When you’re looking to improve your website’s performance, one key thing to remember is, you must focus on numerous factors simultaneously.
Not only in both life and digital marketing, we tend to give all our attention to one or two important elements whilst ignoring something else completely which can turn out to be equally as important. If you want to do better in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), it takes more than just a little SEO.
Your website also needs to be designed well, or you risk squandering all that organic equity you have been building. SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than many people might realise. Their components combine 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, this will also allow great user experience.
Here are five ways they’re used together.
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 your website isn’t mobile-friendly then unfortunately your already half a decade behind, Google had made mobile-friendliness a major ranking factor back in 2015. Not only do Google index website pages, since 2017 they’ve started mobile-first indexing so you can simply see how important Google finds this, however, there’s still many websites that haven’t caught on yet.
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 increasing tremendously. 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.
A website with a high bounce rate due to website speeds on different devices is going to send bad signals to Google, and your current ranking positions could just drop.
Simple to read design
If you’ve been working on improving your SEO, content is one of the things that you’ve spent a lot of time on. Some people might not realise what a huge impact the design of a website can have on your content as well as the presentation of it.
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. The main reason a user goes on to your website is to get information if they can’t get what they came for, what’s the point? At some point, you’ve probably been on a website that had a text that was impossible to read because of the page design. Maybe it was a light-coloured text on a pure white background or a dark colour on black. Those kinds of designs recall the often-terrible websites of the mid-to-late 1990s.
But the issue is not always colour. The text may also be too big or small or written in a hard-to-read font. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly or sites that are difficult to read on any device 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.
Website Speed
Do you know what’s slowing your website down? Chances are, it could have something to do with your web design. Website speed is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, and it’s a primary deficiency for many websites.
If you haven’t been ranking well, it could be that your website is just too slow and people are bouncing off it quickly. Never forget that page speed is a known ranking signal, so you need to devote your time to speed up your site by optimizing your images, eliminating unnecessary plugins, allowing browser caching, and so on, again this isn’t just a simple process and there are many factors to this alone, if it’s done incorrectly you could potentially break the design code for your website.
Now, you personally might think your website loads rather quickly enough, not knowing how long people are actually willing to wait. Ideally, your website should load in two seconds or under.
When it takes longer than three seconds, as many as half the users visiting your site are likely to abandon it. Page speed is more important on mobile devices, where people are even less likely to spend time waiting.
Page speed is not only important to users, but it’s also important to Google. The speed of your website affects Google’s ability to crawl it which simply means if it takes time to crawl not all your pages will be getting ranked across Google as they’re not getting indexed.
Sitemaps
If you want search engines to be clever about how they crawl your website then having a sitemap is a major factor if you want to get high rankings on search engines.
Your sitemap provides search engines with a guide of all the pages and content on your website. This gives you the chance to tell search engines what pages are most important to your site, it also gives the search engines a way to find out more about your website. It’s an important part to get right for larger websites with multiple pages or even products such as eCommerce websites along with the newer ones that might not have any external links.
In addition to their benefit to search engines, sitemaps also aid in user navigation. A new visitor to your site can refer to your sitemap for help getting around it as all the page links are in one place. Another great reason for a sitemap is because they also contain important metadata about your web pages to give them a better chance of ranking highly.
Gaining Users’ Trust
Unlike some other SEO factors, you really cannot measure how much people trust you or your website. However, gaining trust is still a huge part of getting your website to rank higher. There’s no doubt that most users are quick to form opinions, and once they have them, it’s difficult to change their minds.
Over the years, we’ve gotten used to seeing perfected websites that provide an excellent user experience. This is what we expect to see when we open any website. We want something that’s clean, easy to navigate, and that can quickly give us the information we want. We tend to think these kinds of websites just seem more trustworthy.
If a website looks old and outdated or is too difficult to use, most people will be left with a bad impression, and they could leave and not come back at all this brings us back to having a high bounce rate along with the first three points of this blog. You could have a product or service that might be exactly what they are looking for, but your website doesn’t convey this, having an SSL certificate on your website is a great way in order to gain user trust as well as search engine trust as it shows your website is secured with a padlock next to your URL.
A bad website will make it look like your business or organisation simply doesn’t put in much effort.
Conclusion
SEO is always best done in partnership with web design and improving your web design doesn’t have to be difficult. Just remember to keep these pointers in mind when getting your website designed, you could soon start seeing the higher rankings that have been eluding you.
If you have any questions feel free to get in touch with us here at Bemunchie, we specialise in Web Design as well as SEO Marketing and all our team works in-house meaning we would simply be able to offer our great website design services and seo services to you directly from our own team.
