Users and search engines are the two most important things to consider when creating a website.
Your website must be SEO-friendly for Google to display it when users search for your products. But for customers to find the products they want to buy, you also need an imaginative, user-friendly website.
The challenge for website owners becomes striking a balance between being user-friendly and SEO friendly, especially when hundreds of products are offered on the site. Many organisations have two independent teams for web development and SEO, further complicating matters. Even if both teams are internal, it can be challenging to get them to collaborate to create a stunning and profitable website.
While the SEO team wants to ensure the site has enough information so Google can rank it well for user search queries, the development team will struggle to keep the visual and user aspects of the site as simple as possible.
What is SEO web design?
Optimising a website for search engines is known as SEO (search engine optimisation). Designing a website and all of its pages is known as website design.
Developing a search engine-friendly website is often referred to as SEO web design. It addresses the SEO best practices that website designers should adhere to.
Why is SEO-friendly web design Important?
How will people find your website if it has a beautiful design, but you can’t get any of its web pages to rank in search engine results?
While social networking and PPC advertisements are excellent for boosting traffic, it’s crucial to find organic (i.e., free) strategies to do so and climb to page one of the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Here are some of the main advantages of SEO web design.
SEO web design increases organic traffic
Any search engine traffic to your website that is not the result of paid advertising is referred to as organic traffic. These internet visitors discovered your site after performing a Google search and perusing the suggested results.
More precisely, the top search result receives almost 25% of all clicks, followed by the second by 15%, and then a sharp decline.
SEO web design attracts high-intent traffic
When someone uses Google to search for something, they usually have a specific question to which they’re trying to get answers. They’ll click on your page when it appears at the top of the search results with that precise response.
Even though they might not convert immediately after finding your website, they now know they can contact you if they have any additional inquiries. Because they were looking for anything related to your sector, this top-of-mind brand awareness is excellent for boosting conversions.
Because traffic with high intent is much more valuable than other types of traffic, it’s critical to optimise your new website to improve search engine rankings.
SEO web design improves the user experience
An ROI of 9,900% is achieved for every dollar spent on user experience, but it is not the only advantage. Your website must be user-friendly and SEO-optimized if you want to please Google’s algorithm. Google has improved its standards so that metrics relating to the user experience count toward your rankings.
Any marketing strategy must include an element to increase your website’s SEO. It makes sure that your website functions correctly and is simple for users to navigate so they can locate the information they need.
To avoid having inferior websites affect its own user experience, Google only wants to rank the greatest websites. As a result, having a highly rated website helps users locate what they’re seeking while also earning their confidence.
Making the most of your marketing budget with SEO web design
Although the modifications are free, implementing an SEO plan can take time. With some website knowledge, many business owners can set up SEO parameters themselves, or they can delegate it to someone on their team.
The point is that SEO is a low-cost tactic for assisting your website in achieving your marketing objectives and raising your overall return on investment.
10 things to optimise for SEO web design
Now that you know the significance of SEO web design let’s discuss optimising your website. To incorporate these 10 points as simple as possible, keep search engine optimisation top of mind throughout the whole web design process.
After all, you don’t want your web development team to spend all that time building the website only to have your SEO team dissect it and lengthen the process. Instead, having the two groups collaborate on each of these throughout the design stage speeds up the project.
1. Mobile-friendliness
A responsive website guarantees your target audience has a smooth experience whether they are browsing your site from a computer or mobile device, which benefits your SEO.
2. Website speed
As of 2018, Google’s algorithm now considers your website’s speed. It makes sense because nobody likes to wait for a webpage to load. Google won’t thus display it to them.
Things that can affect your page speed include:
- Web hosting
- File sizes
- Plugins
- Coding/scripts
- Traffic volume
In addition to several data to help you identify where you can improve your page speed and, consequently, your rankability, your website will receive a distinct score for desktop and mobile.
3. Sitemaps
Even if Google is highly intelligent, it’s never a bad idea to lend a hand. And a sitemap is just what you need for that.
A sitemap file contains your website’s web pages, files, videos, and other content. These are useful for websites with various carriers, especially if they aren’t all linked.
This makes it easier for Google to identify and crawl every page on your website so they can all be ranked. After all, a website won’t receive any organic traffic if Google can’t locate it.
4. Readability
Readability is a key ranking element. Visitors to your website won’t benefit from your company’s offerings if they can’t read the material there.
For your website’s copy blocks, headers, and overall readability, best practices recommend using large, bold serif or sans serif fonts.
Users can understand how Teachable can assist them right away. Additionally, by structuring your material with header tags, you can help Google recognise the critical elements of each page, enhancing your SEO.
5. Image file names
Since image file names are so brief, you might not even notice them, yet they can play a significant role in the SEO of your website. Consider your choices carefully before naming something home-page-header-final-2.jpg.
Instead, use terms and phrases that will help Google understand what the image is about.
6. Alt tags
Your photos must also include alt tags in a similar vein. This is significant for various reasons.
One, for about 25% of Google searches, photos are returned. According to data, visual search capabilities are what younger searchers (62 per cent) prefer over any other technology.
Google’s algorithm can precisely understand what is happening in your photographs thanks to alt tags. Your image can appear in the search results if it corresponds to the user’s query.
With a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end, your alt tag should be a complete statement that precisely describes what is in your image.
Second, it increases your accessibility in general. The information in your photos can be understood by someone using a screen reader to view your website, ensuring that blind or visually impaired still enjoy an excellent user experience.
7. Website navigation
The general appearance, feel, and user experience of a website are typically web developers’ primary concerns. The visual components of a page and user interaction with those components will interest designers and developers. Consumers using mobile devices now outnumber desktop or laptop computers, so they frequently prefer to make things as simple as possible.
However, the most critical part of your website navigation is its internal links to the most crucial product or feature pages.
8. URL structure
Additionally, your SEO strategy should be incorporated into your URL structure. The focus keyword from your web page or blog post should be the sole thing in each URL slug.
For each page, you intend to include in your website design or makeover when it launches, be sure to conduct keyword research. And repeat the process for each additional page you make along the way.
This keeps your pages available while assisting Google in determining the keyword(s) to rank your sites for. This ensures that your URL slugs are simple to remember and type into a URL field if someone is seeking a certain page because most target keywords are a few words long.
9. Metadata
Your metadata includes title tags and meta descriptions (also known as meta tags. This information can be found in the Google search results. Make sure your metadata is optimised, as 36% of SEO professionals believe the title tag to be the most crucial SEO component.
10. Indexable content
The likelihood of the pages appearing in the search engine results pages increases significantly if a search engine can easily crawl a site—quickly examining, digesting, and comprehending the material on each page of the site.
The major content on each page should be in HTML text format because that makes it easiest for Google to understand what the page is about.
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