The design has a measurable impact on a website’s capacity to rank well for relevant terms in organic search results, proving that the two are inextricably related. Companies with siloed teams, where design and marketing don’t collaborate closely, or where marketing is added to a project after the site has launched may run into this issue. Sites built without search engine optimization in mind might have long-term negative effects on search engine rankings.
SEO services in Columbus develop custom websites for businesses of all sizes and in various sectors, always keeping SEO best practices front of mind. Our marketing strategists work hand in hand with the designer to make a website favorable to search engines from the start of any design or redevelopment project. We learned a lot about how design influences a site’s performance in organic search as a result of this.
Here are four ways to avoid hurting your SEO while maintaining a visually appealing design.
Know your usability considerations.
Search engines’ primary objective is to return the most relevant and useful results for users’ queries. The best approach to guarantee happy customers and repeat visits is to do this. The more people utilize your service, the more money you’ll make through ads.
This means that search engines will reward superior user experiences. They don’t want to rank a problematic website so high that users are discouraged from using it. Bad search engine usability leads to frustrated users. When a website is easy to navigate, users are more likely to be pleased with the site and the search engine that led them there.
We all know mobile usability is just as crucial to the overall user experience as desktop usability. More time spent on a page or site, more inbound links, and a healthy number of social shares indicate a positive user experience. Search engines value these characteristics because they are indicators of content quality. Mobile usability design should be a top priority for any website that wants to increase organic search rankings.
Design discoverability.
Content needs to be discoverable so search engines can easily crawl and index it. The most advanced search engines can only find new material by following links. If relevant links are missing, poorly placed, or do not work, your material will go unnoticed, and your site’s pages will not rise in the search engine rankings.
From a user experience standpoint, you want to design a site architecture that is easy to navigate. Still, from a search engine optimization standpoint, you want to develop a site architecture that is easily crawlable and uses internal links sparingly. They are complementary and may be accomplished concurrently, which is good news. Top-level service or product categories, which should also map directly to your core keyword themes, should be prominent in the architecture. To further organize your products and services, your landing page design company can divide them into further categories.
Develop quality content.
The content of each page on your site ultimately determines how well it performs in search engine results. Modern SEO is all on excellent content, unlike the keyword stuffing of yesteryear.
Planning for high-quality content creation should begin before the design or redesign phase begins. It would help if you always considered the page’s function before working on it. So, what do people need and want to know about this subject? What kind of material will be most useful for our message to resonate with our target audience? The site’s design must accommodate the content you have considered necessary, so the answers to these questions should be utilized to inform the design. The alternative is to force content into place after the fact, when opinions on the design may be set in stone.
Redesigning requires vigilance.
Websites’ search engine optimization (SEO) performance often drops during redesigns. If a firm decides to revamp its website without consulting an SEO professional, it could lose much of the SEO value it has built up over the years. Many businesses ignore this reality and stumble blindly into a makeover, only to see their organic traffic plummet.
Crawling your site to get an overview of its current state, including all its pages and the data linked with them, is an important first step before beginning the redesign process (e.g., current rankings, existing title tags). Do any of these posts seem out of date or unnecessary? If so, where in your proposed architecture would they be sent instead? To what extent do the pages on your present site perform well in search results for your preferred keywords? High-value information must be kept on the new site, so go over all of your content and make sure that nothing gets left behind in the redesign. Make careful to create a redirect map and activate redirects before launching your new site if the URL structure will be changing.
Conclusion
Many businesses are unaware of design’s role in search engine optimization. They’ll focus on making material that gets shared and linked to on social media, ignoring that it’s difficult to read on mobile devices or that some of the pages on their site have never been indexed. Understanding the connections between design and SEO can help maximize your site’s visibility for the search terms and themes that matter most to your business.
