It’s estimated that there are over 2 Billion websites on the internet today. That number might seem a little alarming. It sure did to me. It gives the feeling of “how can I even compete with that?” But in reality, only around 400 million websites are active in 2021. That makes a little more sense, when you think of all those old blogs we had to create for a college class that no longer matters. Or maybe a business website that has since folded.
The point is, there’s a lot of websites out there, and you want to do what you can to stand out. And that’s where a web designer comes in. They take your basic information and turn it into a beautiful website that is user friendly, easy to navigate, and fits in with best practices.
However, you can have the most beautiful website in the world designed by a top web designer, and it won’t make a lick of difference if it’s not optimized for search engines. People, your target customers need to find your business online. 9 out of 10 consumers search online before making a purchase. And that’s where SEO comes in.
How Does Web Design Affect SEO?
In this article we’ll go over SEO web design tips with strategies that web designers can use while building a website to help improve the SEO for their clients. Web design is becoming a bigger factor when ranking well for SEO, so it’s important to keep SEO in mind from the very beginning of the process.
The Page Experience Update, coming in June 2021 is taking web design into account. Just like the name says, it means websites need to provide a good experience for users when they visit a website. That starts with web design. It’s making sure the page loads quickly and taking Core Web Vitals into account. It’s making sure the page is easy to navigate and understand. Content needs to be relevant and applicable to the business and point of the website. Essentially, the design of a website is becoming more important than ever.
But it’s not just the Page Experience Update. Google algorithm updates are including user experience factors, such as:
- Anchor links
- TLDRs
- Tables of Contents
- Well thought-out headers
- Anything that can boost user experience and provide people an answer to their question ASAP
All pages are mobile-first indexed as well, so it’s even more of a push to make sure your UX and web design is on par on a mobile device so it doesn’t impact your SEO.
Follow our checklist below for the best SEO Tips for Web Designers to help your clients succeed.
7 SEO Tips for Web Designers
1) Implement a mobile-friendly design
Any web designer should know that having a mobile friendly design is crucial for a successful website. Without a mobile friendly design on your website, users become disinterested, bored, and lost navigating through it. The best way to implement a mobile-friendly design is to keep your users as well as search engines in mind. When the website’s design reflects a business brand, the more authentic and appealing it is for users. Having a well organized website through different pages and categories also helps make the design aspect easier for web designers to design. Keeping it organized is important, as long as it makes sense on the website to be responsive and effective. Overall, mobile-responsiveness is an essential factor at this point of time.
2) Use headers throughout the content
Along with keeping your website looking clean and organized, headers are one of the best ways to help do this. Headers help keep your content organized and listed as what’s important to read or what should catch your users attention. From a website design standpoint, headers are helpful in organizing content and making it flow and read better. Readers in this way can better digest the content when it’s not a huge block of text or all the same size. Coming from an SEO standpoint, adding keywords into the content and H1, H2, and H3 tags holds a lot of weight and can help your keywords rank. Which in return helps your website rank higher and stand out against your competitors. Headers help keep your design and content organized on your site while also adding SEO value into it as well.
3) Optimize images
The visual aspect of the website is crucial for any web designer. Visual aspects are what help attract, keep, and convert users to using your site. One of the biggest SEO web design tips is to optimize your images. Image optimization includes having the right image size, adding the image alt text, the quality of the images are good, and styling the images. When it comes to the size of the images, it depends on the placement and use of the image. If it’s a header image, the size obviously needs to be bigger and pops on the screen. If it’s on the lines of a blog image, then any size around 600×600 can be a good size for the blog and for site speed as well.
Adding image alt text is an important part of optimizing images. The alt text does the job of describing the image for search engines and for other users as well. The quality of images needs to be good for your website to stand out and shine. Along with the quality of images, styling the images helps put everything into place. Overall, all of these SEO web design tips need to be considered to make your image optimization up to par.
4) Design user-friendly URLs
Along with designing a good looking website, making your URLs look good is another important factor to consider. While longer might seem better, it’s actually the opposite. The shorter the URL, the easier it is to crawl. In this way it also makes them friendly. When the URL is shorter, the more likely it is for someone to easily remember it. Using numbers could be something you could add, but it’s more SEO friendly to try to leave them out as much as possible. Overall, having an organized URL structure is an important SEO web design tip.
5) Use anchor links
Anchor links, also known as jump links, are a great way for your users to find the information they’re looking for. Having anchor links, as a part of your website, helps users link to what they’re searching for and helps save them time. People don’t want to scroll a lot or read through an entire page. While one easy solution may be to have shorter content, long form content tends to rank better for SEO. That’s why using anchor links is a great way to have a happy medium. Using TLDR’s, table of contents, and anchor links as a part of your website will help users have a better experience finding the content they’re searching for.
6) Easy-to-read font
When you’re on a website, you want to be able to read and scale through everything that’s on there. Having the appropriate font size and spacing is a huge part of this! Making the font size and spacing the right scale in proportion to other aspects helps tie the site together. You wouldn’t want your headings to be the same size as your images. Making these adjustments not only makes it easier to read, but it helps create a better sense of unity on your site. This SEO web design tip is one that every web designer should remember.
7) Design with site speed in mind
Did you know that certain design aspects on a website, while they may look pretty, can end up slowing your website speed down? Keeping site speed in mind is crucial to whether or not your website will operate properly. This is one of the most important SEO tips for web designers. Chances are, if your website has been lower in rankings, this could be one of the main reasons for it. Individuals like to find their information quickly and site speed is the determining factor on whether they will get it quickly or slowly. Optimizing your site with design aspects that help improve your site’s speed will increase the value of your site.
SEO Tips for Web Designers
While making a website look pretty may seem like an easy task, as we can see there are a variety of factors and things to go over to make your site run smoothly. These SEO web design tips are a few ways to help get the design aspects of your site started while also being aware of optimization and SEO.
Boostability provides white label SEO services to many web designers or web design agencies. It’s an added product benefit to your services you already provide to customers that can drastically improve their visibility online. Contact us today to learn how we can help your web design agency grow with SEO services.
