Web design is such an important factor when it comes to trying to rank your website higher on search engines, and if your trying to figure it out trust us, there is plenty of work to be done. SEO, while simple in its goal, can get quite complicated at times. With so many strategies to try out, one can only guess which one works best for their website. Fortunately, that guesswork can be eliminated with a little bit of research, and today, we want to tell you that one of the most significant factors for good SEO lies in your web design skills.
Keywords, CTAs, backlinks—these factors are all crucial aspects of SEO. However, web design is just as important, and in this article, we want to talk about three factors of your website design that can seriously affect your SEO:
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1. Load Time
Speed is the name of the game today, and for users who surf the web for information they need, the last thing they want to deal with is a slow-loading and unresponsive website. If your website takes longer than three or even two seconds to load, there’s room for improvement. Each second that passes increase the risk of driving away visitors exponentially, and you wouldn’t want to lose customers or your rank just because your website loads slowly.
To ensure your website doesn’t suffer from slow load times, it is time to use tools like Google’s PageSpeed. Such tools can help test your website’s load time, even giving you suggestions to improve load times. This is vital to ensure that your website loads as fast as possible, keeping your visitors happy.
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2. Web Design / User Experience
What’s the main goal for all these search engine algorithms implemented into the search engine? To improve the user’s experience. User experience is something giants like Google take incredibly seriously, and if they see any website that does not contribute to a positive experience, their rank will drop significantly.
That said, a positive user experience is all about a website that makes the visitor feel good. From stunning web design to quick and concise content, a website that’s designed to leave a visitor happy and satisfied is a website that has a great user experience. On the other hand, poor web design will only hurt your visitor’s experience, driving them away from your website. Not only can this significantly damage your reputation, but drop your rank too.
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3. Mobile Friendliness
Recently, the rise of mobile devices has made it so that the majority of all online activities are done on devices like laptops and mobile phones. While this may not sound like something of a concern, it is for website owners. Websites designed for the desktop will not run correctly with such small screens, and if a website wasn’t built to be mobile-friendly, chances are any user entering the website will be frustrated with navigating it.
To eliminate this problem, the simple answer is to design the website to be mobile responsive. This is one of the best ways to make the website mobile-friendly. Such design allows the website to restructure itself to be easily navigable and readable on smaller screens. Regardless of the screen’s dimensions, it will adapt accordingly to provide the best user experience.
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Conclusion
As you can see, within website design are three factors that play a pivotal role in how effective your website’s design is. All in all, for the best website design, you need to make sure your website loads quickly, offers a positive user experience and is mobile friendly. Maximizing these three factors will help you provide a well-designed website that users are happy to use and search engines have no problem rewarding you with a much higher rank.
On that note, keep in mind that SEO strategies such as these take time to implement, not to mention give results. After all your hard work, the patience game needs to be played. Over time, you will start to see the fruits of your labour, most of which are from organic visits, which are incredibly valuable to you!
Putty Squared is a website design and SEO agency in Belfast offering solutions that help businesses grow their online reach and achieve digital success. Work with us today and improve your website design!
