SEO-optimised web design: What? Why? How?
Importance of website design for business
Regardless of the industry, they operate in, a company's online presence can significantly affect its success in engaging with its target customers and driving the business. In today’s times where an internet connection is almost ubiquitous, a majority of customers will visit or look for a company’s website for researching their products and services. Not having a website can hamper a company’s reputation and business. This also applies to businesses which offer offline services. For visitors to quickly locate a business office/store, websites typically offer a map to locate its stores or offices.
By creating a well-equipped website, businesses can not only showcase their products and services but also generate testimonials and reviews. This makes understanding the importance of website design an important driver for any company’s success.
Why is SEO important to a website?
Now that you know how a website can help boost your business, you also need to know how to make it work for you in the best manner possible. Search engine optimisation also known as SEO, is a collection of guidelines for website optimisation that can help your website rank higher in organic search results. It improves your website's visibility in search engines and increases organic (non-paid) traffic to your website.
The primary objective of SEO is to improve your understanding of how online users search for your products/services so that you can provide high-quality content to meet their needs. The second-most important aim is to assist you in building a website whose content can be found, indexed, and well-comprehended by search engines.
By making your website more “visible”, SEO boosts high-quality organic traffic to your website. This organic discovery of your website due to SEO also increases sales, thus boosting ROI on the time and money spent on implementing it. Apart from this, when done correctly, SEO includes improving the UI and UX of the website. This ensures that not only do the users find the website good to look at, but their experience in terms of navigation, structure etc. is also smoother. Since organic traffic largely consists of users who already intend to buy a particular product, this increases the possibility of them turning from being prospective users to paying ones.
Best practices for an SEO-friendly website
Let us look at some of the best practices that website designers should adhere to in order to contribute to the website’s SEO score. Some of these practices are as follows:
1. Mobile-friendliness
A responsive website guarantees your target audience has a smooth experience whether they are browsing your site from a computer or mobile device, which benefits your SEO. This is especially important in today’s times since the number of people accessing the internet from a mobile device vastly exceeds those using desktop/laptop computers.
2. Website loading speed
Nobody likes to wait too much for a web page to load. The faster your site loads, the happier the user is, and the better your SEO score is.
Your page loading speed may be affected by the following factors:
● Web hosting (geographical location, available bandwidth etc.)
● File sizes of various assets like images, videos etc.
● Plugins (analytics, media plugins etc.)
● Amount of scripts that need to load before the user can start using the site
● Traffic volume
3. Sitemaps
The structure of your website's web pages, files, videos, and other content is stored in a sitemap file. These are useful for websites having a variety of pages, especially if they aren't all linked to one another. Having a sitemap not only helps the search engine crawlers to navigate the site but it can also be used to make your site navigable for the user.
4. Readability
The content of your site should be tailored according to the target audience. Content which is easily readable without needing too much effort on the visitor’s part makes for a happier user. On the contrary, content which needlessly uses complicated language and is not structured properly can cause a user to quit browsing, in what is called a “bounce”.
5. Proper image file names
Since image file names are not visible to the user, you might tend to not pay much attention to them. However, search engines do take them into consideration. File names for images and other assets should describe the image properly. For example, “home-page-header-product-benefits.jpg” is a much better choice than “home-page-header-final-2.jpg”.
6. Descriptors in alt tags
Google's algorithm can decipher the contents of an image based on what is specified in the alt tags. Providing proper text in the alt tags can ensure that the image will appear in the search results if it corresponds to the user's query. Your alt tag text should be a complete statement that precisely describes what is in your image.
7. Website navigation
Your visitors won't be able to locate the various pages on your website like your blog, email signup page, product listings, pricing, contact details, help documents etc. if you do not provide proper website navigation. This will not only hamper the usability of your website but also frustrate the user and cause them to bounce off the site, never to return again. On the other hand, a well-navigable website will ensure that they will spend more time on the website and better engage with your business.
8. Proper URL structure
Your URL structure is an important component of your SEO strategy. The focus keywords from your web page or blog post should be a part of the URL slug. For each page, you intend to include in your website design be sure to conduct keyword research. This will ensure that your URLs contain the proper keywords and will be appropriately picked up by the search engine algorithms.
9. Metadata
Your title tags and meta description are examples of your metadata (also known as meta tags). This information is shown in the Google search results. Make sure your metadata is optimised and contains relevant content. About 36% of SEO professionals believe that the title tag is the most crucial SEO metadata component.
10. Indexable content
The likelihood of the pages appearing in the search engine results pages increases significantly if a search engine can easily crawl a site—easily examining, analysing, and comprehending the content on each page of the site. This is where having a well-structured sitemap helps.
In conclusion
To sum things up, the quality of your web design including its SEO friendliness can significantly affect the success (or otherwise) of your digital marketing efforts. Adopting an incorrect web design and SEO approach could also damage your company's reputation.
From website branding to SEO to social media outreach, web design is crucial to all digital marketing services. Improperly implemented web design could have a detrimental effect on your business prospects. So what are you waiting for?