Many companies build websites only considering programming and UI/UX (graphic design). Web design not only involves programming and graphic design but also involves marketing aspects. Marketing aspects are important as the website is not only about creating better aesthetics, it is the one that affects your online presence. Your website is the first thing people see when they want to learn about your brand so it is a key to boosting your search engine presence.
Web design has a huge impact on Search engine optimization (SEO) too. Hence marketing aspects are also required for a better web design that attracts both visitors and search engine crawlers.
So, How Does Web Design Affect SEO?
Your Website design affects SEO and Google rankings in three ways. They are
- SEO and human experience
“A Good design boosts your SEO ranking, whereas a bad design affects your ranking”. Today, many search engine bots try to mimic user experience for better rankings of the website. If a web design is bad for a user it is also bad for the search engine bots. i.e if you have a poorly designed website that’s hard to use, website users, try to leave the website. Search engines take this into consideration and drop your rankings accordingly. Similarly, If you have slow load times, hard-to-read text, or outdated site design, etc you are just making it a bad user experience with your site. therefore a well-designed website helps both the users and search engine bots to crawl on your site.
- Quality visuals boost user time on site
A good Web design boosts your authority, building trust with users. In fact, “48% of users will leave a site” if they don’t like the design. By creating high-quality content with pleasing visuals you can keep users/visitors on-site for a long time which is good for conversions and SEO. Good looking visuals and content are that it helps people choose you over other competitors which helps for conversions to your company more quickly. Another benefit of pairing quality content with amazing visuals is that you allow users to dig into your content and engage, which makes search engines think that your site is reputable and rank-worthy.
- Make it easier for crawlers indexing your site
Web designers need to take care of both visitors and search engine crawlers. Making difficult web designs can make the website difficult for search engine crawlers choices, you can unintentionally make it difficult for crawlers to index your site, damaging SEO rankings. Thanks to web design best practices, your developer will format URLs, content, and images in a way that crawlers can index more quickly, boosting your rankings.
Designing an SEO-Friendly Site
Both the web designer and marketers must work together to create a better web design as web design has a significant impact on your SEO. Below are a few SEO Practices you can adopt for an SEO Friendly Design.
- Limiting Flash and JavaScript
Programming languages such as JavaScript and Flash make it difficult for search engine crawlers to read the content. You may use these languages for a better design but try limiting these on your website for a better SEO. Placing Critical content in these elements makes it harder for the crawlers and they miss this content making it difficult for a better SEO.
- Clean Navigation and Simple Design a simple, clean navigation
Make sure your website is simple to navigate so that the users shouldn’t find difficulty in finding data on your website. Not only users, but SEO crawlers also find difficulty in finding URL’s which may lower your SEO score. Navigation should be clean and straightforward and the URL must be simplified so that they are easy to remember. limit the number of categories you use within your URLs.
- Maximum Readability
Your website content and design must be easy to read. Both users and search crawlers find it difficult to read if you use tiny fonts, pale colors that blend together, or jarring design elements.
- Using Responsive design
In today’s world, there are many types of devices with different screen sizes. So taking this into consideration, web designers need to create responsive designs to adapt to the different screen sizes. Making Responsive design saves time, money. Google especially rewards mobile-friendly and responsive sites which helps in a better Seo ranking.
- Focus on Colours, Content, and images
The web designer also needs to focus on colors, fonts, and layouts, content, and images. Content should be on par with your design to make higher rankings in search engines. Valuable and informational content signals search engines that your site is useful. Not only adding content and images but optimization of all on-site images is also required to reduce loading times and help search engine bots index your images.
- Speed Web Loading
It was found that “A 100-millisecond delay in load time can decrease your conversions by 7%”. A slower website leads to a reduction in your conversion rates. Your web design has to be fast to keep users on-site, which in turn boosts your SEO ranking. If it takes more time to load the site, the users will leave the website within few seconds. This causes a bad user experience and lowers your search engine rankings.
Conclusion
Web design not only affects user experience but also affects search engine rankings. Poor web design practices lower your SEO rank, showing your site lower in search. Combining marketing and web designing elements can highly increase your search engine rankings.
Looking for a Web site design with both Marketing and Design aspects? Then look no more. We got you covered. Progressio have created many websites which helped our clients stand out from the crowd. Reach out to our team of experts now and book a free consultation. Progressio can help your brand optimize for SEO without sacrificing your beautiful design.
