Your business’s website is your portal to the way potential customers will perceive your business. But, website designs should consider more than just aesthetics. A well-designed site plans for speed, navigation features, and compatibility with various screen sizes and devices. These aspects are critically important for improving the search engine optimisation of your business. With a thought-out blueprint for your business’s website, you can catch the attention of your target audience, as well as search engines.
According to research, 90.63% of websites get no organic search traffic from Google. If your business’s website is one of these that is not optimised for search engines, you can lose your chances of gaining prospects through search engines. It is essential to consider search engine optimisation (SEO) a critical aspect of your business’s website design.
effect of Website Design on SEO
Web design is directly linked with your search engine rankings. In addition to focusing on web content and web hosts, you need to prioritise SEO in web design for these reasons:
Poor Website Indexing
Google uses web crawlers to scan web pages for quality and keywords automatically. The goal of the search engine is to provide its users with the best result for their search queries. Essentially, the web crawler algorithm compares the content relevance, organic keyword frequency, and the web design UX to determine the website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. If you have a non-user-friendly web design, your page will not be ranked highly in search results. As a result, you can lose potential leads and traffic.
Slow Loading Time
Website load time plays a significant role in user experience. Research shows that the first five seconds of load time impact conversions most. Therefore, search engines only rank websites that take less than three seconds to load. Slow-loading websites frustrate users, lowering the quality of the online search experience.
Mobile Responsive Design
A mobile-friendly web design allows users to have the same browsing experience they can get from a laptop or a computer but on their mobile devices, like a phone or tablet. Search engines prefer and support mobile responsive web designs. If your website has unique content, a clean layout, and easy to navigate format, the chances of ranking high on search engines increase dramatically.
High On-Site Time
People prefer to visit a site that is pleasing to look at. With a cluttered web design, you will attract less traffic. This is because most users head over to your competitors’ sites instead of locating features on your website and easily find what they want. With good visuals, your on-site time increases, showing search engines that your website is a good and credible source of information and should rank higher on SERP.
Web Images and Alt-text
Images on websites allow for breaks in long content and help raise engagement and on-page time. However, larger image files slow down the website loading time, which drops your search engine ranking. Additionally, if you’re using the image to deliver an important message to your audience, the slow loading speed may prevent the audience from seeing the image content.
To avoid this issue, your web designer can compress images to decrease their size and load time. A talented designer will ensure the compressed file loads quickly without compromising image quality.
Another way to optimise your web design is to add relevant keywords and alt-text for each image. Search engine crawlers cannot read the image content, so web designers use alt-text to describe the image content to the crawler. Taking this initiative shows that the image adds value for the visitor.
Text Font
A search engine may not care what font you use on your website, but your visitors do. This is why it is essential to use an easy-to-read font to optimise the user experience. If your visitors are satisfied, the search engine will also favour your website over your business’s competitors. That is why you should refrain from mixing different fonts and ensure the font size is neither too big nor too small. Your web designer can also perform an audit to ensure consistency and legibility in text across all devices.
To Wrap Up
Web design and SEO are two different aspects of digital marketing. But web design requires SEO to get the best results for your business in the form of new traffic. A poorly designed website decreases site performance, user experience, and search engine ranking, so you must ensure your business site caters to all design elements. Implementing good search engine optimisation practices for your business can help your website gain more traffic from Google and help your business get noticed by your ideal customers.
If you want an SEO-optimised, fast, and easy-to-use web design for your business, chat with our team at Crunchy Digital. We have experts in search engine optimisation, content marketing, web development, and so much more!
