While designers and SEO experts are united in their focus on addressing user experience and user intent when designing a website, there are some areas where they don’t always see eye to eye. These include labeling for users vs. labeling for search engines and consolidation of content vs. expansion of content.
Is there a way to address the needs of both sides while creating the best possible user outcome? Absolutely. This guide will help web designers consider the implications of search engine optimization (SEO) when building a website.
Why Is SEO Important in Web Design?
Image source: Envato Elements
SEO and web design are essential for user experience. Optimizing visual elements for search is a key consideration for SEO specialists during design projects, alongside information architecture and taxonomy. SEO should, therefore, be part of the product design process from start to finish.
1. SEO in Web Design Increases Organic Traffic
SEO in web design can increase organic traffic by optimizing a website's design and architecture, this way, search engines will find it easier to crawl and index the content.
Optimizing your website for search means that your content is more likely to appear at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for phrases, questions, or keywords related to your products and content. This increases your brand's visibility and attracts new potential customers to your site.
Additionally, SEO web design helps improve the website's user experience, which leads to better engagement and potentially more conversions.
2. SEO in Web Design Attracts High-intent Traffic
SEO in web design attracts high-intent traffic because it enables you to optimize your content to rank for keywords and phrases that address specific questions that users are looking for when they’re searching for the solution that your product or services offer.
Suppose your website's content is relevant and provides the exact answer to a user query. In that case, it will be more likely to appear in the main search results for that query, increasing the chances of the user clicking on the result and visiting your website. Users are more likely to click on the top results on Google rather than browsing beyond the first page of results, so you can capitalize on the search engine's effort to match user search intent to the most relevant and targeted search results.
3. SEO in Web Design Improves the User Experience
Web design and SEO can improve the user experience in several ways. Let’s go over some of them:
Skilled SEO experts and web designers collaborate to ensure a website is user-friendly across devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones by using usability testing tools. Creating a responsive design can make it easier for users to access a website and navigate its content, leading to a better overall user experience across devices.
When optimizing a website for page speed, you ensure that it loads quickly, which can enhance the user experience because it reduces the time it takes to access the content the user seeks.
By considering user experience as part of the overall SEO strategy, businesses can ensure that their website delivers a practical and enjoyable user experience that encourages people to stay longer, visit more pages, and return often. This can help increase the site's visibility in search engines and drive more traffic, as user experience is a ranking factor for Google.
4. SEO in Web Design Can Increase ROI
SEO can significantly impact a website's overall ROI by increasing its visibility and driving high-quality leads. According to Forbes, one of the key benefits of SEO is that it boosts a website's credibility by ranking high on (SERPs), leading to increased trust and engagement with potential customers.
Credibility and improved rankings can also increase brand awareness and market share and generate more leads and sales.
Optimization can improve the user experience. It makes it easier to navigate, increasing engagement and reducing bounce rates.
As Botify suggests, SEO can inform and improve nearly every other marketing effort, making it an essential component of any digital marketing strategy. This diagram reveals how the SEO funnel relates to customer experience:
Source: Botify
To measure SEO's ROI, start by calculating the business value of all SEO activities compared to their cost. You can achieve this by tracking website traffic and leads and attributing sales to SEO efforts.
Note that you’ll need proper conversion tracking in Google Analytics to get the ROI calculations.
Once you’ve set up your tracking and get the value of conversions, you’ll see SEO in web design can help increase a website's overall ROI by driving high-quality traffic, boosting credibility, and improving the user experience.
What Do SEO Experts Care About in a Web Design Project?
You can strategically design a website with SEO in mind, improving its SERP visibility. This will drive more traffic to your site and contribute to your business's revenue.
Designing a website with SEO in mind involves several key steps:
- Conducting keyword research: They identify the keywords and questions that the target audience uses to search for things related to the business. These keywords are then used to optimize your content, meta descriptions, and URLs.
- Creating a sitemap: Develop a sitemap that outlines the structure of your website. This can help your website's overall visibility in search results.
Source: Envato Elements
- Optimizing on-page elements: Optimize your website's on-page elements, such as page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt tags, to include keywords and provide context to search engines.
- Creating high-quality content: Create relevant, valuable content for your target audience and include keywords with intent. This can improve your website's search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
- Following Google’s EEAT Guidelines: EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) are Google’s parameters for evaluating your content’s quality.
- Improving page speed: Optimize your website's page speed to ensure it loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices. This enhances the user experience and increases the chance of users staying longer exploring your website.
- Building high-quality backlinks: Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve your website's authority and search engine rankings. You want to ensure those websites have high domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR).
How SEO and UX Design Can Improve Website’s Navigation
SEO and UX design are connected because they both focus on improving a website's user experience. The first one optimizes a website's content and structure to rank higher and drive more traffic to the site. At the same time, UX design focuses on creating a positive user experience by making the website easy to use, visually attractive, and engaging.
When SEO and good UX design combine, they deliver a website that ranks well in search engines and provides a positive user experience that encourages users to stay longer, visit more pages, and return often. Additionally, when done correctly, both contribute to improving navigation.
Here are some tips to help you understand how users move through the website:
- Examine Google Analytics User Flow. This means analyzing the User Flow section within the Audience segment to see a movement's behavior and what users prefer to visit.
- Investigate internal navigational links. Learn about what users expect to see but need help finding. Use Site Search in Google Analytics to examine user search terms.
- Analyze user interaction using a heat map. Heat maps visually represent user behavior on your website and allow you to review how users behave differently on desktop and mobile.
- Discover your top linked pages. Using Google Search Console’s Links section, you can get a report on the frequency of links among your internal site pages. Remember that linking internally benefits precedence on your website, improving your SEO results.
In summary, SEO and UX design are connected because they both focus on improving the user experience and navigation on a website. Combined, they can deliver a website that ranks well in search engine results and enable a positive user experience that encourages engagement and repeat visits.
How to Ensure Your Website Is SEO-friendly
Besides putting into action the steps for content search engine optimization, these are some key steps to ensure your website is SEO-friendly:
- Optimize your website's meta tags, titles, and descriptions to include keywords and give search engines context.
- Ensure your website's URL structure is clear and concise and includes relevant keywords where appropriate.
- Use alt tags to describe the images that appear your website. This is quick way to help search engines understand your site's content.
- Ensure your website is responsive, which can impact your search engine rankings.
- Improve your website's page speed by optimizing images and reducing the size of files where possible.
- Use internal links to enable search engines to understand your website’s structure and how different pages relate to each other.
- Periodically update your site’s content to keep it relevant. This will increase your audience's engagement.
Wrap Up
Optimizing a website's page speed reduces the time it takes to load pages, improving its search engine rankings. Also, creating high-quality content that is easy to read can improve the user experience and increase the site's visibility in search engines since the algorithms recognize this content as valuable for readers.
Follow these actions and keep them in mind throughout your design process so your website will be SEO-friendly and optimized for search engines. When focusing on SEO as well as good design, you can improve your website's visibility in search results, attract more traffic, and increase your business's revenue.
