If you were to ask any successful web designer how to design a good website, they’d tell you the same thing: you need to take a holistic approach. This means considering all the factors that can affect your website’s performance, such as its design, content, speed, SEO, and user experience. Taking a comprehensive and holistic approach ensures that you make the most of every aspect of your website and ultimately improve its performance.
Having said that, if you want to greatly improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages, you need to understand how your website design can affect SEO. That’s what we’re going to talk about today by discussing a couple of web design aspects that go with SEO:
Content Accessibility
When visitors come to your website, they should be able to access the information they’re looking for quickly and easily. In such a case, good website design is important because it can help to make your content more visually appealing, which can help to keep visitors engaged for longer, boosting your ranking.
On the other hand, bad website design can make it hard for visitors to find what they are looking for. Pages cluttered with random content and too many links that don’t have a specific goal can be confusing and off-putting for viewers. This can make them leave your website without seeing the content they initially came for, hurting your ranking severely.
Mobile Optimization
It’s important to make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices. Google considers this a major ranking factor and has been doing so since 2015. They even introduced mobile-first indexing in 2017 to emphasize the importance of this. Despite this, many websites have yet to make the change, even though more people are using their mobile devices to surf online rather than their desktops.
What does this mean to you? Creating a website that works well on mobile devices is essential for ensuring your visitors have a positive experience and that your SEO improves. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it can be difficult to navigate, resulting in a high bounce rate and negative signals to Google. This can significantly impact your search engine rankings for the worse.
Page Speed
Are you aware of what is causing your website to be slow? It is likely related to the way it is designed. Loading speed is a critical factor of SEO; unfortunately, many websites don’t meet these standards. Slow websites leave visitors frustrated, causing them to leave, resulting in the downfall of SEO results.
So, if your website is not performing as expected in terms of search engine rankings, it may be because the loading speed of your site is too slow (more than three seconds to load). As search engines are aware of the importance of page speed, you must make an effort to improve your website’s speed. This can be done by compressing images, disabling unnecessary plugins, and enabling browser caching. Your aim here is to get it to load within two seconds; the faster, the better.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is an organized list of the pages and content on a website that helps search engines find and understand the content on the website. It outlines the website’s structure, allowing search engines to quickly and accurately identify all the pages on the website and their relationship to each other.
Why is this important? Creating a sitemap is a great way to help search engines explore your website. This document provides a clear understanding of the navigation structure, making it easier for search engines to identify and index the content on your site, all of which benefits your SEO efforts.
Conclusion
All in all, these factors can significantly affect your website’s SEO, so if you suspect your website is behind any of these factors, you need to take action immediately. By doing so, not only will they improve your visitor’s experience and trust in your business, but they will also boost your SEO. All these benefits combined will help you succeed, especially in the highly competitive world we live in today.
SpinnerMedia is your go-to full-service digital marketing partner, helping you meet various needs, from SEO to custom websites and more. If you are looking for an Atlanta web design company to assist in helping you create a successful website, reach out to us today!