The design of a web page impacts more than just the user experience. In addition to looking good and aiding in functionality, it also affects your search engine optimization or SEO. Today we will discuss some SEO website design tips.
SEO can have a positive impact on your traffic, the quality of your visitors, your conversion rate, and more. In this article, we’re going to outline a few SEO website design tips and tricks that can massively improve your conversion efforts
Your Navigation Should Provide A Positive User Experience
Search engines want to help their users in every way possible. For this reason, they prioritize good SEO web designs that offer a positive user experience.
To ensure your website does, you can start by creating effective and easy-to-use navigation. If people can’t find what they’re looking for, they won’t stick around, and this will signal to search engines that your website provides a poor UX. In general, your customers should be able to find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks.
SEO Web Design Of The Header Navigation
You don’t want your navigation to be too crowded or distracting, though. To avoid this, you should create a hamburger menu to keep things clean and organized; these are particularly helpful on mobile devices. Here’s how it looks on Neil Patel’s website .
SEO Web Design Of The Footer Navigation
If you have a large website with a lot of pages, you’ll want to include all of the necessary links in a footer at the bottom of your website’s pages. It allows for more links, but will still keep your web design clean and easy to navigate. Take a look at this comprehensive footer from Zappos for inspiration.
You Should Use Visuals To Boost The Time Spent On Your Site
You want people to spend as much time on your website as possible, and this is done through effective SEO web design. In addition to our SEO website design tips, utilizing analytics can also assist you. Brief visits tell Google that your website was not helpful to a relevant search. If this happens often, your ranking on the search engine results page (SERPs) will drop. You’ll want your site to be engaging – visuals can help with this! Think about how you can incorporate them into your pages.
Here are some of the SEO website design tips regarding the types of visuals you can incorporate into your site’s design that is sure to grab and hold your visitor’s attention:
- Infographics: Think about all of the infographics you’ve seen shared around social media in the last year or so. What was it about them that made you look? They’re colorful, entertaining, and break down complex information in an easy-to-understand way. Consider how you can incorporate infographics into your pages to outline a process or explain statistics. If you need help creating your own, check out Venngage’s online infographic maker
- Images: When it comes to incorporating imagery into your SEO web design, you need to decide what format you want to use, where to place images on your pages, how to compress your file sizes, and how to ensure your images are of very high quality. It’s not just a matter of making your website look good — you’ll also want it to load quickly.
- Videos: By 2022, 83% of all internet traffic will come from videos and video marketing! Tap into this market to help introduce your brand, boost conversions, and make your website more engaging. You can incorporate videos into your website in a whole host of ways. Introduce your team, show behind-the-scenes footage of a day in the office, do an FAQ live stream, create a fun cartoon that explains what your brand does, and more.
You Need To Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive For Effective SEO Web Design
You need to have a responsive website to ensure a friendly SEO web design that works and looks great on every type of device, from Macs to PCs, iPhones to Androids, and laptops to desktops. Fun fact: in 2022, an estimated 56% of web traffic will come from a mobile device, so you could miss out on a lot of traffic and sales if your site isn’t built with this in mind. Plus, if you can’t guarantee that your website is responsive on all devices, search engines will be hesitant to rank your site well.
For more help, take a look at Matchbox Design Group’s guide to the best practices for a responsive website design.
You Should Ensure Your Pages Load Quickly For Effective SEO Web Design
47% percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. Fast-loading sites are considered good SEO web designs. That means you don’t have much time to convince visitors your business is worth pursuing! A slow-loading website can increase your bounce rate, put potential clients off, and have a negative impact on your SEO.
Dig into your website code to figure out different ways to make your site load faster and optimize SEO web design. Optimizing your code (removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), compressing files, and optimizing images can all dramatically increase website loading speed. For further reading, take a look at Moz’s guide to page speed.
Make It Easy For Visitors To Find Content
You might have spent a lot of time designing your service or landing pages, but have you thought about how you’re going to present your quality content so people can easily find the information they’re looking for?
People won’t want to read a whole article to find one- or two-sentence answers to their questions. With effective SEO web design, you can make this easier for your viewers. Divide your content into clear categories, adding page jumps, and adding internal links so they can move from one piece of content to the next.
In addition, updating your content and repurposing content will help keep it fresh, current, and give customers what they are looking for.
Take a look at how FreshBooks has taken this approach with its guide to writing invoice letters. Down the side, there’s a sidebar that shows other categories of content users can access, and there are page jumps that allow the reader to get right to the piece of information they’re looking for.
You Should Add Reviews To Your Service Pages To Build Trust
Adding online reviews to your services pages is a great way to build trust and create effective SEO web design; they showcase to both search engines and your target audience that your business is worth looking into! They work as social proof of quality among real people and positive reviews also tell Google that your site has authority, boosting your SEO and your rankings on the results pages.
Adding reviews to your service pages doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Bay Property Management Group, for instance, has a carousel of Google customer testimonials at the bottom of its Montgomery County, MD location page. This makes it immediately clear to both search engines and people when the reviews were posted, who posted them, and what they thought of the service. Positive reviews also help to show the business in a great light, which will give search engines the confidence to rank this site higher for relevant queries.
All Of Your Content Should Be Formatted Properly
No one wants to read a huge wall of text, and formatting your content with on-page SEO elements is a very important and effective way to boost your SEO and use proper SEO web design best practices.
Consider how you could break down and format your content to make things easier for viewers and tell search engines what your article is about. Title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and bullet points are great places to start with effective SEO web design. Otherwise, keep your paragraphs short, make your hyperlinks easy to see, and make sure your fonts are legible.
You Should Prioritize Readability To Make Your Website Accessible
People with disabilities can often have a difficult time utilizing different parts of the internet because they are not accessible. Consider how you can make your website more accessible and follow ADA compliance. Not only is accessibility important for SEO web design, but it improves your site’s UX, opens you up to a wider audience base, and shows that you’re thinking about your customers’ experiences.
For more help, take a look at this article on ADA compliance and website accessibility. It covers how to implement closed captioning, audio transcripts, simple English, and more.
Summary
When designing your website, keep these SEO website design tips in mind; proper formatting, accessibility, simple navigation, visuals, reviews, and a good UX will all help improve your SEO and website conversion.
If you need more help optimizing your website, Matchbox Design Group is an eCommerce website agency that has you covered. Find out how they can help you leverage social media, design your website, drive traffic, and more.
