Although many people don’t realise it, search engine optimization (SEO) and web design are actually closely interlinked. Something as small as the structure of your website can have huge ramifications when it comes to achieving a high search engine ranking.
In this article, we take a look at five of the most notable ways that your web design could be impacting your SEO efforts. If you’re making any of these mistakes, you need to try and fix them – now!
- A poor design will impact the user experience
And since the user experience is closely linked to SEO, your site’s design is super important. In simple terms, a website that’s poorly designed won’t attract and keep visitors. People who find your site will likely leave quite quickly, resulting in something that’s called a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate is seen as something that’s quite negative by Google and the other search engines, and it’s something you should avoid at all costs.
- Poorly optimized media can be very damaging
A surprising percentage of people attempting to create their own website and perform their own SEO don’t understand how important media optimization is. Adding high-resolution images and videos can seem like a good idea, but it’s usually not.
This is because large media files will result in a slow website. And as you may already know, a slow website will impact your SEO efforts. The major search engines place a strong emphasis on site speed and performance, which means that media optimization is essential.
- A site that’s not mobile responsive is destined to fail
The majority of people browsing the web today do so from a mobile device. This means that you need to make sure that your website renders correctly on such devices. This is something called mobile optimization or responsive design, and it’s something that you absolutely have to keep at the front of your mind during every step of the website creation process.
- Reviews should always be included in your design
If at all possible, you should be adding some sort of customer reviews to your website. Reviews breed trust, and they are used by both human visitors and search engines to gauge the quality of your services. Good reviews will almost always result in higher search engine rankings, and using rich snippets to present review scores on the search engine results pages, can make things even better.
- Site structure is very important
A well-structured site with an organized URL hierarchy is important for both human visitors and search engine crawler bots. If your site is cluttered and confusing to navigate, two things can happen. First, human visitors can become frustrated, which can result in high bounce rates and the associated SEO penalties. In addition, poorly structured sites may not be indexed possible by the search engines, which means that they really won’t rank well at all.
Final Word
At the end of the day, there should be one clear take-home message here: It’s extremely important to make sure that your website is well designed, following web design and SEO best practices, or else your search engine ranking can suffer. If you’re making any of the mistakes outlined above, we’d recommend dealing with them ASAP, and you should see your rankings get a boost almost immediately.