How Does Web Design Affect SEO? 5 Ways To Improve It

Intro

Your website must be well-designed. SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than you may realize. Your website visitors shouldn't notice anything about what you have created. They should start navigating through your site. Many people think that website design is just about adding attractive images to the website.

Web designers must take into account user experience. A website is like an online store that is open 24/7. It's the first thing your audience will see if they want to know more about your business. Website design makes a big impact on SEO. It is necessary to optimize the website for search engines and users.

What is meant by SEO, and why is it important?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to increase your website's visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo with the goal of increasing regular users. The end result is a natural improvement in the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

How will the SEO work?

SEO is how Google decides which sites should rank first on the results page. Search engines crawl your website and insert what they see into their algorithms to determine how relevant it is to the search. A good SEO-compliant website design will help you rank on the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs). For this reason, SEO is very important. Even with small businesses, you want to make sure your website has everything Google needs to understand what it sees.

How will the website design affect SEO?

The website design can have a significant impact on your SEO. Having a website that is well structured with proper design will increase your overall visibility in google SERP. The structure of your roofer website can drastically impact the google ranking performance.

(Image source: Unsplash)

Navigation structure

Your website's navigation structure doesn't just affect the user experience; it also affects search rankings. Complex navigation structures make it difficult for visitors to find the information they need. This negatively affects factors such as bounce rate, the average time taken, participation, etc. First of all, there is a simple main menu. It should be crowded with too many items. Also, make sure the main menu is easily accessible on both desktop and mobile devices.

Page loading speed

Page loading speed is one of the key SEO ranking factors, and web design has a huge effect on loading speed. If your site takes too long to load, there may be a problem with the web design. To increase loading speed, you can minify CSS & JS, compress images, use caching solutions, minify redirects, etc.

Picture

Suppose you want to increase your engagement rate and increase the average time spent on your site. Adding eye-catching images and pictures might be a good idea. Adding lots of images to your website can increase engagement. But it can increase the loading speed of your site. A slow-loading website can ruin the user experience and negatively impact your search rankings. 

404 pages

A 404 page is displayed when a user visits a broken link or a page that no longer exists. First of all, you need to get creative with your 404-page design. On this page, you need to indicate that the URL they are looking for is invalid or no longer exists. Another thing you can do is add a search bar to your 404 page; this way, visitors can search for what they are looking for.

Reading experience

No matter how high-quality content your website has but with a bad reading experience, Web visitors are less likely to read the entire content. This results in a higher bounce rate and a lower average lead time. A high bounce rate and low occupancy will eventually result in a drop in search ranking. This makes the reading experience one of the key ranking factors.

Tips on how to improve website SEO:

Mobile friendly

(Image source: etsy.com)

Anyone with some experience with SEO or creative web design probably already knows the importance of making your website mobile-friendly. In fact, if this is not something you are taking the time to do. Google ranked mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in 2015. That was half a decade ago.

Since then, the search giant has launched mobile-first indexing in 2017. It's clear how much mobile-friendliness Google places importance on, but many websites are still not getting attention. The half of the web traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that more than half of your audience is likely to use a mobile phone as well.

Without a mobile-friendly website design, you may accidentally alienate half of your users. A website with a high bounce rate because it doesn't load properly on your phone or tablet sends a bad signal to Google, and your ranking may plummet.

Easy-to-read design

(Image source: chrisboddy.com)

If you are trying to improve your content, SEO is probably something you spend a lot of time on. Some people may not realize that website design has a huge impact on your content or at least per presentation. Bad web design can prevent users from reading what they came to your site to do.

Pages with content blocks in strange places there are too many hyperlinks that don't serve a clear purpose. It will remove all audiences that you manage to import to your site. Web designers understand how to create a website that makes your content easily accessible to users so you get the most out of your money.

Website speed

Do you know what slows down your website? It's possible that it has something to do with your web design. Site speed is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO and is a major flaw for many websites.

If you do not rank well, it might be because your website is too slow, and people come back quickly. Keep in mind that page speed is a known ranking signal. Therefore, you must dedicate your time to speeding up your site by optimizing images. Get rid of unnecessary plugins, Allow browser caching, etc.

Now, you might think that your website loads fast enough without knowing how long people are willing to wait. Your website should load in two seconds. When it takes longer than three seconds, over half of the users who visit your site are likely to abandon it. Page speed matters more on mobile devices, which people spend less time even waiting.

Sitemaps:

When it comes to crawling your website, creative web design can help in more ways than one. A sitemap is an essential element to have if you want search engines to become smarter about how they crawl your site. Your sitemap provides search engines with recommendations for all the pages and content on your website. This is your chance to tell search engines which pages are most important to your site.

This is a very important part of getting it right for large websites, including new websites that may not yet have any external links. In addition to being useful to search engines, Sitemaps also help with user navigation. Your new site visitors can refer to your sitemap for help.

Sitemaps also contain important metadata about your pages to give them a better chance of ranking higher.

Gain the trust of users:

Unlike other SEO factors, you can't measure how much people trust you or your website. However, gaining trust is still an important part of getting your website ranked high. There is no doubt that most people are quick to form opinions, and when there is an opinion, it can be difficult to change your mind.

If you are building an MVP product and your competitors rank higher than you then you should care about your website or product landing page design, Also its play important role when you trying to get initial product feedback for your newly launched MVP.

End Thought

SEO is best done in conjunction with website design, and improving website design is not difficult. Keep these pointers in mind when designing your website, and soon you may start seeing higher ranks far away from you. If your website is not responsive to users, don’t expect your website to rank higher in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

When it comes to rankings, Search engines value websites that provide a quality user experience. Proper focus on essential website design elements, such as beautiful images, navigation structure, content, CTAs, etc., will improve the usability and experience of your website visitors.