How Web Design Impacts Search Engine Rankings

As website owners, we know that website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important.

A lot of business owners presume that web design is all about defining the user experience and making their digital home look pretty – but web design has a serious impact on how your business ranks on search engines like Google.

In this blog post we discuss how and why website design impacts website SEO.

User Experience

You want your website to easy enough for viewers to be able to navigate and read the content. Readability is a key feature that search engine crawlers look for. This is why website owners should make sure that the website doesn’t have too many distractions in the design. If the human eye can’t read your website’s content, how do you expect a robot to read it?

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

The title of your website is one of the first things that potential customers will see in the search engine results. They should be enticing enough to keep people clicking on them so they can read more about what you have to offer. The meta description, meanwhile, summarises everything a person needs to know before taking action – which could mean the difference between your site being visited or ignored for a competitor.

Depending on how your website has been designed and what software is being used will decide how the page titles and meta descriptions are created. If you are using WordPress, you can get plugins like?Yoast SEO?and?SmartCrawl Pro?to let you determine exactly what the page title and meta descriptions to give you control over how the pages and posts on your website show up on Google.

Site Speed and Loading Times

It is widely recognised that anything more than a few seconds is an unacceptable time for viewers to wait for a website to load. Anything more than that is a shoddy experience for viewers – not only do your potential customers know that, so do the search engines.

Slow websites are consistently penalised by Google. Unsure of what your websites loading times are??Use this free tool?created by Google that lets you see how quick your website loads across desktop and mobile devices, as well as identifying what is slowing it down.

Website and URL Structure

Good web design is about more than just the visuals – it’s also about how easy a site can be navigated. In this sense, having a clear and logical structure for your website content will go miles in helping visitors find what they’re looking for with ease.

Look to have a logical process for you blog post categories and website pages – not only does it help your viewers find the information that they want, it helps Google find out what content you have got.

If you are using WordPress, make sure that your permalinks structure is set up as “Post name” so that the URL path matches the page/post title.

Images

There are two things to consider when it comes to the images on your website and SEO.

Firstly, size and quality matters. An image that is too big for the space it is filling, or is of an excessively high quality for it’s purpose, will slow down the speed of the website unnecessarily. As covered in the above, slow websites generally rank poorly on search engines.

Secondly, do the images match their descriptions? Not only do search engines rank websites and their written content, they also rank images too. Making sure that the images on your website match their descriptions and feature the relevant keywords can make a big difference.

Responsiveness

Most website views are on mobile devices these days – 54.8% in fact (Source:?Statisa). That means a website that doesn’t work well on mobile devices, it will be a poor user experience that will turn away potential customers.

And because more than half of website views are on mobiles, this impacts on how Google ranks websites. Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm (released in April 2015) evaluates websites on this criteria and provide a few pieces of advice you are likely to want to adhere to:

• The format of your website should be such that it can be viewed without zooming on mobile devices.
• It should be the same website across all types of devices (the days of a mobile website and a desktop website are long gone).
• The website should be easy for viewers to navigate and use.
• Everyone, regardless of what device they are on, should be able to complete common tasks (for example, a common task is being able to fill in and submit a contact form).

Luckily, Google has created a free tool to determine how mobile-friendly a website is.?Click here to test your website’s mobile-friendliness.

In Summary

Your website is only as good as its design. As a result, it’s vital that you follow the basics of great web design to ensure your site ranks highly on search engines like Google.?

User experience and loading speeds are two important factors in ranking high enough for customers to find you organically when they type relevant keywords into their browsers. But little things like image descriptions and permalinks have a part to play too.

The tools below will help you get started with improving these aspects of your site and finding out how well your website is performing on Google. Let’s chat about how we can make sure your website stands up against competitors by building an SEO plan from the ground up or optimising existing content.

Tools you can use

WhatsMySERP?– a free tool to monitor how your website is ranking on Google. View at?whatsmyserp.com.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test?– Google’s quick, easy and free way to find out if your website is mobile-friendly. View at?search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.

Google PageSpeed Insights?– Google’s tool to score how fast your website is to load and find out what needs to change to improve your score. View at?developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights.