Skip to content It is undeniable that content is king because you need high-quality content to rank well in search results and gain high visibility for your brand and business. However, content alone cannot perform well unless backed by an equally good web design, which provides the platform for SEO to blossom. No matter how good your content is, you need to prop it up with some good web design that can catapult it to the higher echelons of search rankings. If you look at Internet Systems by Sunbowl, it will be easy to understand the truth of the statement. You must understand what constitutes good web design that strikes the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality by creating user-friendly and SEO-friendly websites. The key is SEO and web design synergy.
No matter how good your content is, you need to prop it up with some good web design that can catapult it to the higher echelons of search rankings. If you look at Internet Systems by Sunbowl, it will be easy to understand the truth of the statement.
You must understand what constitutes good web design that strikes the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality by creating user-friendly and SEO-friendly websites.
Web design helps to create SEO-friendly websites
The importance of web design for SEO reflects in the WordPress websites that design websites by inserting the necessary marketing smarts into it to make it SEO-friendly so that anyone can launch the SEO campaign right from the start.
This approach underlines the importance of web design and SEO moving alongside throughout the design process instead of creating a website first and then applying SEO on it like a band-aid, which is a flawed approach.
SEO-friendly websites allow search engines to access the website, crawl the pages, and index it, thereby increasing ranking possibilities. Proper web design ensures easy crawling of the web pages by the search spiders, which is the first step towards ranking. If search engines cannot crawl the website efficiently due to design deficiencies, it will affect indexing and affect the ranking.
In this article, we will discuss how to ensure perfect harmony between web design and SEO that improves the prospects of ranking and generates revenue for a business. But it is crucial to understand the elements where web design and SEO converge, and the collaboration begins. Here are some ways in which SEO and web design work together.
Mobile-friendly websites
The fast-evolving mobile technology has now made it almost mandatory to create not only SEO-friendly websites but also ensure that these are mobile-friendly too. Since the number of mobile users has long ago overtaken desktop users, it needs no further explanation about the need to create mobile-friendly websites that provide the most expansive reach to the most extensive audience section.
If you are yet not having a mobile-friendly website, you are a few years behind your competitors. Moreover, since 2015 mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor for Google, which in a way, compels every website owner to follow the diktat to make their business survive online.
Add to this Google’s stand on mobile-first indexing introduced in 2017, which further underscores the importance of mobile-friendly websites. Without a mobile-friendly website, you are losing almost half of your web traffic originating from mobile devices.
The design must be easy to read
It seems obvious to spend more time improving content for improving SEO performance. Too much emphasis on content tends to camouflage the importance of web design, which can severely damage SEO prospects if not up to the mark.
Poor web design is a turn-off for visitors who fail to read what they want on the website and will not hesitate to abandon it. The website layout aids content visibility and makes it easy to find information, and the use of minimal hyperlinks ensures that visitors can concentrate on the content without any distractions.
Failing to locate the content quickly will leave visitors frustrated as they cannot get the information they seek. Web designers know how to create highly user-friendly websites that create good engagement.
Website speed
You cannot compromise with your website speed and must take every step possible to improve it so that visitors feel happy. Besides keeping visitors happy, speedy websites make Google happy too, and so much important it is for them that in 2015 it declared that website speed was one of the ranking factors.
Most websites are deficient in this aspect, and poor website speed is often the reason for low ranking. Monitor your website speed closely with a focus on individual pages to identify the areas that need improvement so that you can ensure that the page opens under 3 seconds, which is the maximum permissible limit.
The farther you are away from the target, the more traffic you are losing because half of the visitors will turn their back to the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to open.
Do not neglect sitemaps
Sitemaps might seem so much innocuous that some people often do not give it the importance it deserves. However, sitemaps are crucial elements of web design because they help search engines crawl your website smartly, leading to better indexing.
Sitemaps are like a guide for search engines that show the way to all pages on the website in a sequential manner so that search engines can understand which pages are essential for your website. In particular, large websites must be extra attentive to sitemaps or else search bots, and visitors would lose their way on the website and defeat the purpose of SEO.
Gain the trust of users
The most challenging aspect of a marketer’s SEO journey is to gauge the trust level of the audience on the brand and business. Although it is critical to gain users’ trust, being an intangible factor, it is tough to fathom how much confidence your brand or business enjoys.
Since people can form opinions almost instantly and stay firm, it can be challenging to change their minds. Providing users with a clean web design that is easy to navigate and finding information is easy should help express your intention to keep users happy and gain their trust.
Create the most impacting impression the first time someone visits your website and reap the benefits in the long run as the memory remains deeply entrenched in their minds for years.