Why Web Design and SEO Go Hand In Hand

Many marketers and business owners think that SEO is most effective once a website has been designed and developed. There is a belief that SEO and web development and design are inherently different in their ‘philosophies’ (for lack of a better word), whereas they have more in common than you might realise. 

It’s hardly surprising why so many websites suffer from issues such as slow responsiveness and speed, poor functionality, and lack of traffic, to name just a few. While a company owner or marketer will likely have made some effort in trying to establish a presence on search engines, sometimes the website itself is just not right and doesn’t accomplish any business goals, or doesn’t reflect the business well enough.

Customers make an informed decision about a website and brand within a few seconds from when they discover it for the first time. If a site does not tick a few crucial user experience and design boxes from the outset, you could be driving potential traffic and customers away in droves. Conversely, you may have spent a fortune on a professional website, but may not be clued into what your audience is searching for, or how to tweak your site in subtle and intricate ways to help it become more visible in search engines. 

Both of these scenarios are all too common, which is why it’s important to approach SEO and web design as a collective, instead of viewing them as vastly disparate investments. 

Where Do SEO and Web Design Overlap?

SEO and web design work together more harmoniously than most people realise. When you execute both strategies correctly and with the same goals in mind, you can create an easier and more comfortable user experience for people that land on your site and, hopefully, convert into customers. But in what components of a website does its design and SEO strategy intertwine?

Responsiveness
Most search traffic is performed on mobile devices these days, which is why it’s important to ensure that your website is optimised for mobile. Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor in 2015, before introducing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and mobile-first indexing in the years that followed. Therefore, a mobile-first approach to the design – and the potential users using those devices – is crucial to align SEO and web design.

Site Speed
Many websites are built without consideration for speed, and it’s not unusual for developers to realise that plugins or features of a site could be slowing it down significantly. Website speed isn’t just important for user experience, but it’s one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, with Google outlining guidelines – known as Core Web Vitals – to help developers optimise the speed and UX of sites to boost rankings. In short, site speed is a huge ranking signal, and it usually involves diving into the website code. 

Security
Nowadays, security is crucial. Buyer habits have changed significantly, with most purchases being conducted online. Therefore, to encrypt sensitive consumer data via the internet, businesses need SSL certification, to ensure every standard HTTP request from a browser to a server is indecipherable. SSL certificates are absolutely vital for websites these days, particularly for brands that run large-scale eCommerce stores. 

SSLs are so important now that search engines like Google alert users when they are browsing unsecured sites, and this can have a detrimental effect on conversions. If sites are not using HTTPS and opting for standard HTTP, it will affect their Google rankings over time, as fewer people will use it, and therefore Google will not see it as a trustworthy resource. Therefore, it just makes sense to encrypt your site, to secure (pun intended) buyer trust and search engine visibility.

Site Plan
Sitemaps are crucial to have embedded within your site code to make it easier for search engine bots to crawl your website. A sitemap provides search engines with a guide to all the pages and content on your site, and you can effectively stipulate which pages are the most important. 

XML sitemaps also help user navigation and contain important metadata about your pages, therefore helping them rank higher. If you do not align your site plan with your web design, you could risk creating a complex sitemap that makes it more challenging for bots to crawl and users to navigate. 

How to Ensure Your Website Performs Well From the Start

To avoid falling into the trap of prioritising a website that’s visually appealing without factoring SEO into the mix until later, it’s important to take the below steps. Ignoring SEO when designing and developing a site can be a huge detriment, resulting in lost business and poor rankings. What good is a website if nobody can find it? 

However, taking these steps will help you ensure your website gets off on the right foot, allowing you to manage its performance more effectively.

1. Conduct a Competitor Analysis
   Your website needs to reflect what you do, with its design and content targeted towards the ideal buyers. Regardless of your long-term business growth journey stage, your site needs to reflect your current and long-term goals, which means you need to consider your business competitors and who they are trying to target. 

   Depending on your industry and niche(s), you may have ‘SEO’ competitors as well as similar businesses to yours, so it’s worth finding a healthy balance. By understanding what your competitors are ranking for and what they are providing to their customers (or rather, what they are not), you can tap into gaps in your own site and content. 

2. Perform In-Depth Keyword Research
   Keywords and search terms are the lifeblood of your site’s rankings. Look for the most relevant keywords in your industry ‌that reflect the services or products you provide. However, look beyond the high-volume search terms, and look for longtail keywords which may be less ‘competitive’ and have a higher click potential. Looking at these metrics will help you get an idea of what you want to rank for and what content you can potentially have on your site pre- and post-launch. 
3. Establish a Migration Plan
   If you are doing a full website upgrade where you are, for instance, not fixing what you have already developed but, rather, ‘starting from scratch’, it’s worth establishing a full migration plan. You can establish what URLs you want to keep and set up 301 redirects to prevent the loss of valuable traffic to those pages, and it’s certainly more valuable to keep them if they have value. If some old URLs do not need to be kept, it’s worth de-indexing them or setting up redirects to other pages, otherwise, you may increase the likelihood of 404 error pages, which are negative in Google’s eyes. 
4. Don’t Ignore Desktop
   While mobile devices are where the bulk of site traffic lies, many people still use desktop devices so it’s crucial to consider the site desktop design and performance from both types of devices. Whenever you build a site or add new pages, it’s always worth testing them on both platforms and also on tablets, to ensure that all features and functions work correctly and that the site responds to commands or requests. 

   Content marketing and analytics tools will also list how much traffic you’re getting on mobile and desktop, so you can make informed decisions on what to do with pages that aren’t performing well over time.

5. Use a Test Server
   As said earlier, UX and site speed are of paramount importance if you want to rank higher on Google and also deliver a positive customer experience. Whenever you update your site (more on that below), consider rolling the updates on a test environment to ensure the design and functionality are not drastically affected. You can also use a test server to experiment with any new tools or plugins that you find, rather than roll them out onto the live site immediately and risk affecting traffic and performance.
   
   
6. Invest in Managed Updates
   Sites need to be kept up to date, from the core systems and databases to any third-party plugins and add-ons that they’re using. This is vital to patch any vulnerabilities in the software and protect the stored data on a site. A CMS like WordPress makes it easy to patch and update sites, however, there is always a risk of updates causing functionalities of the site to not work properly. 

   Therefore, a test server is always useful as a way to double-check whether the updates work or, alternatively, consider paying a third-party development agency to oversee the management of your site, including any patching and security. 

7. Review Your Site and URL Structure
   When establishing any 301 redirects or migration plans, it’s always worth reviewing your new website plan and URL structure. Looking at the structure of your site and its URLs is a good opportunity to determine whether it has logical navigation and whether users can make sense of it. You don’t want to flood your URLs full of irrelevant sub-categories for product or service pages. Ideally, you want the most relevant landing pages for primary services or products – titled with top-level keywords – with sub-categories following a similar pattern. 
8. Write Professional Content
   It goes without saying that good rankings are built on creating professional, engaging and relevant content. This means that your service or product pages need to be written through the eyes of a customer and not those of a business owner – something which is, understandably, very hard to do without a professional content writing background. It’s not just a case of writing content that includes keywords to help crawlers understand the context of your page, as well as writing relevant anchor text (for links) and CTAs (calls to action). 

   Once your site is launched, the writing shouldn’t stop there! Google loves sites that continually add pages of relevant content, usually of topical interest or that reflect new business developments. Adding blogs and articles, in the same manner, is crucial for driving traffic. 

9. Follow On-Page SEO Best Practices
   Every indexable page should have a unique URL slug (permalink), Page Title (Meta Title) and meta description. All these elements should follow Google’s recommended character lengths to avoid truncation in SERPs, for both desktop and mobile devices. Meta descriptions are not ranking factors, but they should contain compelling copy that describes what a page is about. Page Titles and URL slugs should ideally contain a keyword.

   In page content, it’s wise to use relevant H1 and H2 tags to break up the text. The H1 and Page Title should be similar but not exactly match. Consider also using bullet points, a mixture of internal and external links, alt text for images, and breadcrumbs to show the user where they are on the site. 

10. Liaise With an SEO or Web Agency
    If all of the above tasks sound difficult and time-consuming, it’s because they are. SEO and web design are never one-and-done processes, and they take time to perfect. It also takes time to see results and there are only so many hours in a day, so it’s unsurprising that many startup and small business owners turn to outsourced web and SEO professionals for assistance. 

    If you fall into this category, communicate with them about your goals, targets and what you want to achieve out of your investment. Post-launch, regularly liaise with your agency to ensure you are up to speed with developments. Over time, they will make recommendations to you about how your site can be improved, so take those on board.