Let’s face it — we’re in a digital age for quite some time now. And with the advent of the pandemic, business people realized that there are more benefits in making a high-quality website.
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Now, companies are investing a lot of time and effort to optimize their websites. They realized that by optimizing your website for search engines, your website’s search ranking will increase significantly. This makes your website (and your business) easier to find on the World Wide Web.
In this article, we will discuss to you how crucial it is to optimize your web design for search engines. But first, let me briefly discuss what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or simply SEO, is the process of modifying your website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines. This may sound simple, but this method requires expertise and knowledge about people’s search inputs on search engines.
Making your website SEO-friendly requires knowledge about the keywords and phrases that your target audience searches for. This marketing strategy gives you leverage against your competitors.
If you’re successful with making your website SEO-friendly, your website will build a strong presence in your niche. This will gain your website a reputation and trust from your audience.
Benefits of an SEO-friendly Web Design for Your Business
When you think of web design, the artistic side is what pops in your head easily. But web design is so much more than that. Your website design is the totality of your website.
That’s why it’s important to consider how optimized your website is for search engines. If people are searching for a solution for a certain problem, and they used a keyword that’s on your website, then people will be aware of your business.
Here’s why it’s important to have an SEO-friendly web design for your business:
Branding
While branding falls under a different category, having an SEO-friendly web design can impact the way you establish your brand. Optimizing your web design will make your website worth remembering for your audience.
Traffic
Another main factor that your website needs is traffic. For a website to thrive and survive, it needs traffic. For a website to be among the highest ranks, it needs a lot of traffic.
Here’s where SEO will come into play. Applying SEO to your web design means optimizing your website for easier navigation, control, and user-friendliness. This way, your visitors will be converted to leads, and then prospects for your business.
Less budget for ad space
If you make a website that’s SEO-friendly, you don’t have to worry about ad space anymore. You don’t need to advertise your website because, quite literally, it advertises itself — thanks to SEO.
Targets the right audience
Nowadays, people are using search engines more than ever when they are canvassing a product, or just finding some product reviews. Around 62% of consumers use search engines to find some information about a new product/business.
This graph shows how important for your website to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
People also visit the business websites directly when they are ready to buy. And ranking high on search engines will catch your potential client’s attention. When these prospects land on your homepage, they won’t be disappointed with the web design as well.
Increases reputation
There’s a lot of aspects to consider when you want to have an SEO-friendly web design. Each one has a part to play, but the ultimate goal is to leave users with a great experience. This will increase your ranking on SERPs if done in the right way.
Having an SEO-friendly website improves your website’s credibility and reputation as well. This comes along with the increase in your website ranking. If people trust your website, people will trust your products.
How to Know if Your Web Design is SEO-Friendly
There are a lot of web design tips to see if your website is SEO-friendly. Thus, you will need to check these pointers and make sure that they pass the standard to be considered SEO-friendly. Here are 5 pointers to look out for:
1. Mobile-responsiveness
To be considered SEO-friendly, your web design should be responsive to most gadgets. People are using their mobile devices to surf the Internet. Therefore, if you’re building a web design for your business, you should consider its compatibility with other devices.
This makes your website flexible and responsive even when accessed from a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop. No matter what screen they’re viewing your website from, your website would still be responsive and capable of doing its job.
You’d need some tools to check your website’s loading speed and responsiveness on different kinds of devices. And there are a lot of devices with different kinds of operating systems. You could consider hiring a web design company or agency to do this task for you. They could help in optimizing your site for mobile access and they could make sure that it’s viewable on different devices.
2. Fully indexable pages
For your website to be indexed by search engines, you have to make your web design fully indexable. We all know that Google is not so good at indexing images. That’s why it is highly recommended that you place alt texts for your images.
By placing alt texts in your images, you’re helping Google understand more of your content. This makes it easier for search engines to index your pages and rank higher on SERPs based on your content alone.
3. Keyword targeting
If you want your web design to be SEO-friendly, you should target keywords that are highly relevant to your niche. For example, your business is about mobile accessories. Your target keywords should be about mobile accessories, like “phone accessories” or “mobile gadget accessories”.
By using these keywords, you’re making your website relevant to the people searching for these keywords. You’re reaching out to a specific market from your niche by targeting keywords for your website. You can also include keywords and key phrases on your URL links to make this method more efficient.
4. Website loading speed
If your visitors will spend more than 5 seconds waiting for your website to load, they won’t even finish the loading time and find a better website than yours. That’s why you need to optimize your website’s loading speed so you won’t lose your prospects without even seeing your website.
Here are some factors that can affect your website’s loading speed:
- Outdated CMS
- Large image files that are not optimized
- Bad and congested server
You should look out for these factors and do a systematic check to improve your website’s loading speed. Your web design should also be prepared for an influx of visitors at any given moment.
5. Visually appealing web design
For your website to be SEO-friendly, you should also consider how it looks from your audience’s perspective. You don’t want your website to look too boring or too flashy because some might consider it unprofessional.
You have to find the sweet spot where your web design looks professional and functional at the same time. You also need to minimize pop-ups because it’s very annoying. The ultimate goal for your web design should be to keep your audience engaged no matter where they are on your website.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to create your website and you have doubts regarding your web design, we hope that this article helped you realize how important it is to have an SEO-friendly web design. You can also check in with a web design company to make sure that your web design is top-notch.