August 24, 2022

Gone are the days when search engine optimization used to be a straightforward process. With each passing day and year, it’s getting complex and difficult to understand and boost your site’s rankings. Thanks to the rising technology and user demands, there’s a new world order taking place.

Today, search engines like Google rank user-oriented websites with great aesthetics and user experience. It has increased the demand for web design and development services as everyone wants user-friendly sites. But does it have real implications on how your website ranks? This article provides a different take on how web design affects your SEO ranking and how you can improve it.

But first, let’s understand what’s the correlation between web design and SEO ranking.

How Web Design and SEO Ranking are Connected?

Web design and SEO ranking are two faces of one coin as one cannot function without the other. Web design is more concerned with the attractive and pleasing aspects, whereas SEO deals with website accessibility and visibility.

They aren’t independent components of your website as many believe if they can excel at one, it can help outweigh the other. However, this is far from the truth.

Understand this, great site SEO will help you rank better and attract more customers. And an excellent website design will keep them there, which further increases the likelihood of your website ranking higher.

Did it shock you? Take a minute to digest the truth… Feeling better now?

In order to perform better, both aspects of your website need to collaborate and work in sync. Indeed, it’s vital to build a user-centric and SEO-friendly site that increases your presence on search engine result pages (SERP).

Now that you understand how web design and SEO are connected, let’s get to know the factors that impact your SEO rankings:

Factors that Affect Your SEO Rankings and How to Improve them

1. Poor Navigation Affects Your User-Friendliness

The first element that impacts highly on your website’s user-friendliness and SEO is navigation structure and hierarchy. It affects multiple engagement metrics like average time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate that Google accounts for when determining your SERP position.

Streamlined navigation helps improve these metrics and also contributes to your business’s revenue and profit growth. If not optimized properly, your site ranking and conversion will take a hit.

Here are a few tips to ensure your website design has a good navigation structure:

Keep the menu simple and limit the number of icons to avoid confusion
Use familiar terms instead of complex and technical jargon
Make your navigation at the header and footer accessible for all device types
Provide a search functionality to help users reach the desired page easily
Design navigation in a way to reach your main service/product page within 3 clicks

2. Website Responsiveness Affects Page Experience

Responsive web design & speed is another factor that highly affects your search engine rankings. Your website’s responsiveness is directly proportional to how it’s designed and structured, and how fast your site can load. Ideally, your website should load between 1 to 3 sec.

As per one statistic, 1 sec delay reduces the customer satisfaction level by 16%, and 1 in 4 visitors will abandon your site if it takes more than 4 secs to load. Let’s see a few tips to improve your site’s responsiveness and page experience:

Improve the Core Web Vitals of your website
Compress and minify your CSS and JS files
Use a caching solution
Upgrade your site hosting to a faster and better service provider
Use Content Delivery Network

3. Design Layouts Impact Your User Experience

Search engine bots love to crawl, index, and rank websites designed with well-structured and aesthetic layouts. It makes your content’s relevancy easy to understand for users and improves their experience. Since it’s good for your users, it is also great for search engine crawlers.

Also, an expert web design team is careful when implementing layouts to avoid any major cumulative layout shifts when users try accessing your site. They help you implement a consistent and engaging website layout that draws more customers in and compels them to explore more.

Here are a few tips on how you can improve your site layout:

Utilize minimal web design principles
Make your layout consistent with uniform colors
Keep your layout content cohesive
Users should feel conducive when accessing your site
Define layout visuals properly

4. Media File Optimization Affects Your Website Speed

It may be tempting to use high-resolution media files given the impeccable video and camera technology out there. But unfortunately, large media files have a great impact on loading speeds and user experience. Another website error is including too many images that make your site sluggish and cause a drop in your rankings.

As we learned, search engines consider site speed while determining your SERP rankings. Thus, properly optimized media files positively contribute to your website’s experience. Here’s how you can optimize your media files:

Compress your images to a web format that reduces the load from the server and enhances the website speed.
Embed your video file from third-party platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
Add relevant & keyword-rich ALT tags to your images for search engines to understand the context.
Keep in mind that according to the accessibility rule, you should have some text content, including a transcript of what’s being displayed so that readers having a hearing disability or sound turned off can view the content. A few years back, sound-to-text transcription was troublesome, but today you can utilize automatic audio transcription services like Happy Scribe to simplify the process of converting MP3 to text.

5. Mobile-Friendliness to Affect Your Engagement

The digital world that once was driven by desktops and computers has now shifted to hand-held mobile devices. According to Statista, around 60% of the global traffic uses mobile devices to access websites. Also, users today want mobile-friendly sites for quick and easy access to information.

However, since mobile devices have small viewports, adjusting your web graphics, UI, visuals, and other elements is a bit tricky. But a professional web design team with proficiency to develop mobile-friendly websites can make it seem like a cakewalk.

Here are a few tips to ensure your website is mobile-friendly:

Use pre-built mobile-optimized and responsive templates
Avoid using popups
Focus on improving website load speed
Implement PWA if possible
Cut down on using flash animations

6. Visually Appealing Elements Impact Your Website Quality

Visually appealing elements are not only made up of images and videos, they also include animations, GIFs, micro animations, and other graphics that skyrocket your engagement. Also, visual content like infographics can get you high user engagement and contribute to your rankings.

According to Venngage, over 33% of marketers spend most on visual design and around 10% spend on creating animations and interactivity.

If your website doesn’t look appealing and eye-catchy to users, they’ll bounce off instantly, affecting your engagement metrics. Also, due to poor visuals and poor metric performance, Google won’t consider increasing your ranks. This will negatively affect your business revenue and profitability.

Here are a few tips to avoid the impact of poor visual design:

Understand the intricacies of appealing designs
Ask your web design team to come up with informative and insightful designs
Implement visual designs that speak for your brand
Don’t use stock images

Final Thoughts

Web design isn’t only a factor that affects your user experience but also plays a vital role in boosting your organic SEO rankings. The poorer the website design, the lower your chances of ranking higher on search engine result pages.

As we learned, the quality of your website design has great implications on how your users and search engines perceive your brand. Thus, you must pay heed to the above-mentioned factors and implement tips to improve your web design and SEO rankings.

Search engine optimization forms an integral part of digital marketing. And a considerable slice of SEO success depends on the strength of the SEO strategy executed. Strategies for implementing SEO vision are constantly evolving. The only way to judge their efficacy and return on investment is to gauge them against metrics like organic traffic and search engine rankings for the target keywords. One metric that counts substantially in determining the robustness of SEO strategies is what is known as a backlink profile. What’s it all about? How does it affect SEO? How do you create profile backlinks? We will answer this and more:

What is a backlink profile?

A backlink profile is a term that refers to the number and quality of links that point to a website. The backlink profile affects search engine rankings. Google’s robots are constantly crawling through the internet, assessing the quality and quantity of backlinks to determine the popularity and authoritativeness of a website.

Backlink profile considers other link characteristics like anchor text, domain quality, relevance, and the types of links. Analyzing backlink profiles should constitute a significant part of any successful link-building strategy since a high backlink profile equates to higher rankings and, consequently, more referral traffic to a website.

How does a website gain from a strong backlink profile?

Backlinks offer incredible marketing and branding advantages to websites. Some of the lauded benefits of executing a robust link-building strategy and growing backlink profile are:

Better ranking in search engine results pages.
Increased organic and referral traffic to a website.
Brand reputational growth.
Better relationships with other sites and content creators.
Increased visibility for websites.
Introduction of your brand name to new audiences and potential customers.

What makes for a strong backlink profile?

When embarking on a link-building journey, it is crucial to know how to measure the strength of your backlink profile. Understanding the signs of a strong backlink profile helps you know what to look out for in your backlinks. A strong backlink profile is one with:

Relevant & authority backlinks that are littered with spammy anchor texts.
Majority of high authority, organic profile backlinks.
Backlinks originate from websites relevant to a site’s niche, industry, and subject matter.
Few low-authority and low-quality links.
Diverse backlinks. A backlink profile is determined by more than just the number of backlinks. The quality of the links is also a significant factor. Unsavory tricks and black-hat SEO strategies do nothing but raise red flags and increase the risk of getting damaging penalties from Google. Disavow any low-quality spammy links pointing to your site so that they do not harm your search engine rankings or result in penalties.

What is a healthy anchor text ratio?

Anchor text ratio refers to how the anchor texts are distributed in the backlink profile. A favorable anchor text ratio signifies that the link-building efforts for a website bear fruits. Ideally, a healthy anchor text ratio is one with more than 80 percent of branded, natural, or URL anchor text, 5 percent exact match keywords, and 10 percent with keywords mixed with the anchor text.

These values reflect an acceptable healthy ratio for the homepage. A good ratio for the inner pages of websites includes 35-45 percent branded, URL anchor text, or natural, 50-60 percent with the keyword phrase mixed with the anchor, and 10 percent matching the exact keywords in the backlink.

Types of anchor texts for backlinks

Naked URL

Naked URLs are links that hyperlink the URL itself rather than anchor text. These URLs may seem unnatural but can come in handy when used correctly. Naked URLs offer a much-needed diversification that helps the backlink profile. They help dilute the backlinks so that they do not seem too aggressive. They make the backlink look organic rather than spammy.

Branded Anchor Text

These links use the brand as the anchor text. This backlinking strategy works best if the traffic recognizes your brand. The incoming traffic knows about your site and has no qualms visiting your site. Branded URLs cement a brand and also offer great profile diversification. That said, they do little to attract new audiences and bring new traffic to a website.

Keyword Anchor

These anchor texts use the keywords that a page is targeting as the anchor links. Keyword anchors have the capacity to create a robust backlink profile and draw more traffic to a site. That said, Google could flag them as spammy. The search engine giant could view it as an attempt to inflate the rankings.

Backlinks from other websites and how they affect your link profile when doing SEO

Backlinks from trusted websites cement your credibility and build your reputation. They are more or fewer popularity votes that Google uses to determine which sites are worth recommending to its users. A robust backlink profile is the stamp of approval that search engines look at to determine the rankings on search engine results pages. Building a reputable backlink profile is no easy feat. And that is because getting links from trusted websites requires significant effort. It may be difficult, but not impossible. Here are some ways to obtain links from other websites that will boost your SEO:

Organically gaining backlinks

Gaining backlinks organically requires that your website be informative, appealing, and more trustworthy compared to others in existence. That should compel other sites to view yours as an authority site they can link to in their content. Google rewards websites seen to be reputable by ranking them higher on search engine results pages. High rankings translate to more traffic and conversions.

2. Building networks

Another incredible way to grow your backlink profile is to build relationships with other website owners. Asking other website owners to link to your site or offering to create mutually beneficial content for their websites is a sure way to build your backlink profile with trusted websites.

3. Buying backlinks

Buying backlinks will no doubt boost your rankings and backlink profile. However, it is a high-risk strategy since it runs the risk of Google penalties that can set your site back further.

4. Diversify, diversify, diversify

Diversity is equally crucial when building backlinks from other sites. You have a better chance of growing a mighty backlink profile if your backlinks are not too similar. Backlinks from a diverse pool of trusted websites will boost your backlink profile.

Final Words

In a nutshell, building a healthy backlink profile is an SEO strategy that promises a substantial ROI. Using profile backlinks with other SEO elements is a sure way to boost search engine rankings and increase conversions.

Day: August 24, 2022

How Web Design and SEO Impact Your Search Ranking?