As web designers, it’s our job to build your website for you. More than that, it’s to build you a website that’s functional, beautiful, and gives you the best possible chance to succeed online. That might seem fairly simple, but in reality, that’s a lot of work to do! Just one of the things we have to consider is your SEO performance, and how we can design your website to improve it. That’s right, your web design has a direct link to your SEO ranking, and here’s why.
The Human Factor
The thing to remember about SEO is that user experience is critical. If users find your website easy to navigate and use, then you will see improved SEO results. this means your website design needs to focus on how real people use it.
If your design is too complex or confusing, then your visitors will leave fairly quickly. Not only does this harm your conversion rates, but search engines pick up on the fact that visitors leave your website quickly, and will drop your search rankings as a result. This is called a ‘bounce rate’, and design is one of the biggest factors.
Design Boosts Time
Did you know that 38% of users will leave a site if they don’t like the design? It’s true! Creating quality visuals and formatting them in a pleasing way will not only reduce your bounce rate, but it will encourage users to stay on your website for longer. Search engines pay close attention to how people behave when using your website, and if they stay and explore for an extended period of time that means your rankings will go up. The easiest way to achieve this is with high-quality web design.
Make Things Easier For Crawlers
While your website design should always prioritise the needs of human users, you also need to balance the needs of search engines. Search engines use ‘crawlers’ to assess your website for over 1,000 different factors to determine your search engine ranking, and this can change on a daily basis. If you make the wrong web design choices, you can make it difficult for crawlers to index your site and damage your SEO rankings. A good web developer will be able to use best practices to ensure your website is accessible to crawlers and SEO-friendly.
Higher Page Load Speeds
Page load speed is one of the key SEO ranking factors (according to Google), and your web design has a huge impact on load speed. If your pages are too bloated with large images or necessary code, your SEO rankings will be negatively affected. A good web designer will be able to minify CSS and JS, compress images, use caching solutions, minify redirects and more to minimize page load speeds.
Mobile Friendliness
Being mobile-friendly is another big factor in SEO, and with over 60% of web traffic coming from mobile devices it’s even more important. Google introduced mobile-friendliness as a key ranking factor in 2015, and launched mobile-first indexing in 2017. So when your website is being built, its mobile-friendliness needs to be at the forefront. Without a mobile-friendly web design, you may accidentally alienate half of your users and significantly increase your bounce rate- both bad things for SEO!
At Moyralla Marketing we don’t just build websites. We create websites that look beautiful and are SEO-friendly. We understand what search engines are looking for in a website, and use that knowledge to create a solid foundation of SEO that will help our clients get found online. If you like to know more, just get in touch
