How Website Design Impacts SEO

by Shubham Yadav Digital Marketing Expert

Every designer should be aware of how the website design impacts SEO. The design of your website plays a very important role in your overall SEO effectiveness. Content is not the only factor that comes into play when it comes to the many elements associated with SEO. The design of a website is another thing that must be taken into consideration. It would now be prudent to examine some of these issues so that more informed decisions about a website’s design can be made.

Mobile optimization

This aspect of a website’s design is critical. Google now identifies websites that do not have proper mobile optimization. You have two choices when it comes to this major issue; you can either have a single website that is “mobile first” and designed with mobile devices in mind, or you can have two separate sites, one for mobile and one for everything else. However, you run the risk of having duplicate content if you choose the latter option, and this would damage your website’s SEO ranking. Having a responsive website design ensures that your site is optimized across devices (desktop, tablets, and mobile)

Images

There are several things to consider when it comes to images on your web pages. One of the most important factors is the fact that high-quality images will usually lower the bounce rate of your pages by increasing their visual appeal. High bounce rates negatively impact a webpage’s SEO rankings. Using appropriate Alt tags for images certainly improves your SEO.

Page Speed

If the images on a page have a large file size, they will take longer to load and this affects page speed. If your pages take too long to load then their SEO rankings will be negatively impacted. If the file sizes of your images are too large, you should reduce them by using Photoshop, so you can control the exact amount of data compression used for this process. You should also optimize the code of your web pages and eliminate any unnecessary characters; this will also improve your page speed.

User Experience

If the content on your website is not as per quality standards, it will adversely impact your page. In fact, after 2018’s algorithm update, Google itself announced via its Tweet that building content is a way to increase the ranking of a website. It was suggested for the websites, whose rankings were dropped, but it is similarly applicable to the new websites, or those sites, which are not in ranking as yet. The aspects that can be considered as quality standards are (1) The way it has been written (2) How informative it is (3) How much it solves the queries of the users.

Navigation Design

Good navigation is necessary because when users find your website slow or out-of-date, they do not consider it worth seeing. At the starting point, it should be figured out the kind of features website provides to its users and the hierarchy, in which information has to be displayed. There should be appropriate sitemaps, and the things should be easily discoverable.

Managing Bounce Rates

Pages with 404 errors are unable to build page rank. Besides, the coming soon pages also don’t give a good impact. It will be better to avoid these pages. But, there are ways to manage bonce rates, which include:

Rather than using 404, try explaining it in some other way. Because 404 is a technical term and it keeps the visitors confused.
Your 404 page ad coming soon page should have same template layout or site navigation of the page.
Add internal links of your prominent pages like Home Page, Product or Service pages and more to 404 and coming soon pages.
If you are managing the blog posts, include the links of your featured posts.
Add Search Box 2.
Implement a 301 redirect if the page is being displayed 404.

The key to proper website design is balancing the SEO issues with the UX issues so that the user has an aesthetically pleasant experience but does not have to wait too long for a webpage to finish loading. When your designer takes into account that how website design impacts SEO, he or she gives a boost to your search engine optimization strategy.

So your website design does not only determine its appearance but also the ranking that it get on search engines.

Originally published on https://www.canbayinc.com/blog/how-website-design-impacts-seo/