Regardless of how good your SEO skills are, make sure your graphic and web design skills are up to par!
Do you love the benefits of search engine optimization?
Who doesn’t? After all, there are noticeable increases in traffic after you’ve done well in optimizing your site or after you’ve hired someone to do so. The impacts of search engine optimization on marketing strategies, lead generation, and your brand’s credibility is, at its peak, unparalleled.
However, there are some who can’t reap the benefits of their SEO. For the most part, it’s because they over-optimized their website or the SEO company they hired isn’t worth the price. The most common reason this happens though is bad web design.
Few people realize that a well-designed website is also an important factor in SEO. Not only that, but it also helps in improving the other effects of SEO.
How can web design impact SEO that much though, you ask? Read what’s below to understand how bad design can ruin your website’s SEO.
1. Navigation Becomes Impossible
If it has a bad design, a website’s main problem becomes navigation. Without proper design, your visitors may not be able to access your pages through the main page. Dropdown tabs may not drop down while some buttons may not be functional at all.
As you can tell, this can be detrimental to your SEO since people won’t access other pages to your website. This results in fewer visits and overall traffic on your site.
In some cases, your visitors won’t also be able to navigate links going out of your website. The reason being links become broken without proper maintenance. Once again, you can attribute this through poor design, leading to low-quality maintenance.
2. Content Becomes Inaccessible
Your content becoming inaccessible is another fruit of poor design. This happens is most common among mobile users. Even if people can access your content fine through desktops, it doesn’t mean it will be the same for mobile users.
Content may appear broken apart or too large to fit in a mobile screen if not optimized. With over 4 billion people accessing the internet through mobile devices, having poor design means your website is missing out on a large group of potential visitors.
In some cases of poor graphic design, content becomes inaccessible because of poor ad placement. Ads are the lifeblood of any kind of website. This is why it’s important to have them displayed if you’re given the opportunity to run ads on your website.
It doesn’t mean you can put ads wherever you like without planning it out first though. Ads can and will block off a part of your content if not planned well. This may increase the bounce rate of your website since people can’t see your content anyway.
3. Traffic Goes to Other Websites
Websites with bad design often experience a high bounce rate with their visitors. Bounce rate is the statistic that determines how long a visitor stays before leaving the website. A higher bounce rate means lesser time to visit other pages of your site.
This happens because of a poor design while link building. When a visitor clicks on a link, you would want them to come back to finish the rest of your content. With bad design though, they’ll go to another page and forget about to go back to your content.
Instead of opening a different tab, most links replace the current tab they’re on. People will forget about your website unless they’re reminded to go back.
As you can tell, this can kill small businesses who rely on digital marketing. Without any means for customers to go back and browse their products, their business is as good as dead.
What You Can Do to Fix Bad Web Design SEO
Those are only some instances where bad design can ruin your website’s SEO. Here’s what you can do to help yourself improve your SEO.
1. Use a Responsive Web Design
To avoid having to deal with inaccessible and unreadable content on mobile, opt for a responsive design for your web pages. With a responsive design, optimizing your website to display its content in a way that will fit common resolutions of mobile devices will become easier.
It’s also worth noting that Google favors websites with a responsive design. This means you’ll get yourself higher in the search rankings by doing this.
2. Reduce Your Plugins and Other Resources
Another way a poor design can ruin your SEO is by slowing it down. Slow websites tend to get placed at the bottom of the search results. This is because Google and other search engines don’t want their users to find slow websites.
Speeding up your website is the best way you can remedy this problem. The main culprit of slow websites is a host of plugins. These can take up a website’s processing capacity and cause it to load slower than it should.
Removing unnecessary plugins is your main goal here. By doing so, your website can focus its processing power to load the essentials.
3. Fix Broken Links
Fixing broken links is one of the most important things you can do to fix your design and boost SEO. Outbound links, ones going out of your website, help with your SEO a lot by boosting link credibility. Making sure no links lead to broken pages is part of basic website design as it relates to on-site content.
Inbound links, meanwhile, ensure your website gets discovered through external websites. You can fix these by making sure their landing pages don’t take too long to load, aren’t broken or missing, and by ensuring they’re anchored with correct text, with keywords if possible.
Have Good Web Design SEO Today
Web design is essential not only to make your website more appealing but also to ensure optimal performance when someone visits it. Make sure everything is up to standards by reading the guide above. Keep your SEO at its peak with a good design now!
Once you’ve set up an optimal website, your next step is marketing it. Lucky for you, we provide amazing digital marketing services and the best ad campaigns a website can want. Contact us here and we’ll get in touch with you shortly.
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