Many users believe that the goal of web design is to make a site look good. That is partly true – but it’s not the whole story. Web design makes a significant impact on the entirety of your site, including search engine optimization (SEO).
How Web Design Affects SEO?
First off, you need a website that properly represents your brand. It has to convey the message behind your products or services with clarity and coherence. Your target audience has to understand your language, and this is only achieved when you create your website for the people that you are trying to reach with it.
Now, if your company isn’t a web design firm, you will need professional web design and development assistance. Fortunately, the market is full of great web design agencies that can create great websites.
In other words, you have a good chance of finding a design company that can provide you with quality web design services, meet your budget and see you eye to eye on your business vision.
You want to make sure the web design agency you work with provides complex services, not just draw pretty graphics for your site. SEO is one of the crucial services you want the agency you hire to provide. Web design is not enough.
But, let’s say you already have a website. And you’ve already tried optimizing it yourself. The thing is that when something is wrong with your web design, it’s very likely that you’re still having a difficult time drawing traffic and getting a good search results position (SERP).
There are a number of things that may go wrong with your website’s design that can damage your SEO in more ways than you can imagine. Your site might be loaded with professionally written meta descriptions and titles and have a lot of backlinks from well-regarded websites, but still fall behind when it comes to traffic and rankings.
This can all happen just because of bad web design. And this is when you should hire a web design agency to redesign your site or build a completely new one if the current site you have is hopeless.
Below are some of the web design issues that can potentially affect your website’s SEO.
1] Poor Aesthetics
As was already mentioned, part of the web designer’s job is to make your website look good. Appearance matters, after all, as far as sites are concerned, and a wonderfully designed one will certainly get a lot of attention from users.
Nevertheless, when web designers decide to use the wrong color patterns, improper fonts, and badly-executed graphics, website visitors are instantly turned off. Usually, they decide to check out another site.
Even if your SEO is excellent, visitors who cringe at your company’s website won’t hesitate to load up the homepage of your competitor. This situation is far from ideal.
2] Bad Navigation
While looks are important, stunning graphics and incredible color patterns can’t make up for a website lacking clear and simple navigation. No one wants to get lost on a website while trying to find some clickable elements or even a simple search feature.
Poorly executed navigation is a major turn-off for most web users, so when working with a web design agency, make sure the inclusion of simple and easy to use navigation is taken seriously.
3] Auto-Playing Videos or Music
Some business owners try to be hip by putting up videos or music that starts playing automatically the moment the home page loads. But, it’s important to understand that many users find this annoying. Especially those that wear headphones at all times while surfing the web.
If you think that it is absolutely necessary that music or a video plays on your website – fine – but at least make sure it does not play automatically! Let users decide whether they want to play it or not: an ON/OFF button will do the trick.
This way, visitors won’t exit your website in a rage after an auto-playing video or music scared the hell out of them because their headphones were turned up a little more above average.
4] Pop-Up Notifications
While pop-ups can be useful, they can also be very annoying. In particular when they pop up in front of users before they get a chance to check out your content. They are even more annoying when they cover the main page’s content right after a user loads a web page from the search results.
If there’s no way for you not to use pop-ups, consider using them sparingly. Few things are as irritating as a pop-up that emerges the moment your website opens up.
5] The Bottom Line: User Testing Is the Key
It’s true that at times business owners get too involved in their work. This makes them miss important issues and look over what is preventing the bottom line.
This is exactly the reason why it’s essential to conduct user testing before launching your site – this will make sure that your web design is good and ready to go.
By hiring a reliable, reputable, and experienced web design agency, you get access to a team of talented designers, copywriters, developers, SEO experts, and other specialists that will make sure your site is a masterpiece.
While you may think that you don’t have the budget for it, it’s best to tighten your belt and put aside the needed funds, because otherwise, your site will be a waste of time, money, and effort.
Your site must look good, that’s for sure, but the SEO should be as good if not better than the aesthetics of the design.
If you want your target audience to know about your brand, your products or services, you want them to also know that they can trust you. While you can have an excellent company offline, you will have to make a serious effort to gain the trust of web users. And this is why SEO is a crucial part of your company’s success.
