A stellar digital presence is a key to success for businesses nowadays. Without an online presence, a business can’t reap the levels of success it hopes for. A website plays the most important role for businesses to cater to their target audience digitally. Now, there are many ways to grow online through a website. But the most important and cost-effective is SEO.
If you are willing to know more about SEO, click on the link and give it a read.
Creating a website isn’t enough for an outstanding online presence. You must make sure that the interface is easy to use by a person visiting it. An easy interface and design greatly impact the results of SEO as well.
In this blog, we will shed some light on how a website design affects SEO, and how to make an SEO friendly design.
Website Design & SEO Go Hand-in-Hand
A website shouldn’t only be visually appealing. Design is quite important, too. As it greatly affects the entire way a website will perform digitally. Gone are those days when billboards and pamphlets were distributed to let people know about your business. In today’s world, people see a business’ website first if they want to know more about them and their services. And more importantly, it is the only thing that will help you in creating a presence on search engines.
As stated above, a website design does impact SEO. Here’s how:
How Does Web Design Affect SEO?
There are 3 major ways in which a web design greatly impacts SEO.
1. If the user interface is not human-friendly
Investing in website UI is the key to growing on search engines. If a website’s UI is not human friendly, it will adversely hurt the presence of search engines, mainly Google.
In today’s world, Google is the king of search engines. Everyone who runs a business and has an online presence surely wants to rank on the top pages of Google. Having a bad UI will be a barrier to making this a reality. Google bots have been designed in such a way that they mimic human behavior. It means that what a person will find bad on Google, their search bots will also find it bad.
It is simple to understand why UI is important for SEO. If a user finds a website visually appealing and easy to use, the bounce rate will be less. If a website doesn’t have an aesthetic design and a friendly interface, the bounce rate will be pretty high, making the search bots drop your site to lower pages.
Moreover, the website must be heavily speed optimized too. No one likes to wait for a web page to load. They will leave instantly if a web page takes a long time to load.
If your website is already live or is in making, make sure that you take care of the above discussed things to keep the design SEO friendly.
2. If the visuals and content are not eye-catching
A good web design is essential to make a user stay on a website. Web design boosts your authority, building trust with users. According to statistics, 38% of people are likely to go to another website if they don’t find the visuals catchy.
Complimenting visuals with engaging text is the perfect strategy to decrease the bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate, the higher the chances of users staying on the website. Thus increasing its authority that can boost rankings.
3. If the content layout is complex
Just having good content is enough to rank your website. If a user finds the content on your website twirled in a complex layout, they probably won’t read it and bounce off to a newer website.
Keep the website content layout simple, make headings hierarchy, add amazing visuals to make a user stay, and make a blog page on your website.
Doing this will give search bots an indication that you are here to help the users as well, which will help a lot to get on the starting pages of search engines.
What’s An SEO Friendly Web Design?
We discussed a few issues of a website that can affect SEO. Now, let’s discuss a few tips that can make a website design and SEO go hand-in-hand.
1. Make a responsive design
Let’s start with a fact that many of us don’t know. Google index mobile responsive website first. The data present on the mobile version of your website is utilized firstly by Google for indexing. So, if you have a website that is not mobile responsive, then you are in for some trouble that will significantly harm rankings.
To keep a website design SEO friendly, the first thing to make sure of is that it has a responsive design. A responsive design means that a website shall be functional on all screen sizes.
A few years ago, designers used to make a website functional on desktops only. After making a desktop design, they used to create a similar one for smartphones too. But this method has become obsolete now. In 2021, around 54% of the website’s traffic came through smartphones.
In today’s time, you can not undermine the importance of providing a seamless experience to users. And for that, a responsive design is necessary for a website. Or else, it will impact your SEO rankings.
Tip: Go for a mobile design first, then move on to the desktop version.
2. Make a simple, clean navigation
Users don’t want to navigate through a website to look for things they want. So, make sure your website can be easily navigated by a person using it. Make simple and clean navigation.
That’s something quite important for search engine crawlers too. They will consider a website to take on the top of search engine pages that have a simple, rather than those that have a hard to navigate sitemap.
In simpler words, keep the URLs short, limit and remove any duplicate categories if present. Give your users a website that can be easily searched for the information they want.
3. Make loading speed fast, faster, fastest
When a user comes to your website, the chances of conversion reduce if the web pages take time to load. In fact, around 8% of users bounce back if there is merely a 100-millisecond delay in the loading time.
To make sure that it does not happen, collaborate with a web guy and ask them to maintain your website on a monthly basis. Ask them to optimize it for speed from time to time.
If the load time is fast, users might stay on your website, indicating to crawlers that your website has something they are looking for. Thus helping in boosting SEO rankings.
For a website maintenance service, you can hire our experts.
To Wrap Up
In today’s digital world, having just an online presence isn’t enough to boost your business sales. There are many tactics and strategies that you have to imply to make sure you get desired results.
In the case of a website, the major thing is to keep the design SEO friendly. We’ll advise you to go for a WordPress website design or Shopify website design, as it is considered very SEO friendly.
To get a website created, contact SEOHUB.PK. Our website experts will turn your dream website into a reality with their expertise.
