3 Ways Good Web Design Can Improve SEO Performance
There are three ways good web design can improve your site’s SEO performance, and we are going to take a closer look at them in this article.
Having an excellent site optimized for search engines is more important than ever. Over 80% of internet users instinctively turn to search engines to find information, products and services, and other things they need online. The landscape is also more competitive than ever, so standing out in search results is a must. Search engine optimization or SEO is a crucial digital marketing instrument, but it is one that cannot be utilized on its own. Other things you do to your website affect your SEO performance, including the way the site is designed. There are three ways good web design can improve your site’s SEO performance, and we are going to take a closer look at them in this article.
Ways Good Web Design Can Improve SEO Performance
Performance Is King
Users don’t have 8 or 10 seconds to wait for your site to load. The average internet user expects to see activities on the screen within the first 3 to 4 seconds, so you have to design your site accordingly. Having a website with a lot of heavy visual elements is no longer the way to go.
Performance is king in today’s market. If you want your site to have an extravagant design, you have to think twice as hard about maintaining performance. This is why top design firms like WSI Digital Web put more emphasis on designing for performance.
There are other things you can do to boost performance too. For example, you can use loading – or lazy loading – to make sure that content loads fast. You can also add a loading animation to stretch users’ attention span further.
Clean Code and Functional Design Can Improve SEO Performance
Another way good web design helps SEO performance is in making the site more crawlable. The tempting thing to do is utilize a lot of visual elements to make the site catchier and more attractive; there is nothing wrong with this approach. However, visual elements are not crawlable. As a result, a great way that web design can improve SEO performance.
You have to add ALT tags to images and other visual elements on the page so that search engines can recognize them. Crawlers will even index your visual elements (i.e. photos and illustrations) and include them in image search results, which is also good for your SEO performance.
As an added bonus, adding ALT tags to images is good coding practice. You can extend clean and consistent coding to further boost the site’s SEO performance.
Pure SEO in Design
Last but certainly not least, there are design elements that directly affect SEO performance. The information you place in the footer, for instance, can be useful when you are doing local SEO. Borrowing the website of WSI Digital Web as an example, you can see how the layout is important.
The web design firm adds to large calls to action and a footer that really represents who they are. You have a lot of confidence seeing how the firm’s site structure, knowing that the website itself performs really well SEO-wise.
These are the three ways web design influences your site’s SEO performance. Use the tips and insights discussed in this article to refine your own site and improve its performance in search results.
