Web Design and SEO: How to Make a Perfect Website for your SEO.

Web design and SEO are two concepts that have to be totally linked if we want to achieve success for our project. The design allows a page to be attractive to ensure a good user experience, but if no one visits it, it won’t do us any good to have the most beautiful website. That’s where it’s so important to think about web design with good SEO optimization.

Why is web design important for an online business?

Design is very important in the website or online store of any business. Especially, to convert visits into conversions. A few small design changes can boost sales on a website, or can cause a stampede of users to leave and go elsewhere. And if we emphasize this, it is to show the extent to which we believe that web design is important.

But design can never be put ahead of other SEO criteria. SEO and web design must work together to achieve visits and conversions.

Key elements of web design for your SEO

Web design goes far beyond the visual and the work of certain aspects that algorithms take into account to place a page higher or lower in the ranking is fundamental. We are mainly talking about
SEO On Page
but let’s see in detail what we consider the main factors that should be taken into account so that web design and SEO go hand in hand (and are often overlooked):

#1. Responsive Design: the importance of Mobile

For many years it has been necessary and basic to have a responsive web design, it is no mystery: that your website adapts correctly to mobile devices. But for some years now, it is no longer just that:

• According to flat101′s conversion study, 69% of traffic comes from mobile. So it is mandatory to think more about the mobile version than the desktop, because that is where most of the traffic is going to come from.
• In 2018, Google launched mobile first indexing, which means that Google is prioritizing your mobile version for your site’s SEO rankings

Así, que como no pienses en móvil desde ya, estás fuera.

#2. Optimization of loading speed

Another of the fundamental aspects to take into account when designing a web page or when we want to improve it for SEO, is the
loading speed
. In an era where users are in more of a hurry than ever, the time it takes for a website to load will be key. If it is too slow, the user will opt to go back and look for another of the many alternatives that can be found. This is a factor that directly affects the user experience, and therefore the positioning of your site.

#3. Content and text to position yourself

The content you can offer to your users is a key aspect that will make a difference. Therefore, it is of vital importance to offer valuable and qualitycontent, which differs from the excess of information that can be found by browsing with a single click. Naturally, this content must have a visual aesthetic that captures the reader’s attention and follows the same design line. Accompany the text with images that help to contextualize it and highlight in bold the most important keywords to facilitate reading.

It is important to put content in words, understandable to humans and optimized for search engines. All things being equal, a website with more text (in general) will tend to rank better than one with less.

Bonus: text inside images?

This is also one of those inexplicable bugs, but still seen on many websites.

Is a text, as part of an image, still text…? This is not a philosophical question; it has a very clear answer if we talk about semantic understanding of search engines. A text trying as part of an image is NOT a text in Google’s eyes. Its algorithm cannot read the content of the images.

Sometimes these things are done to look for shortcuts and take the shortest path to accomplish something with as little design work as possible. But it is very counterproductive, because it will reduce your chances of appearing or being well optimized for search engines.

#4. Content hierarchization: headings or tags of importance for SEO

In order to make sense of all the information on our web page, it will be necessary to hierarchize the content by means of the well-known headings. These tags, known as H1, H2, H3, etc. will help structure all the content on your page and allow you to link different parts of it, thus reducing the abandonment rate.

It is important to use the main keywords of our business in these tags, as this helps Google understand what content it will index.

WARNING! This is not a trivial issue. The themes usually come with a specific typography for the header tags (h1, h2… h6). Each has a different size and typeface.

Some amateur designers (and others who are not so amateur) use these tags thinking more about design than SEO.

Sometimes, surprisingly, you even come across websites without an h1 or with multiple H1s .

In fact, header tags are a matter of SEO, but more generally they are fundamental from the point of view of layout, information structure and usability in general. Even if you like the look of the letters in h3 better, you should not place them unless you have previously put some h2 tag, and of course you can not do without an h1 in a page you want to position.

To play with the typographies, modify the default ones of the theme, etc.., do not use h tags. Get right into your web CSSor look for someone who knows how to do it 🙂

#5. Don’t forget to optimize titles, meta descriptions and URLs.

Another aspect that we can not overlook and that we must take into account, since they will not have any visual effect, but are essential for SEO, are:

• Titles and meta descriptions. These tags describe the content of each URL and tell Google what they are about. They also have a direct influence on the user experience, as they are the first thing they will see on Google before accessing our website and the element that will determine whether they click or not.
• URLs. They must be user-friendly and optimized to make the search engines’ job easier. It has no relevance to the design but it is very important to take it into account. To do this, we will try to make sure that they contain the keyword and that they are as short as possible, avoiding words that do not add value, such as prepositions or articles. Logically, these URLs must also follow a hierarchical structure that helps to improve the user’s browsing experience as well as Google’s crawling.

#6. Optimize the weight of images or videos uploaded to your website

Finally, images are another factor that affects both web design and positioning. On the one hand, they need to be as contextual as possible in relation to the content displayed in order for the page to make sense. In addition, these images must be original and must be optimized, with a good nomenclature, as well as a reduced weight, which does not negatively affect the loading speed of the web, as we mentioned in previous points.

If you want to check the loading speed of your website, you can do a simple test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

#7. Do not force the user to scroll

Videos at the height of the page header, very large images, and sliders, if they occupy the entire screen and overshadow other important information on the page, force users to scroll. But if you catch the visitor on a day when they are a bit lazier, they might just leave your site.

When a user enters a website for the first time they are asking themselves “What’s in here for me?”. You must be able to provide information that will help them answer that question. If you distract it with fireworks, no matter how nice it looks from the design point of view, you will be worsening the user experience, and that ends up being noticed in the search engine positioning, because abandonments and bounces will increase.

#8. Beware of the use of pop-ups and intersitials

Pop-up windows with sales or advertising messages are now being pursued by Google. In fact, Mountain View has been warning about it for a long time.

The reason? Because they are a big problem for the user experience on mobile devices, Google’s great obsession, which we mentioned in the first point.
The pop-ups had a great conversion power to capture subscribers for subsequent actions to send newsletters, offers, etc.; sell ebooks or other products; etc.

Some pop-ups that only occupy a small portion of the screen, do not hide the content and can be easily closed will, in principle, not be penalized. But you have to be careful, because the borderline between an emerging advantage that does not bother you and one that does is more subtle than it seems.

Web design and SEO for new or existing websites

Keep in mind what is your starting point, to know what steps to follow to make your web design SEO oriented, we usually talk about 3 possible scenarios:

#1 Creating a website from scratch

This is the best case scenario, since, from the very beginning, we will be able to design an SEO friendly site that takes into account all the fundamental aspects to improve the user experience and reach the top positions in search results. Once the customized page is created, the ideal is to follow a monthly SEO strategy that can take you to the top.

#2 Current website without SEO

In the case of having a website that has not taken into account the SEO for its design, the most appropriate is to perform an audit to determine what is the real state of the web and what changes need to be applied. In some cases it is advisable to build a completely new website, ensuring that the authority gained with the history is not lost.

#3 Current website with SEO

If your site already has an SEO strategy in place to position itself in search engines, but needs to make a change in terms of web design, the best thing to do is to contact an SEO company. expert SEO agencyThe SEO will be taken care of and the necessary changes will be applied without affecting the SEO.

Basic tips to redo a good web design with SEO in mind

• The first step after analyzing the page will be to perform a web architecture proposal that is coherent, clear and accessible, responding to the visual part (that which affects the design itself and the user experience) and to the part of organization and hierarchy of information and contents.
• The most important thing is to make a migration through 301 redirects, making a previous list of all the current addresses of the web (before applying modifications), and verifying that the redirects take us to the same section that was in the previous version of the web.
• In those cases where a content no longer exists on the new website, it will be redirected to a related content to maintain the SEO importance of the link. It will also be of vital importance to review the incoming links to our website, so that our domain continues to have authority for search engines.
• All the changes applied at the web design level will be totally focused on maintaining the SEO and even detect which are the points of improvement and the aspects that will contribute to improve the optimization of your website. Therefore, in those pages where positioning is good, we will try to maintain or improve the key factors of On-Page SEO such as headings, titles and meta descriptions, among others, and even improve them.

Influence of web design on SEO

Many tend to wonder if web design really influences SEO. The answer is simple and you have already seen them in this post: yes.

It is as important that your website is beautiful and has a very good user experience, as it is that it is well optimized for SEO and users find it, because if no one visits it, it is almost the same as not having it.

If you have a website that is not giving the expected results for lack of implementing a good SEO strategy, or you want to get started in the world of digitization, in Rodanet we have the solution. Contact us and we will help you find the path you need to increase your business profitability.

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Marta Solano

Copy & Content SEO Strategist en Rodanet | m.solano@rodanet.es | + posts

Es una de nuestras "pichichis" en la liga de futbolín 🥅 Además de ser experta en estrategia de contenidos, también pilota de estrategia para meter goles. 😎

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