Building a successful website requires a business to consider two major aspects – consumers and search engines. Consumers are who you are building a website for, search engines are the mediums through which your consumers will reach your website. It should be SEO-friendly so that search engines rank it and your consumers can find it and it should be creative and highly functional so that those consumers can find what they want. This is an epic conflict that most businesses face, especially those that offer thousands of products on their websites. Such businesses must find a fine balance between their website is user-friendly and SEO-friendly.
To add to the complications, most businesses have two different teams to handle SEO and web designing. And in most cases, the two teams are not on the same page ever. While the website development team would want to create minimalistic websites and keep the visual elements simple, the SEO team would want the site to have enough content so that search engines can crawl and register the site. So, how do you manage the two conflicting opinions and strike a balance between the right design and SEO?
The answer is SEO-based on Web Design, a practice of optimizing a website so that it ranks high on search engines while keeping the design aesthetics and functionalities intact. Let’s dive deep into it.
What is SEO Web Design?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique of optimizing a website and its components in such a way that search engines find it and rank it high on the results. Web design takes care of the design and functionality part of the website. Web design ensures that a website looks visually leasing while it provides the right features and functions to the users so that they are able to find what they come looking for.
SEO Web Design combines these two practices. The result is a website that not only has pleasing visual appeal but is also optimized for search engines. When a website is designed while keeping the SEO best practices in mind, it makes the website that much more powerful to deliver the desired results. It is just what businesses want in this competitive marketplace where nothing below the best works.
Why is SEO Important in Website Development?
You get an amazingly beautiful website that is visually stunning and has all the right features. But if your customers are unable to find it, it will not solve any of your business goals, isn’t it? This is why SEO is such an important aspect of any website. SEO optimizes the web pages and makes them search engine friendly. This allows search engines to find them and rank them in the top ten results of the first page, getting you maximum website traction. SEO during website development provides many other benefits. These are:
SEO web design brings more organic traffic
Even though social media and PPC are great ways of getting traffic, organic (unpaid traffic) makes a huge difference in bringing your website to the first page of SERPs (search engine result pages). And the numbers can be huge. The top-ranking website gets a quarter of all clicks, while the second-ranked one gets around 15 percent. The numbers drop quite drastically from there on and the website in the 10th rank gets only 2.5 percent of the clicks. It would be safe to say that any website that ranks on the second page of the search results would get close to nothing in terms of clicks. So, it is extremely important to rank on the first page of the SERP, and SEO can help you get that.
SEO web design gets more high-intent traffic
When someone conducts an online search, they already have a goal in mind. They are looking for something specific. If your website shows up at the top of the search results and provides the right information, the user is highly likely to click on it. Even though they might not convert into a customer immediately, they will remember your website or brand because it provided the information the user searched for. This immediate brand recall value is highly desirable for any business. This high-intent traffic can be diverted through engaging SEO efforts.
SEO web design increases user experience
User experience has become one of the most important factors that digital property makers are looking into, including search engines. Most search engines are constantly working towards increasing their user experience by ranking only the best websites in their results so that the users get what they search for. An SEO-optimized and well-designed website increases a user’s experience, hence getting a better ranking on search results. Factors like dwell time, mobile usability, and bounce rate determine your user experience and SEO web design can enhance all these factors to the maximum.
SEO web design maximizes your marketing efforts
SEO is a cost-effective branding strategy that can get a lot more business than other traditional marketing methods. It might take some initial investment to implement and kick start, but it yields results for an elongated period of time. Furthermore, if you possess basic website knowledge, you can do it yourself to a certain extent. In short, if planned and executed smartly, you can get the maximum result through SEO web design with minimum effort and investment.
Areas to optimize for SEO Web Design
Keeping SEO in mind when you are getting your website designed can help you scale your business to a great extent. It’s a combination made in heaven and, if done right, can truly transform your business. Let the design and SEO team come together and concentrate on the following aspects for maximum benefits:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Website speed
- Sitemaps
- Readability
- Image file names
- Alt tags
- Website navigation
- URL structure
- Metadata
- Indexable content
Strategically planned SEO and visually appealing and functional design are two pillars of a website that make it effective. However, what most businesses miss is incorporating SEO while designing their website so that the basics can be implemented right from the time of its inception. The deeper SEO is ingrained in a website’s design, the better it will perform. Start with keyword research and take it to the end by developing effective backlinks. You will see the difference. The bottom line is providing value to the customer in the best way possible. So, optimize every important part of your website and see how it changes your business.
