How Your Web Design Affects Your SEO

Web design has more importance than simply aesthetics, and whilst it is important to have an attractive website, there are other things to consider when designing a website that will have big impacts on how it operates and the return you get from it. 

One of the big things that web design impacts are your website’s SEO rating.

Having good SEO is important as this determines how likely you are to rank highly on search engines such as Google. 

SEO determines how likely people are to find your website, so you should be doing everything you can to maximise it. 

During a time where a business’s online presence is more important than ever before, SEO has the power to make or break a business. 

Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to ignore the impact of a badly designed website. 

Below we will discuss how poor website design will badly impact your website’s SEO. 

SEO takes the design and User Experience (UX) into account when ranking your website.

Why?

Because search engines want to give users the best possible search listings and it now goes beyond simply assessing content and keywords to judge how to do this.

Search engines now look at other factors when deciding how to rank websites, with bounce rate and time spent on-site growing significantly in importance.

A high bounce rate suggests that users are clicking onto your website from search engines, only to hit ‘back’ right away after seeing your website. Assuming they don’t leave straight away, the next indicator of the quality of your website is how much time they continue to spend on your site.

Therefore, having a well-designed website can significantly improve your SEO ranking through these two variables.

So, if your bounce rate is high, or the average time spent on your website is low, this signals to search engines that your website is poor, or, at least, it is not giving users what they want.

However, with some simple changes in the design and the UX, you can give your SEO ranking a boost by decreasing that initial bounce rate and increasing the time spent on your site.

Also, you’ll probably find that your conversion rate improves, and that is never a bad thing.

Good navigation gives your visitors a much easier time when on your website, which is beneficial in terms of getting them to stay on your website which will lead to a greater number of conversions.

First impressions count for a lot and if your website has poor navigation and is difficult to use then visitors won’t be forgiving and will simply look elsewhere, so having excellent navigation is of great importance.

This has a knock-on effect on your website’s SEO and therefore its ranking.

An unappealing site with poor navigation will likely lead to users leaving quickly, increasing the bounce rate, and decreasing the time spent on-site and thus resulting in a poor ranking.

An easily navigable site will ensure that users find the information they need and allows search engines to crawl your pages. The ideal navigation is simple, intuitive, and aligns with what users would expect.

When it comes to navigation, the simpler the better.

Another one of the many factors that are taken into account when determining search engine rankings and web design is page speed.

How does this relate to design?

If your website takes a long time to load due to large images and other media, extensive Flash plugins, and other rich features, these will all dramatically reduce the speed of your site, having a knock-on effect on your ranking.

On top of the direct effect on a website’s ranking, the bounce rate and the time spent on a page can also be greatly impacted by a slow site.

Users are generally impatient and happy to simply go onto another site if there are any minor issues, so fixing something simple such as the speed is definitely a measure you should take to improve the UX.

One of the best ways to increase your page’s speed is by decreasing the file size of images.

Every large, uncompressed image adds loading time to your web page which will nudge you closer to a speed that will impact your ranking and UX.

Compressing your images online is one of the easiest ways to improve your page’s speed without too much hassle.

Whilst having a responsive site is not an official SEO ranking factor, the benefits of having a responsive page – quicker loading times, lower bounce rates, and longer time spent on site will all help your site’s visibility.

In recent years, more and more people are accessing the internet through mobile devices so it has become more important to have a website that is responsive to different devices to improve the UX.

There are several factors to consider when designing your site which goes way beyond just how it looks.

The UX is deeply linked with SEO and therefore how your website is ranked on search engines, and so maximising this is essential.

If your site looks beautiful on the surface but remains complex, slow, and cumbersome to use, then you could inadvertently be harming your SEO efforts.

Whilst search engines can’t directly interpret the way a site looks; they take cues from how your users respond to it through measurables such as bounce rate and time on site.

So – how do they respond to yours?

Make sure to keep these 4 things in mind when it comes to your web design and SEO, in the future.