SEO and Web Design: Smart Collaboration to Skyrocket Conversion
The relationship between SEO and website design isn't entirely clear. Many site owners believe that the most rational approach is to separate different digital promotion areas and isolate them from each other. On the one hand, this supposedly allows for clear segregation of analytics. But on the other hand, this deprives the site of comprehensive development.
An eye-catching and convenient site that is not optimized will sink into oblivion, losing its organic potential. An optimized site that is not user-friendly, regrettably, also will not stand the test; people will leave it without finding the desired section and become disillusioned with your brand.
This is why web design and SEO have to go hand in hand – it's not that hard, but it gives amazing results. Let's talk about how you can befriend them and provide your visitors with the perfect user experience.
Gather Speed
In our modern, ever-hurrying world, it isn't easy to imagine a person who will wait for a website to load for more than three seconds, which is especially true for mobile devices’ users.
If this precious time has passed, but we still see awkward attempts to connect to the server, pictures uploading, and other things, we indifferently click on the cross icon and move on to the next option.
Other than that, Google will not rank your site high and sometimes even penalize it if there are any signs of poor user experience, including slow page load time, while faster sites rank higher.
Therefore, you need to accelerate your site, that is, make it load quickly. To do this, one must act by contradiction and understand what slows it down. And bingo, quite often, it is a problem of SEO and design.
Working with acceleration starts with a few classic tricks:
Reducing the number of graphic elements.
Optimizing pictures.
Permitting browser cache.
Using Gzip compression.
Removing unnecessary or underused plugins.
Reducing the amount of code.
Adding relevant title, alt, and description.
As you can see, this list includes representative tasks of not only SEO and design but even coding. This is already a reasonably serious and authoritative set of techniques for increasing the site loading speed. If you are intimidated by manipulations with the code, you can postpone it, and first of all, do the optimization of the graphics and prescribing the meta tags. We should also mention graphics optimization. High-quality images, especially if it's a product, have a big impact on conversion. Therefore, good image compression is important so that the photos do not lose their quality. You can do it yourself in Adobe Photoshop or even online editors. But if you would take this issue seriously, or if image quality is critical for you, but you need maximum compression, then you should contact a photo retouching service like photoretouchingservices.net or others.
This is what you can do without much knowledge and the involvement of specialists. But the result will be impressive. An optimized site that will load well and quickly and have the correct SEO structure will be well-received by search engines and occupy higher positions.
Conquer the Mobile World
Since we have already mentioned mobile devices, it would be reasonable to continue talking about them. Everyone or almost everyone understands the importance of a responsive website design that will look equally good on a PC and a smartphone.
In addition to the fact that more than half of people surf the Internet from their smartphones, Google added mobile adaptability among the factors in the site's ranking. And that was five years ago. You don't want to show your potential clients your five-year backwardness, do you?
If your site is optimized for mobile devices, it will not only rank better, but it will provide a much better experience for visitors and lower bounce rates. With a responsive design, your visitors get everything they need in the right format.
The main tips for mobile-friendly design are:
Reduce the size of images. This is always true as smartphone users tend to linger even less than PC users.
Customize designs for a wide variety of screen sizes. Now there is no concept of the classic smartphone screen size: there are a great many of them, and this must be taken into account whenever possible. The same goes for tablets.
Showcase all page content. It may seem impossible, but you need to provide the user of a small device with the same amount of information as the user of a PC. It is possible to remove some elements such as complex dropdown menus, navigation, and advertisements, but not important content.
Structure Your Content
Most of the work with SEO is about various manipulations with content. And this applies not only to its filling with keywords but also simply to its correct presentation and structuring. This point can be called the most obvious example of the benefits of cooperation between design and SEO, and now we will explain why.
If the page is filled with a solid canvas of text without lists, blocks, headings, or any other sign of structure, the person will most likely leave it. Such a page is a clear example of the lack of a strategy for thinking through design and optimization.
You may have heard that SEO loves structured pages with H1-H6 headings, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and more. It is much easier for search engines to check such pages for relevance to the search queries for which they are created. Heading tags show crawlers the structure of the text: they help them distinguish headings from body text and determine the degree of their importance.
Besides, the structured text is more readable and looks much more presentable and attractive. Visitors can quickly skim through the content and see if it makes sense to read the entire article. Well-formed copy reduces the likelihood that visitors will immediately close the site, helps them quickly find an answer to their question, and possibly lead them neatly to purchase your product or service.
Use Internal Linking
Random or misplaced links can cause confusion or even rejection. But a well-thought-out internal linking strategy yields results for SEO and UX:
Organizing content based on categories that differ from standard navigation;
Providing more ways of interaction with the site for the user;
Demonstrating the context for each link;
Helping search bots to highlight the most significant pages.
Grasp the key points of internal linking:
The home page of the site is the most authoritative, so it should link to other pages.
Key pages should be visible first, so take advantage of blocks, footers, menus, and breadcrumbs for this.
CTA texts should be clear, useful, and meaningful, and the call to action should logically derive from their message.
Link placement doesn't play a key role in SEO, so place them in a meaningful and organic way.
It is easier for search engines to assess the importance of links in text content than in images because most often, images are loaded without clear and contextual alt attributes.
Do not use natural anchors (click here, go to the page, learn more, etc.). They can be considered spam by search bots.
Having mentioned the work with links, we would like to mention another win-win way to improve the site's position. This is a guest posting – placing expert articles on top article submission sites with the inclusion of a link to your website. Buying backlinks is an excellent and affordable SEO method to improve your position in search results and, accordingly, boost traffic to your resource. And when a person gets to your site, it's your job to make sure he or she stays: have you already managed to optimize it according to the SEO and design parameters we specified?
To Wrap it Up
Make SEO and design work together and not separately, and you will see the result. Basically, they work towards the same goal – increasing sales. And they do this by improving the user experience and increasing the site's search engine rankings.
Do not be afraid to use the tips we have provided, as this does not require any technical knowledge. Combining the two will help you take the digital development of your business to the next level.