Website design and organic search performance are intrinsically linked, which is to say that design has an observable effect on a website’s ability to rank well for relevant terms. This can become problematic for companies with isolated teams, where design and marketing don’t work closely together, or in cases where marketing is only brought onto a project after a site has already been launched. Sites designed without SEO in mind can cause ranking issues down the line.
At our digital agency, we work with clients across industries to design and develop websites that are built with SEO best practices in mind. Our marketing strategists are involved in design and redesign projects from the beginning, collaborating with the designer to create a website that is search engine friendly. From this experience, we’ve gained a lot of insight into the interplay between a site’s design and its ability to rank well in organic search.
Below we cover 4 methods to ensure your design is helping, as opposed to hindering, your SEO efforts.
1 – Know your usability factors
The goal of search engines is to provide the best results they possibly can to users who search on their platforms. This is the best way to ensure customer satisfaction and keep users coming back. More users equal more advertisers, and more advertisers equal more profits.
What this means on a practical level is that search engines will reward sites that offer great experiences to users. The last thing they want is to place a site in the first position of the results page and have a user click on that site only to realize that it’s frustrating or difficult to use. Poor usability translates to a bad user experience with the search engine. Good usability translates to user satisfaction with both the website in question and the search engine that included it in the results.
Good user experience will bear itself out in longer time spent on a page/site, higher volumes of inbound links, and a healthy amount of social shares. These factors are seen as indications of quality and therefore are rewarded by search engines. Of course, by now we all know that it’s not enough to focus solely on desktop usability – mobile usability has an equally important role to play in the overall picture of user experience. Mobile-friendliness is an absolute must if you’re hoping to make gains in organic search visibility, and it should be a primary design focus.
Article source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielshaoolian/2017/09/21/4-tips-to-ensure-your-website-design-seo-is-done-right/