Contents
Introduction
Your website needs to look good. But more than that, it requires a vision that ensures its functionality for the years to come. A great website design will not only help you find success online but will also improve your search engine rankings. Therefore, designing an SEO-friendly website design is indispensable.
We wanted to create a stand-alone piece of content that will help you design a business website for SEO. But before we discuss the various steps you can take to optimize your website design, let’s find out why you need to design for SEO.
Why design a website for SEO?
It is crucial to explore the benefits of SEO-friendly website design as it will help you strengthen your vision. Here are the reasons why SEO website design is essential for your business’s success.
Helps design for the target consumer
SEO-driven website design is made with the target consumer in mind. In other words, you are designing the site to attract the right online users and turn them into customers.
Once the visitors land on your site, a SEO-friendly website design will increase your chances of getting conversions. It gives you the opportunity to focus on what matters more to your customers.
Get highly targeted traffic
The conversions aren’t possible if you attract the wrong online audience.
SEO website design attracts precisely the users that might convert to your business. It involves incorporating design elements and features that target your audience. Indeed, it requires extensive target audience research and testing at your end. But, the effort is worth it. You will have to pay attention to on-page and off-page SEO to achieve a perfect website design.
Creates a seamless User Experience (UX)
Customer experience matters more than anything, especially considering the fierce online competition. Developing a seamless user experience is imperative since it saves the users time and energy while finding the information they want.
SEO web design prevents you from implementing ineffective navigation and inconsistent design. You can successfully reduce the length of the sales funnel, acquisition costs, and time required to warm a lead. It is an excellent way to amplify your online presence.
Boosts organic search traffic
A SEO-driven website makes the most of the organic search results on Google.
People trust Google and the results it shows on its search engine. If your site ranks on top for a particular search query, users will click on it as ranking on the first page itself is solid social proof. After all, only the best sites rank on top. You will get the right kind of online attention and generate more traffic to your site.
Optimize the site for conversions
SEO website design aligns perfectly with user behavior.
Developing a responsive and mobile-friendly website is a necessity, given the growing number of internet users relying on mobile devices to access the internet. Nowadays, the major part of visits are made with a mobile . You will end up designing a website that works well on different mobile devices. In other words, you will never lose customers because of a lack of device compatibility.
11 elements that ensure SEO-friendly web design in 2021
So, how can you ensure an SEO-friendly website design? Now that you know how important it is to design for SEO let’s figure out how to leverage this opportunity for business success.
Site navigation
The navigation on your site should be intuitive. There’s no other way around this.
An intuitive navigation factors-in the online user behavior. In other words, you should think about how the visitors will use your website once they land on it.
The best way to achieve intuitive site navigation is by including the most important pages in the main menu, adding categories and subcategories, employing keywords and call-to-action on each page. Also, include a search bar to allow visitors to search for what they are looking for. It can help them save a lot of time.
Site speed
This is a no-brainer. Your business website should be designed to function fast.
Website design plays a crucial role in how fast your site loads. Make decisions in the design stage that positively impacts the site speed. Ensure eliminating the features and elements that increase loading time. Get rid of unnecessary animations and large images too. Keep the number of widgets in check since you don’t want too much dependent on external scripts. Don’t add design elements just because they look good.
Adopt a thoughtful approach to every single detail you include on the site. Most importantly, check how each change on the site impacts the load speed.
URL structure
The URL on your site should always be SEO-friendly. It is one of the main things Google search engine algorithms consider while indexing your page.
Therefore, you should customize the URL to match the content of every webpage. It should include the primary keyword for each page and must not be very long. We highly recommend you develop a structure for the SEO-friendly URLs and use it across all the web pages.
Mobile-friendly design
The layout of your site is critical, and the first impression can make or break the user experience.
Recent studies showed that it does not even take ONE second for the users to judge your site ! Since mobile internet users are increasing, ensure a mobile-friendly design that encourages them to spend more time on your site. Always preview your site for mobile view whenever you make a change to its layout. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to rate your site’s mobile optimization. The idea here is to design an enjoyable experience.
Visual hierarchy
The visual hierarchy on the site matters. Why? Whenever a user lands on your site, it will fail to pay attention to every element or content on a page.
While it also depends on how big the screen is, a considerable part of the problem is how you design and place the visual elements on the site. Since users are only going to see a small portion of the page, make sure you know what they see in the first few seconds when they land on your site. Follow a visual hierarchy and place the most important information high up to retain the user and improve conversion rate.
Readability
Readability is crucial for any SEO-driven website design. Even well-designed content won’t save you if the visitors find it difficult to consume it.
Therefore, focus on elements that can significantly improve your website’s readability. Go for a larger font, preferably at least 14px. Use an optimal line-height of 24px. Get the contrast right between the text and the background. Once you get these right, start publishing content with more subheadings, bullet lists, and images. Use shorter sentences as you don’t want the visitors to get exhausted consuming the content.
Content creation
Sites that don’t have enough content often struggle to get any recognition online. Since it is a life force of a website, content should be planned in the design stages. The content structure should be a priority when designing a website. We will discuss page structure later. For now, let’s find out how content plays a role in SEO web design.
The very first thing you should do is create high-quality content that provides your target audience great value. Then, optimize the content with target keywords and keep updating the content from time to time. Content is a crucial part of SEO website design. Therefore, you must never rely on duplicate content.
Image optimization
Images play a crucial role in improving website design. The good thing is that they can strengthen the SEO for your site. You must know that Google cannot index the content written on images.
So, how can you optimize them? First, name the images for SEO by including the primary keyword. Not just that, you should also optimize the ALT tag using the primary keyword. Optimize the ALT tag whenever you are uploading the images. Besides that, make sure you compress the images to ensure they are uploaded with the smallest size possible. But it would help if you did not compress them to an extent where you compromise their quality.
Page structure
The way you design and structure a web page says a lot about your brand.
A cluttered and unstructured web page shows that the brand doesn’t care about user experience. Give every page on the site solid structure using headings. It is a useful tool to make the content scannable and organized. You will significantly improve the site’s readability if you strategically divide the content using headings.
Once you have divided the content into different sections, try incorporating the keywords into the headings. Only add the keywords where it makes sense. Don’t force them into the content as it will adversely impact the reliability.
Meta tags
The meta tags and descriptions influence search rankings. Focus on optimizing the title tags and meta descriptions for the target keywords. Google uses Title Tag to figure out what the page is about. Thus it makes for a spot to place target keywords.
The title tag should be short as Google only displays 50-60 characters of it on the search engine results page. Use your primary keyword once, and that will be enough. When it comes to meta descriptions, you should write a relevant meta copy for every web page. Try incorporating the keywords as naturally as you can. The meta description should give the online users a brief idea of what they can expect from the website.
Voice SEO
Another aspect of SEO web design we suggest you never ignore is voice SEO. It is one of the most important website design trends that can set you for success in the future. Internet users are profusely using voice search. The popularity of voice-search-enabled digital assistants has catalyzed the worldwide acceptability of such trends. So make sure you optimize the website for voice search. The best way to do that is by including FAQ lists on your web pages. Then, use long-tail keywords and answer the popularly asked questions in a conversational style.
Conclusion
Believe it or not, but website design no longer requires guesswork.
Website designers have complete access to technology and data they can use to implement advanced designing strategies. An in-depth understanding of how the end-user interacts with your website allows you to prioritize user experience, which eventually helps improve the SEO rankings. SEO-driven website design is beneficial for you, your customers, and the search engines.
So make sure you hire a professional website designer that understands your vision and helps your business thrive online.
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