How does web design impact SEO?

They dictate the rankings of the web pages in the SERPs.Hence, consider web design and SEO together when thinking about marketing and promotional aspect of your business. You should never make the mistake of treating web design and development separately from SEO and other forms of digital marketing. Combining the best of both is critical when trying to ensure the eventual success of your online business. SEO friendly web designing can get you the traffic and leads that can bring you optimum conversions. 

Several things can have a direct impact on your website’s SEO rankings. Here is a closer look at some of these factors. 

The navigational features of your website      

The navigational structure and features you include in your website can influence numerous factors that have a direct impact on your site’s SEO rankings. These factors include the average time spent by a visitor on a page, engagement rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate. When you treat these factors as crucial, they can boost your search rankings and boost your revenue and profit margins.   The navigation features created by a SEO web design service provider allow visitors to look for the information they intend to find. If your users cannot have access to the information they need on your site or they feel lost, it can eventually make you lose a lot of revenue. 

Here are some tips to improve the navigational features of your website.

•    Make sure that the main menu looks simple and straight forward. By keeping the menu structure short and precise, you can avoid confusion.
•    Do not use complex jargon in the main menu. Stick to familiar terms.
•    The design of your website should be such that the menu is also easily accessible on different types of mobile devices. 
•    The main menu should be available and accessible conveniently from all the web pages. An ideal way to do this would be to have the main menu above the web pages.    
 •    You can also put a search bar on the website so people can look for things they are trying to find. 
•    The URLs you use for every web page must be clear, descriptive, and concise. It would help the average user easily understand the nature of the page he/she is visiting by looking at the URL.
•    Implement descriptive anchor text while working with internal links for your website.

The loading speed of your websiteAnother vital factor that can make or break your website’s SEO is its loading speed. The design of your website and its pages plays a crucial factor in determining the site speed. Here are some time-tested and highly effective ways to improve the speed of your website that are recommended by SEO friendly web design experts. 

•    Use only compressed images
•    Reduce the size of your JS and CSS files
•    Use a CDN for your pages 
•    Minimize usage of redirects
•    Use an effective caching solution
•    Minimize the HTTP requests
•    Upgrade the web hosting solution

Ensure a good reading experience

One of the most crucial factors for the success of a website in terms of SEO is that the content of your page is easily readable by your site visitors. Unless this is so, your site will suffer immeasurably in terms of SEO. Users are always looking for information that is relevant to them, and they will value any website that can offer answers to their queries. Hence, you should have your website designed in a way that can present all answers simply and easily. 

When your website offers a pleasant and smooth reading experience, it can automatically lead to an increased engagement rate higher on-page time along with lower bounce rate. Eventually, these factors can ensure better rankings for your website on search engine rankings. 

Have a look at these tips offered by SEO consulting firms that can enhance the readability of your site.

•    Use larger font sizes.
•    Leave sufficient white space.
•    Instead of choosing dark color tones for the background, you can keep it clean, neat, and white.
•    Use fonts that are easier to read. Statistics reveal that a lot of people love the Sans Serif Font.
•    You can divide the content into multiple headings, subheadings, and bullet points, as this can enhance readability.
•    Use infographics, images, and videos to divide the content to make it look interesting. Do not simply paste a wall of text, as this will make your audience lose interest quickly. 
•    Work with shorter paragraphs and sentences so that visitors find it easier to consume the whole content.

Tips for using images and alt text

Practically all websites have images. They are a great way to attract the attention of the audience. By posting interesting images relevant to your subject matter, you can boost the average time people spend on your website to ensure a higher engagement rate. Nevertheless, you still need to use the images wisely, as putting too much of them on the site can slow it down and affect your SEO rankings. 

You can follow these guidelines for better SEO when working with images.  
•    Use relevant keywords for the titles of all the images.
•    With every image you use, do not forget to add a keyword-rich alt text that aptly describes the nature of each image. Search engines do not automatically understand the images. However, they use the alt text for understanding and indexing the images according to particular keywords. Alt text also comes in handy when images fail to load. 
•    Work with compressed images to reduce the server load so your website loading speed can be enhanced.

Google considers both web design and SEO features together when it comes to ranking a site. Thus, you should maintain a balance between the two to get the best results. Following the guidelines described above can help you achieve better SEO rankings for your website. A search engine optimisation consultant can provide you with valuable tools that you can use for the online success of your business. Hence consult with a company of local SEO specialists at your earliest convenience.