SEO is a Part of All Good Web Design and Here’s Why

New websites can often lead to less traffic for one major reason: web design and SEO go hand-in-hand.

Quality web design starts by determining what will bring people to your site. When people Google something, you want to make sure your website is the first thing they see.

So an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital for any online business, and it should be implemented within the web design process, not afterward.

This means that the way your website looks is the second part of the web design process, and it is just as important. Here are some traits of good web design.

Starting with the SEO

Good SEO means knowing your business well. Before writing the first line of HTML code, designers should know what will drive traffic to the website.

SEO does not stop at keywords, however. An effective SEO strategy accounts for the ways other websites will link to it and makes content easily parsable. The best SEO strategies also have the best content.

Basically, before designing the user experience, good web designers will consider how the website will reach the user.

Designers should try to ensure that websites are relevant and applicable to whatever the user is searching for, and are presented to them before other websites.

Designing for the User

After figuring out how to get information to users, web designers should make sure their websites presentable.

You could have everything a user could ever need on your website, but it would not matter if users can’t navigate it.

Difficult user experiences can doom a website, no matter how effective its SEO strategy is. Users will simply leave a webpage if they can’t use it.

So while designers must consider the website’s content, they must also find ways to make it presentable while staying true to their client’s web design branding. A website about something like make-up probably should not have an impact font, and tech blogs may not want to use a Jacques and Gilles typeface.

Designers should also stay ahead of the curve in web design, which includes designing websites for mobile.

Knowing How Web Design and SEO Go Together

Google mentioned recently that it favors responsive designs for mobile platforms over adaptive designs, and designers should keep that in mind while building websites.

So while users may enjoy scrolling through many pages at once and it can be a neat gimmick, the design loads a website’s URL with keywords and raises SEO alarms. This can harm the website’s SEO ranking in ways that responsive design do not.

An SEO audit can help show you how your design is impacting your ranking.

A seemingly good design choice can negatively impact the overall website, which is why web design and SEO should not be treated separately. They go together to make a successful website.

Making Your Web Design and SEO Work

SEO is an important part of any web design, and it should be a part of any web design process. No designer should neglect a website’s SEO strategy while building the actual web pages since SEO can make or break a business.

You can contact us if you want to view your current SEO rating, or if you want to know how to improve your web design and SEO strategy.