure is complicated, it could slow down the page speed. If it takes too much time for your page to load, your visitors will get frustrated and want to leave your site, increasing your bounce rate, which will in turn reduce your chances of ranking high in Google search. Even worse, your visitors might leave your site and land on a competitor, moving revenue away from your brand and into the pockets of the competition. To check your page load speed, you can leverage free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to analyze your content and bring your page speed to a higher level. If your website has issues loading, there are a few ways you can make it faster. Here are some of the techniques you may want to consider to increase your page loading speed:
#3: Mobile-Friendliness If you know the basics of SEO and well-optimized web design, you’re likely aware of how important a user-friendly mobile website is. Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor back in 2015 and since then, it has significantly impacted the way websites are ranked on Google. In 2017, Google introduced mobile-first indexing, which means that it takes the mobile version of your site and considers it over the desktop version for ranking factors. Over the years, fewer people have been searching for websites on desktops and more people are using their mobile phones to browse on the web. As a matter of fact, more than half of traffic is coming from mobile devices. If your website design is not mobile-friendly, you may be losing massive traffic and alienating half of your website users. #4: Links
While keywords used to be among the top SEO ranking factors, Google realized that too many people were taking advantage of this easy tactic and engaging in “keyword stuffing” — shoving keywords into their copy as much as possible in an effort to trick Google into ranking their site. Today, links have replaced keywords as one of the top SEO ranking factors. Here’s how you can use both internal and external links to boost your ranking:
#5: Readability
Another important thing you need to pay attention to when building your website is how informative it is and what kind of reading experience it provides. Information should be easy to find on your website, valuable and easy to understand. This can ultimately lead to a lower bounce rate and higher on-page time which can then increase the engagement rate. A valuable reading experience will help retain your customers on the site and make them want to continue browsing your website. So how can you improve your site’s readability?
Wrapping Up On Web Design And SEO Although web design and SEO may seem like two separate aspects of online business, they are connected on many levels.
When designing (or redesigning) your website, keep in mind that the following factors affect SEO:
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