How Web Design Affects SEO Ranking
Web design practices contribute immensely to your SEO Ranking. Keep User experience your priority to rank higher in search engine
Whenever someone wants to learn more about your brand, your website is one of the first things they will turn to. As such, it is only natural that you want it to have a modern look and sleek design. However, focusing on aesthetics is not enough, especially if, besides presenting your brand in an appealing way, your goal is also to boost your search engine ranking.
As the internet evolves, so do search engines, and right now, there’s hardly anything more important than user experience. And so, it is crucial for websites to deliver the fastest, most comprehensive experience. If your website is not designed with SEO in mind, it will be difficult for people to find you organically and engage with your brand.
With that said, continue reading the article below to learn more about how your website’s design impacts SEO performance so you, too, can make changes for the better.
What Is SEO?
Before diving right into the subject, it’s essential to understand what search engine optimization is. It can be defined as a set of practices and processes designed to increase the visibility of web pages in organic search results and draw more traffic to them.
But, even though increased traffic is always something to be happy about, especially if it’s organic, the other, even more important goal of SEO is to generate conversions.
However, in order to become your customers, people need to be able to find you. This can prove difficult if your website doesn’t rank high enough in the search engines, drowning in the sea of competitors.
That’s why you have to focus on web design that appeals to both humans and search engine crawlers. Using SEO link-building services to increase your visibility can be helpful, but if your website is not properly optimized, all your other efforts will be for nothing.
So, what should you turn your attention to?
Responsive Web Design Is Your Best Bet
Because SEO goes hand in hand with user experience, lousy design can quickly hurt your rating, and recovering from a blast like this may be quite challenging. That’s why it’s crucial to build a website that can adapt to any device, be it a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone.
A responsive website will recognize the device someone uses to browse it in a split second and render everything to match it. This includes orientation, resolution, screen size, and all other interactive elements that may need to be scaled down or up and adjusted to work properly, regardless of the device.
The primary benefit of responsive web design is that it allows you to provide a seamless user experience no matter how someone accesses your website. The last thing you want is for potential customers to be turned off by a website that’s difficult to navigate because it wasn’t properly optimized for their device.
Fortunately, Google Search Console offers a tool to check whether your website is mobile-friendly according to Google’s requirements.
Poorly Designed Websites Won’t Rank
If users deem even a part of your website design annoying, the search engines will likely do the same. For instance, if your layout is too complex and forces people to go through different subpages to find what they are looking for, your search engine rankings won’t go up. The same goes for websites filled with lots of flashing and frustrating ads, popups, or fonts that look unprofessional.
The good news is that even if currently, the design of your website doesn’t look too good, all is not lost yet. First of all, there’s an abundance of SEO-friendly templates, fonts, and designs (some of which are free) that will surely improve how high your website ranks in the search engines. And if this doesn’t repair the damage, you can always invest in the services of a professional web designer or SEO specialist who will make sure your website holds to a high standard. It will certainly be a worthwhile investment.
You Need to Speed Up a Slow Website
The time it takes your website to load is yet another important factor that search engines pay utmost attention to. Without a doubt, the way it’s designed has a huge impact on how quickly its landing pages and subpages load.
Therefore, if you want to improve your SEO ranking, make sure you remove any design element that might be slowing down your website. That includes large images and videos that are not properly compressed, as well as unnecessary plugins and animations. There are truly few things more frustrating than having to wait for minutes at a time just so one page can finally finish loading.
An ideal website should load in less than one second, two or three tops. This is not something to be ignored, as, according to the data, around 40% of users will leave if they’re forced to wait for more than three seconds for a page to finally load.
Luckily, you can do plenty of things to speed up your website's loading time, including using compressed images, caching your web pages, or minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. If you’re still unsure how fast (or slow) your website is, you can check it using Google PageSpeed Insights.
In Conclusion
As you can see, web designs not only have a huge impact on the user's experience but also on search engine rankings. This means that if you fail to address the issues, you’ll risk ranking low in searches. This will inevitably affect your business, as a low position in SERPs equals less traffic and fewer conversions.
Fortunately, there are many easy changes that you can implement to improve the elements that impact SEO. Some of the steps you can take include focusing on a responsive web design and making sure that your website is easy to navigate and loads fast.
Remember: a user-friendly website is a search-engine-friendly website.
