When you plan to enhance your website’s efficiency or the way it performs, it’s essential to mull over numerous aspects. Today, everything is digital and your website is the face of your business or brand online. You may pay attention to one or more components of design and overlook the other aspects, which are equally important. Web design and SEO are related and if you would like your site to grab the top spot in the search engine results pages, you need to think beyond SEO.
You need to design your web pages professionally; else, you will end up losing organic traffic. Only integrating the basic SEO strategies will not help in the future. Both SEO and web design go together and work seamlessly.
According to an article published on https://www.huffpost.com, designing your site’s navigation plays a pivotal role in enhancing user experience and navigation menus and buttons have an impact on the SEO efficiency of your business website.
The design elements should mix and flow smoothly and implemented like an SEO pro so that visitors can spot anything that you add on your website. Their navigation experience should be easy and seamless. Then, what are the components where design and SEO work together? Here are some of the ways you can use them together:
Design that is simple to understand
Did you know that the effect of your web design has a significant effect on the content, the presentation of the same, to be precise? When the design is shoddy, it becomes hard for your visitors to read or access the information for which they have landed on your site in the first place.
If you have chunks of text in odd places together with several hyperlinks that fail to serve a business goal, it annoys your targeted audience. If they find the design is confusing, you will lose your visitors. If they cannot read the information, what is the point of design and SEO?
You might have come across web pages in which the copy was difficult to read because of poor web design. It could be anything like a light font on a white background that makes reading information challenging. Then, too small or too large fonts would make your web page copy hard to read.
The line spacing, white space, navigation ease, and line length all matter to make the browsing experience on your website easy and simple. Again, you need to think about disabled people and integrate a comprehensive website design form.
The mobile-friendliness of your site
Even if you have little knowledge of design and SEO, you already know the significance of making your web pages mobile-friendly. If you do not have a mobile-friendly design, then now is the time to implement the same. Did you know that Google had declared mobile-friendliness as one of the ranking factors back in 2015?
Again, Google came up with mobile-first indexing in the year 2017 and therefore, it proves how essential mobile-friendliness is for Google as well as your website to rank top in the SERPs. Then, there are still numerous sites that are not mobile-friendly. If you want to make your website mobile-responsive, you can look up any top SEO agency firm near you, which assures results.
The count of people looking for websites on PCs has been dipping significantly for a couple of years, while the count of people looking for information on smartphones or mobile devices has been consistently rising. Today, over 50 percent of web traffic is generated from smartphones, implying over half of your targeted audience are using mobile devices to access website information. Therefore, if you do not have a responsive design, you would end up losing a chunk of potential buyers, who are on mobile.
If you have a website with a very high bounce rate, as it fails to load properly on smartphones or iPad, it sends a bad message to Google. Once the search engine giant notices this, your website rankings will dip.
The loading speed of your website
Does your website load fast or takes minutes to load? What is making your web pages load slowly? Have you ever thought about it? The reason is most of the time, poor web design that affects SEO consequently. The speed of your site is one of the major elements of technical SEO and the key pitfall for numerous websites.
In case, your site is not ranking top in the SERPs, the reason could be your slow-loading pages and visitors are clicking away fast. It leads to high bounce rates. Web page load speed is a crucial ranking factor and therefore you need to pay heed to this issue to speed up your site. You can do so by getting rid of unwanted plugins, optimizing the image files, enabling browser caching, and things like that.
You may think that your site is loading fast without knowing how long your visitors are waiting to see your pages load. Usually, your site must load in two seconds or so. If your web pages take more than three seconds to load, half of the visitors will abandon your website and click on some competitor’s site. When it comes to website load speed, it is more significant on smartphones and tablets because users will be less probable to spend time for your pages to load.
Website speed is essential for your targeted visitors as well as for Google because it has an impact on the search engine’s capacity to crawl your web pages. If slow pages make the search engine to crawl only a few pages, then your entire website wouldn’t be indexed. It will affect your site’s SEO and traffic if the problem persists. It means all the pages won’t rank in the SERPs. Moreover, the security of your business website via https encryption is important. If your visitors feel that your site isn’t secured, they will not click.
Final thoughts
SEO and web design go hand-in-hand. One is not complete without the other if you want to rank top in the SERPs, drive traffic, generate leads, make sales, and improve the bottom line.
