A good looking website is never a bad thing. Unless it affects your SEO. Alternatively, spending time on improving your sites SEO won’t bring the desired results if it’s badly designed. SEO and web design are two separate elements that you’ll need to bring together if you’re going to rank well in SERPS (search engine results pages).
Page Organisation
Creating a simple and easy to follow flowchart of your website (like below) will make your website much more SEO friendly.
A good site structure will help people navigate your website much easier. It’s vital to minimize the steps a visitor has to take to get to the information they’ve visited your website for. If people are accessing this information easily, this will lead to the algorithm ranking your site higher.
You can also add Meta Descriptions and Titles to your pages to improve your website’s SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign further. Used correctly, they will help increase the number of visitors to your page. You can read about these in more detail here.
Mobile Matters
It’s a well-known fact that the rate of traffic from a desktop computers is declining. In 2019, mobile devices accounted for 52% of all internet users worldwide! Google has also been ranking search results based on mobile friendliness for a couple of years now.
One way to improve the mobile experience is to use responsive web design. Your website will automatically adapt its design depending on the device it’s been viewed on.
Web pages that aren’t optimised for mobile are much more difficult to navigate for a visitor. They may load incorrectly and cut off vital bits of information, or not load them at all.
Page Speed
If there’s a quick way to put people off navigating your website, it’s slow loading speeds on your pages. If your website takes a while to load, there’s a high chance your bounce rate will increase. This means visitors are leaving your website without visiting more than one page. Your SEO will suffer from this as the algorithm will recognise that people aren’t getting the information they need from your pages.
You can speed up your website by optimising individual pages. Google PageSpeed provides a free check of your website and gives you a score out of 100. It also offers insight into any issues your pages have and ways to improve.
Readability
Your website needs to have high-quality content with keywords that visitors will take something from. If you’ve already started working on improving your SEO this will be something you’ve probably started looking at.
It’s important to remember that people online are looking to find the information they require in the least amount of time. Making your descriptions simple and to the point will improve accessibility. Also, people can get what they need almost instantly.
However, there’s no point in creating great content if it doesn’t look visually appealing. Content that blends into the background because the colours clash, and having hard to read fonts and paragraphs that don’t align properly are sure-fire ways to lose your audience.
Design Penalties
Some design features that are implemented into websites are picked up by the algorithm and marked down in the rankings, or in the worst-case scenario not show up at all. Using either of the below methods today will result in a manual action report sent through Google Search Console.
‘Cloaking’ is the practice of showing Google a different page to the one visitors see. This is used to try and fool the algorithm into thinking the content on your page is different to what it’s actually showing.
‘Keyword Stuffing’ is a technique that is used to be very efficient in SEO. Websites crammed as many keywords into their pages as they could, often repeating the same ones, in order to rank higher.
Summary
User experiences and SEO strategies are both important to consider when designing your website in order to get the best results.
Thank you for reading our Web Design for BEst SEO article. We hope you found this information useful! Here at Be My Social, we can provide digital marketing assistance including Web Design and SEO Services for your business.
We’ve also written further guides on website design and SEO, like SEO Checklist For 2020 and How To Start SEO For A New Website.
