Digital marketing may be a vast field but most strategies tend to be interlinked with one another. Search engine optimization, in particular, depends a lot on website design. After all, what would you optimize if you didn’t have a website? It’s why SEO services in New York usually conduct a website audit to identify what they can do to improve the website’s ranking. A few tweaks to the design can affect the ranking directly or indirectly. Some website designing factors that have a direct or indirect impact on SERP rankings include content, mobile-friendliness, user-friendliness, sitemap and loading speed.
How Does Web Design Affect SEO?
Optimize Content
Web content informs the users what the website is about and helps search engines find it. You can integrate keywords in the content to increase web traffic but you must be careful about what keywords you use, where and how often. The way you present the content is also important and will affect the reader’s UX.
You should consult SEO services in New York to find the right keywords. Other than their search volume and difficulty, consider which keywords are users most likely to use to find your web content and why. Keep your keyword density between one to three percent. Write only as much as you need instead of writing long articles. Proofread it to find and correct grammar and spelling errors. Break your content into small paragraphs and add subheadings to help readers find what they want to know.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of webpages on a website that acts as its map. It guides search engines on how to crawl the website based on their importance and provides metadata to help webpages rank on search results. It also helps visitors navigate the site. It can be helpful on large and/or new websites.
Mobile-Friendliness
It’s been years since Google introduced the Mobile-Friendly update in 2015 in response to the rising amount of internet traffic from mobile devices. If your website still doesn’t load properly on smartphones, then your visitors will search for other websites that do. So you need a mobile-friendly website to cater to mobile users and rank on mobile browsers. Most designers recommend responsive web design in Morristown because it adjusts the website’s elements based on the device’s screen size. Google recommends it because it allows users to access the site on different devices through the same URL without redirecting them. It’s easy to maintain and update.
User-Friendliness
A user-friendly website can rank high because visitors often feel satisfied after browsing the website and browse through it longer or visit it often. This makes search engines more likely to recommend the link to other users and improves its rank. Inversely, if the user interface is complicated, the visitor will bounce and the site’s rank may drop. You need to concentrate on the user experience to create a user-friendly web design in Morristown. Think about how your user will interact with the interface and what actions you want them to take to create a conversion-oriented design. Use simple navigation systems like search bars and breadcrumbs to help visitors navigate the site.
Loading Speed
Your website’s loading speed affects your bounce rate, which may affect your ranking. Nearly half the internet users expect websites to load within two seconds and will hit the back button if it takes a third. Many customers abandon carts due to a slow checkout process. It’s why Google introduced the Speed Update to weed out the slowest webpages. Web design companies in NJ use simple design elements and code bases to improve their loading speed. You can compress images and other files for the same. You need to test your website’s loading speed on desktop and mobile devices to optimize it. You can also use accelerated mobile pages to increase your webpage’s loading speed on mobile devices. AMP is an open-source HTML framework developed by Google that allows webpages to load fast on mobile devices.