Why Web Designers Need to Keep SEO in Mind when Building a Site

Why Web Designers Need to Keep SEO in Mind when Building a Site

SEO Tips Every Web Designer Should Take to Heart

 There are countless ingredients that go into making a great website. A generous spoonful of SEO needs to be one of them. 

Any web designer knows that creating a website that is going to attract traffic and deliver ROI for a company does not happen by accident. Building a site is easy. There are currently more than 1.6 billion of them out there to choose from. Building one that will stand out from the crowd, however, is how the experts can earn the big bucks.

A great design, high quality content and a user experience that will have people coming back for more are the watchwords. But those in the digital marketing space will know that these are also the core ingredients for good SEO. In the digital heartland of England, web designers understand that great design and solid SEO go hand in hand, particularly in the following aspects.

Structural Considerations

Your site structure is the mechanism by which visitors get around. In a sales environment in particular, we all know there is a particular path customers will follow, from learning about the company to assessing choices to making a purchase. However, this is also the case for non-ecommerce sites, where the “product” a visitor is searching for might be a piece of information or news. Either way, the structure has to make it easy for site visitors to find their way around and reach their final destination.

So what does this mean in practice? The usual rule is that no page should be more than four clicks from the homepage. It keeps it simple for both customers and the search engine bots.

Mobile Friendly  

In 2017, more than 52 percent of global online traffic was from mobile. If that doesn’t convince web designers that they need to think mobile-friendly, then nothing will. Key here is having a responsive design that auto-adjusts the page according to the device it is being viewed on. This means a better user experience and reduced bounce rates.

Image Optimisation  

We humans are a fickle lot. Given the billions of sites out there, if we land on one and it is not visually appealing, we will hit the back button and go elsewhere. The fonts, use of colours, geometric shapes and images all come into play here.

Speed Optimisation Web Design

It is not just the what, but also the how. A page might have some beautiful images but if it takes more than two seconds to download, you will start haemorrhaging visitors. Loading speed is something that is far easier to optimise at the design stage than to fix later, so make it a priority from the outset. Keep in mind that the whys and wherefores of hosting and server issues can also have a major impact here.

Two Sides of the Same Coin 

Web design and SEO are often approached as different things, but they are the two moving parts that will make or break a business’s digital presence. Every web designer needs to think about SEO as an intrinsic part of the design task.