When you focus on getting to the top of the search results page you may miss out on some important aspects. It is not just SEO that will get you the top spot. In most cases, the concentration is only on SEO while forgetting the other things that affect too. Web design is an important aspect that can affect your position in the SERP. Both SEO and web design must go hand in hand in getting you in a spot that will attract the attention of your target audience. There are many ways in which web design affects the performance of your website.
1. Performance On Mobile Devices
With more and more people using mobile phones for their browsing, your website needs to perform well on mobile devices. Your websites must be as easy to use and attractive on smartphones as they are on laptops and desktops. If the website is not optimized for the small screens then you are certainly missing out on a huge chunk of customers.
Google has made mobile-friendliness very important. In 2017 it launched mobile-first indexing. That is proof enough for you to understand the importance the search engine is giving for mobile-friendliness. With more people using mobile phones, Google wants websites to perform better on small devices for users to get a better experience.
Half the traffic on the web comes from mobile devices and this means that half of your target audience must also be using these devices for browsing. If your website is not performing well on mobile phones you will lose all these customers. Google is not likely to rank a website that doesn’t load easily on mobile devices and results in high bounce rates.
2. How Readable Is Your Website?
While you give a lot of importance for the content on your site, you must also introspect whether you have given that much importance to readability. The website must be designed in such a way that the content is easy for the user to read. The web design must facilitate easy reading of the content which in turn will give what the user is searching for. Google also looks at this for ranking your site.
The way the content is arranged, the font size and color, etc. have a great impact on the readability of the page. Where the content is placed on the page also is very important. All these factors are part of web designing and the person who designs the site must consider these. They know how to improve readability using factors like white space, line length, etc.
3. Is Website Design Slowing Down Your Loading Speed?
Page loading speed is a very important factor in getting your website ranked. You must find if your website is loading slower due to the website design. People have no patience for slow loading website especially now that internet speeds are improving in all parts of the world. The ideal loading speed for a site is two seconds. Nobody waits for more than three seconds. If it doesn’t load people move on to faster websites. High bounce rates don’t do good for your SEO.
It is not just that your users will leave the websites without seeing it fully. Even Google cannot crawl all the pages on your site if your page loading speed is not good. If all the pages are not crawled by the Google spider, you will have that many lesser pages indexed by the search engine. That means that these pages won’t show up as a result of any search. You must optimize the pages to load faster.
4. Sitemaps Help Guide Search Engines
When the search engine spiders come crawling your website. they must know what pages to look at and what is more important. Sitemaps on your website are the guides for the search engines to know where to find different elements on your website. It will make crawling faster and easier, allowing the search engine to see all the pages. It will tell search engines what is more important on your site.
This is very crucial especially in large websites with many pages. It is also important for new sites for which there are no external links till now. Sitemaps also provide a better user experience as it tells them where exactly they can find what they want. The metadata contained in the sitemaps also helps in better ranking on the SERP.
5. Improve Trust On Your Brand
Even if you have the best products and service, if your website is old and outdated, users won’t trust your company. A website that is easy to navigate is essential for giving a better user experience. It must give the user what he or she wants without much difficulty. Such websites and consequently the companies gain more respect.
It is thus quite evident that there is a close relationship between SEO and web design. Both are essential for better visibility of your website.