How Your Business Website Design Impacts Your SEO

Does your business website get as much traffic as you think it should?
You’re highly likely to answer no to that question. That’s most likely because you’re not getting any traffic from search results. In order for search to have a real impact on traffic, you have to rank in the first few search results.
Your website’s design can impact how your site appears in search results. Want to know more about how your site’s design impacts search results and what you can do about it?

SEO is Not All About Keywords

At the beginning of Google and Yahoo!, these search engines would try to figure out the most relevant search results based on the search term you entered. At the time, the one way search engines would do that was matching the text on your website with the text the person used to find information in the search bar.
That’s how keywords become so important in SEO.
Search engine algorithms have evolved over the last 20 years to the point where there’s so much more than keywords to determine search results. It’s said that Google uses 200+ variables to provide relevant search results to its users.
Instead of relying on only specific keywords, the algorithm takes into account bounce rate, click through rate, site speed, backlinks, and your site’s structure to determine search results, too.
These are all areas where your site’s design can impact your appearance in search results.

The Two Areas of SEO

Looking at the complex world of SEO, how do you even begin to break down and analyse 200 variables? SEO is broken down into two components. There’s onsite SEO and offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO has a lot to do with how your site is designed and the user experience. There are also technical aspects that are usually handled on the backend that play a role in onsite SEO, too.
Offsite SEO are the ranking signals that occur outside of your site. Just because these things happen offsite, it doesn’t mean that your site’s design has no influence. Your site’s design is just as important in offsite SEO as it is in onsite SEO.

Your Business Website and Onsite SEO

Your website’s design has a lot to do with onsite SEO. That’s good news because there’s a lot that you can control regarding SEO and SEO services.

Site Speed

The speed of your business website plays a significant role in your site’s SEO, both from a user and search engine’s perspective.
Google’s job is to provide the best and most relevant search results to its users. If it fails to do that, then people will turn to other search engines to get the information they need. That could be a massive blow to Google’s ad revenue.
The way the algorithm knows it’s providing the best results is by taking into account how often people click through to your page from search results (click through rate), how long they stay on your site, and if they go to another page on your site or just leave (bounce rate).
Your site’s design can impact these factors in a few ways. The first is that your site has to load in under 3 seconds. Anything more than that and you’ll lose your visitors.
Next is creating a user-friendly site that’s easy to navigate when they get there. Your pages and meta descriptions should all be complete and give users compelling reasons to click through. Finally, your pages should have links to other pages that give users reasons to stay on your site.

A Quick Way to Make Your Site Faster

Would you like to know a quick and easy way to speed up your site’s load time? Check your images and make sure they’re all compressed.
People tend to gravitate toward visual designs instead of text-heavy designs. That means that your site could have a lot of images on it. These files tend to be large and take the most time to load.
You can compress these files to make the sizes smaller without losing image quality. All you need to do is either use an online image compression tool or plugin.

Responsiveness

You can expect that a large amount of traffic will come from mobile devices, no matter the source of the traffic. Google understands that its users are using their phones to find information. It’s a big reason why it prioritises responsive site design in search results.
Website responsiveness means how a website responds to different screen sizes. Desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobiles all have different screen sizes. They vary even more by manufacturer, operating system and web browser.
Your site’s design has to have a responsive design. If it doesn’t there’s a chance it won’t appear in search results at all.

Security

Your website design also needs to have certain security measures in place to protect data. Should your site be compromised and suddenly display ads for certain pharmaceutical products, your site can be penalised by Google.
You’ll then have to work to regain the trust of your users and search engines. That will take a while to recover.
Implementing basic security measures on your website can be easy, depending on what you used to build your site.

Offsite SEO

The main variables in offsite SEO are reviews, backlinks, and social signals such as social media shares.
There’s one reason why your business website’s design plays a role in offsite SEO. That reason is trust. Visitors decide to trust a website based on its design in less than a second. Your site’s design will determine if they decide to link to your content.
People are likely to send a link to a site they trust, which can lead to much better SEO. It’s the same as social media content. People will share content from a source they like and trust.

Build a Business Website That Gets Results

Your business depends on website traffic to generate leads and grow. In today’ competitive environment, you can’t do that unless your business website ranks at least in the first page of search results.
In order to do that, you have to have a website with a solid foundation. That begins with your site’s design. We hope this has helped you with How Your Business Website Design Impacts Your SEO.
Dot Media can work with you to design a website that doesn’t just look pretty but gets results for your business.
Get a quote to find out how we can help your business today.