It’s easy to think that attempting to design a website well would see you locked in a battle between making it look good and imbuing it with the SEO juice it needs to thrive on Google’s search pages. However, you might not have realised the extent to which a site’s good looks enhance its SEO anyway.
Admittedly, the association between a website’s aesthetic appeal and its SEO performance isn’t quite watertight – but it does happen, such as in the following indirect ways.
You can rid your site of superfluous design elements
If you are old enough to have been using the internet in the 1990s, you can probably recall visiting a fair few DIY websites overloaded with animated GIFs, scrolling text and – horror of horrors – images flashing like a traffic light.
Fortunately, web designers – DIY or otherwise – have largely cleaned up their act since then, and sites are now often made as clean and clinical as a dentist’s waiting room. Consequently, these sites often load quickly enough to earn Google’s stamp of approval.
Your site’s design doesn’t have to date quickly
Another rookie mistake made by inexperienced web designers is crafting a site in a way that appeals to the designer but not necessarily many people who will visit the site.
Hence, your site should be built to house useful, informative content first and foremost. Otherwise, your site’s visitors could find themselves having to wade through an awful lot of imagery, animations and video snippets before getting to properly learn what your business is actually about.
Your brand’s colours can easily permeate its website
You probably already have a good idea of what those colours are – especially if they have already been placed extensively across a range of your marketing outlets. These can include not only print materials, like flyers and leaflets, but also digital channels such as your company’s social media profiles.
Extending your brand’s colours to its website, too, can help you further imprint your company in the minds of its customers. If this spurs repeat visits to the site, its SEO can be appreciably strengthened as a result.
A mobile-friendly website is an SEO-friendly one, too
According to Google, more than half of searches made on its site come from mobile devices. The search giant also claims that “mobile-friendly sites show up higher in search results”.
One way of optimising a website for mobile users is implementing what is known as ‘responsive web design’. Our web designers can enact this kind of design on your behalf so that your site’s visual elements are always automatically arranged to smoothly fit any mobile screen on which the site appears.
A well-designed website is readily accessible
Streamlining your website’s design is a good method of stripping out non-inclusive design features. In removing these, you can help make your website straightforward for anyone – including disabled people – to use.
This transition would bode well for the number of visitors and hits your website attracts – and thus how this site fares in the SEO stakes as well.
