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SEO is an ever-changing field,
and it can be impacted heavily by so many different factors that it can be difficult to keep up. Website design is just one of them, and is as crucial to your business as the product you sell or the people you employ. To the customer, if a website looks out of date, there’s a good chance the business is too.
There are tonnes of tricks that you can do though to incorporate a strong SEO strategy into your design. Here are the top five…
1. Mobile optimisation
Last year, Google announced that its new algorithm would prioritise mobile optimised websites above all others when users searched via mobile devices. Inevitably, panic ensued amongst those businesses who weren’t prepared, but the truth is that all this does is enhance the experience for the customer – which should be your end goal too. If you want to boost your SEO, then creating either a responsive or a totally separate mobile design is critical.
2. Who’s your audience?
You will probably answer this question with a description of an ideal customer, but what language do they speak? The translation element is so often neglected in website design, but if your product is available to a global market, then you need to think about how text appears in different countries. If you design your website in English, but will translate the page to Chinese, the layout could look totally different and confusing, leading to bounce-backs and therefore, lower SEO.
3. Picture-perfect
Another side to websites that will hugely impact the number of bounce-backs you get is your image loading times. If people are searching on mobile devices, yoursite might be beautifully designed with high resolution images, but if they use up their data and receive slow page-loading times, they’ll leave within seconds.
4. Content is king
Having great content at every turn is a major influencing factor of your SEO. Your content should be used to attract and inform the reader, but be sure not to overload your audience. If someone visits a page full of text, it will instantly overwhelm them make them want to leave. Start off with short and snappy sentences about who you are and what you do, with the option to “learn more” which directs them to a more detailed page. You should also make this content shareable in strategic places, as regular social media engagement improves your SEO.
5. Make navigation simple
You need to think about what your user needs, how theywill search, and what your most frequently asked questions are. By determining your purpose, you’ll be able to provide a stronger navigational layout, as you’ll understand exactly what your customer wants and design your site around delivering that.If you need assistance with this side of SEO, Marketing Signals live by this ethos, delivering organic search engine optimisation through a targeted, long-term approach.
I hope these five tips help you enhance your website design. Do you have any other tips?
UI/UX Consultant, Photoshop, XD, SketchApp, Product Designer, Website Designer, Mobile App Designer, Expert WordPress Developer. For web/mobile design and wordpress development related projects please contact me at dibakar@themepurpose.com
