Traditionally, people believe that search engine optimization is only connected to key words, but there is another very important thing (among others) that affects a website’s SEO, and that’s design. A website’s design can make or break its performance, and while that is obvious from a personal-experience perspective, it can be difficult to realize that it affects the algorithm of SEO. A website with poor design will have a lower SEO “score” than a website with good design, even if they contain the same exact information. This is because user experience greatly effects SEO results. This ultimately leads to greater traffic in that site, which is the goal.
The article I read outlined some design aspects that support SEO. For starters, “Site Structure and Navigation” (softtrix.com). For the search engine “crawlers” to rate your site well, it should have a logical structure. Put simply, make sure it is easy for users to find what they are looking for within your site. The “hierarchy” the article outlined was:
Home->Category->Subcategory->Page
The next design aspect the article highlighted was the push to smartphone accessibility with your site. The majority of searches are now on mobile devices, so you should work on designing your website for those first. Google is looking for websites that are compatible with any screen size.
The third design aspect was “page speed and performance.” The loading speed of sites was made an official factor in SEO rating in 2018. Shockingly, “pages that take more than 3 seconds to load are at risk of losing over 50% of visitors.” For this reason, it is important to make sure your site is equipped to load quickly. The next aspect is “User Experience Signals,” including “time on page and bounce rates,” “accessibility,” and “navigation clarity,” as explained above.
The aspects listed above all affect your site’s SEO rating significantly. For this reason, it is important to focus on the design elements of your site just as much as the keywords and great information it may provide.
4 Responses
Mobile user experience and overall loading times are certainly important aspects of SEO that should not be ignored!
Mobile friendliness definitely is a key feature of good web design so I’m not surprised that Google takes it into account in some way in the site rankings. Hierarchy of information is very useful to the human user as well so material is not missed.
I think it’s so interesting that SEO design has a such a big impact on the side’s rating. I feel like design should be a different part separate from SEO, because SEO seems to be more like keywords and the links behind the website whereas design is more like marketing and the creative side.
Thank you for sharing this Sydney! This is so interesting! I like how you explained that there is not one and only way for SEO, but search engine optimization is a combination of many different aspects.