How web design impacts your search ranking
Penny Dower Hunt, 05 November 2022.
Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a successful business without a great website. That means that it should be attractive and user-friendly. At the same time, a great business website has no value if customers can’t find it. Thus, apart from being user-friendly, it also has to be SEO-friendly. Of course, this is not easy to achieve. Particularly since, as a business owner, you likely have no experience in these fields. Therefore, you should avoid the mistake of designing a website on your own.
Hiring a team of experts from a web design company specializing in web design and SEO is best. Otherwise, you might end up with two conflicting departments and poor results. Let’s look at how web design can impact your SEO ranking to understand why this is so important.
How web design can impact your SEO ranking
Essentially, web design and SEO are two separate fields. That’s why you’ll find experts for each. However, if those experts don’t collaborate, you’ll have spent your money in vain. Let’s find out why.
1. The loading speed of your website
When designing a website, things like coding, file sizes, and plugins directly impact the loading speed. If you don’t optimize these elements, your website will take longer to load. That is a problem, because having a slow website can harm SEO.
The main reason is that website speed represents a key SEO ranking factor. After all, who would want to waste their precious time waiting for a page to load? Research shows that if you want to reduce your bounce rate, you should aim for an average of under 3 seconds to load your page.
The coding used by the web designer can slow down your website and affect your SEO ranking.
2. The website navigation structure
Your website’s navigation structure has a tremendous impact on your SEO ranking. It affects everything from bounce rate to time-on-page, conversion rate, and engagement rate. And all of these metrics help your website rank higher in search engine results. Furthermore, this will likely increase your business’s revenue, which is your end goal.
A good navigation structure means that users can easily find what they are looking for. Thus, keeping things simple is key. There are several ways to do this.
Firstly, you could add a search bar to your website. This way, users will be able to find everything in no time as long as you have a search functionality that is well thought out.
Secondly, ensure that the main menu is simple and uses familiar terms, not specialized ones.
Thirdly, create short, descriptive URLs that users and search engines can easily understand.
Fourthly, add internal links using descriptive anchor text.
3. The images used for your website
Another way web design can impact your SEO ranking is through the images you use. Firstly, using high-resolution images is appealing but slows down your loading speed. And the same thing applies if you use too many photos. Therefore, the experts from WP Full Care advise you to optimize image sizes to speed up your website.
Avoid using too many high-resolution images because they slow down your website.
The images you use on your website impact the time-on-page and engagement rate metrics. Specifically, you need relevant and exciting images to attract users and keep them engaged. However, you have to do more than that for a higher SEO ranking. Ensure you use relevant file names and descriptive alt texts rich in keywords. Alt text is essential because that’s how search engines understand images and index them by keyword.
4. The mobile responsiveness
Nowadays, people use their smartphones even more than their computers. Therefore, making your website mobile-friendly is a must. Furthermore, mobile responsive web design will improve your Google organic search ranking. You can achieve this by speeding up your website, enhancing legibility and the tap target sizes, and choosing the correct viewpoint, just to name a few. But if you’re unsure where to start, run a mobile usability test on Google.
Making your website mobile-friendly is how web design can impact your SEO ranking.
5. The readability
Users are in search of information. But they don’t have the time or patience to read countless pages to get that information. Therefore, to improve user experience, you have to provide a pleasant reading experience. That, in turn, can impact your SEO ranking because it will likely increase time-on-page and engagement rates while reducing the bounce rate.
To achieve good readability, you should divide your content into headings, subheadings, and bullet points. You should also leave large white spaces between the sections. Then, you can insert images and videos to divide the content further and make it more interesting. And make sure you don’t use long paragraphs and sentences.
Regarding fonts, you should avoid fancy ones and stick to legible, readable ones.
6. The 404 missing page
No matter how well you manage your website, errors still occur occasionally. One of the most common examples is the 404 page. That alerts the users that the page they are trying to access no longer exists. The problem is that this increases your bounce rate and decreases time-on-page, thus, leading to a lower SEO rank.
Create a fun 404 missing page instead of the generic 404 page that is produced when a page is missing.
You might be able to reverse this chain of events by being creative. Instead of the generic 404-page design, which is produced when a web page is missing, come up with something original. Make it visually appealing or even funny. That will show your users that their experience matters to you. You can also add a search bar that visitors can use to find what they are looking for. And you can even provide them with one or more links to sections of your website.
Final thoughts
This is only a brief description of how web design can impact your SEO ranking. There are many other contributing factors. Nevertheless, this is enough to show you that web design and SEO rankings go hand in hand. Therefore, you shouldn’t treat them separately. If you’re not an expert, then seek the help of website design pros. But make sure you build a team that works together. This way, your business will benefit from a great website that will attract customers. And you’ll be able to start making a profit.