Despite web design combining the disciplines of design and development, it’s not just a developer’s job. To maximise a new website, you need to involve marketers in every step of the design process.
Most companies form their marketing and development teams in silos, which is dangerous. This means you’re missing out on easy wins during the development phase of your website.
That’s because web design isn’t all aesthetics. Excellent web design affects every matter of your online presence: it’s what people see first when they want to learn more about your brand, and it’s also how your website can boost your search engine ranking.
That’s right: web design significantly impacts your search engine optimisation (SEO). If you want to gain profit and more from a web page, utilise web design that draws both humans and search engine crawlers in these ways:
Web Design Impacts Human Experience
Good design boosts your search engine ranking, while lousy design hurts your order. However, web design isn’t just about gaining search engine bots. These online crawlers are replicating the human user experience. What’s not beneficial for human web surfers is also bad for search engine bots; they go hand-in-hand.
- If you have a website that’s clunky and visually unappealing, you will have low lead and conversion rates. Search engines pick up on users leaving your site in droves and dropping your rankings accordingly.
The converse is also true. Websites that customers spend more time on and even convert leads to sales are rewarded with higher rankings on various search engines.
- If your website loads at a turtle’s pace, has hard to read text or contains old site designs, you’re creating more engagement barriers for customers and search engine crawlers. Instead, embrace good web design practices to keep both human users and search engine crawlers on your site.
Some ways you can fix this include uploading the right picture and video formats:
- For photos, don’t use any other file type other than PNG. This kind maintains high quality but compresses the size to a smaller size.
- For videos, use YouTube links instead.
Both these tips make loading times faster across multiple devices.
Web Design Impacts Indexing
As a developer, one of your most crucial goals is to create an accessible site for both human users and crawlers to navigate. If you prioritise the needs of crawlers too much, you might make it difficult for human users to navigate your site.
Thanks to web design best practices, you’ll know how to format URLs and other content appropriately, which will help crawlers read through your site more quickly. This will help boost your SEO rankings.
Web Design Impacts On-Site Time
Good design boosts your authority. Up to 38 percent of users will leave a site if they don’t like its appearance. Keeping users on your site longer by making an attractive shell for your high-quality content increases conversions and search engine rankings. Excellent web design helps people get over their inherent mistrust of brands and move into a relationship with your company more quickly.
When you pair quality content with good visuals, you invite users to dig into your content instead of leaving the site after the flash fades or some other item grabs their attention on the page. This informs search engines your site is reputable and rank-worthy.
The Conclusion
Web design affects user experience and — ultimately — SEO rankings. Poor web design practices can cause your rank to fall, which will show your site lower in search. This directly affects your business’s bottom line, so investing in SEO-focused web design is essential. By combining marketing and web design best practices, a website that looks great and ranks highly in search can be created.
Contact Digital Webworx today for web design in North Wales! We work with clients throughout the UK, providing high-quality services like web design, SEO, and social media, all the way to IT support and business systems. Send us a request today!