Web Design and SEO are different areas of expertise. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interdependent. There are some techniques, read more to find ways on how to rank a website on Google.
In order to drive maximum results, it is essential to execute your design and SEO strategy correctly to create a synergy between them.
When Google ranks websites on its search engine, it takes into consideration your web design, and it feels like one of its key ranking criteria. So when opting to build a new website, it’s much better to opt for custom web development services in order to ensure that you have all of your requirements incorporated in them, rather than opting for generic design and development, which doesn’t translate into the required results as per modern SEO standards.
To rank better, you need to think about more than just keyword frequency and density. Here are 5 ways to rank your website better in Google Search by leveraging a better web design strategy.
1. Mobile-First Approach Is The New Essential
Beginning from July 2019, Google announced that it would start mobile-first indexing as a default for all new websites. Historically, Google’s search engine would use the desktop version of a website to determine its relevance to a user’s search query.
This makes complete sense in light of the current web traffic data statistics. According to Statista’s numbers, the mobile device website traffic percentage stood at 51.51 % as of October 2019.
To optimize your website for Google, your web design strategy needs to be mobile-first. This is the version of the site that Google’s algorithm will review when indexing your website.
In this strategy, these are some of the things you need to keep in mind.
- Is the text of your website responsive?
- Are the images on your website responsive?
- Is your mobile loading speed optimized?
If you’re a business owner who already has a website that is primarily desktop first, then you can follow Google’s suggested best practices. Here are some of the key ones for websites with separate URLs:
- Your mobile site and the desktop site should contain the same content.
- Structured data should be present on both the mobile and desktop versions of your site.
- Metadata should be present for both the mobile and desktops versions.
One thing that is important to know here is that Google does not recommend the use of separate URLs since it’s hard to maintain. It’s better to adopt a responsive web design, for which you can consult a web design agency.
Designing a website with a mobile-first approach helps you improve your SEO. It synchronizes the content on both desktop and mobile devices, giving you better chances of ranking high on Google.
2. Google likes the Consumer-First approach
User-friendly is a term often thrown around in the web development world without really understanding what it means.
User-friendly web design is all about making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for on your website.
A lack of User-Friendly design leads to a higher bounce rate, which is calculated using the formula. And it hurts your ranking.
Google prefers websites that are user-friendly since they are more effective at providing an optimized path towards acquiring a relevant solution to the user search query.
When you design your site, the user experience matters a lot. If your site is easy to navigate, provides the most relevant piece of information for the users, then you increase the time they spend on your website.
More time spent on your website means more engagement, more clicks, more conversion, and more backlinks.
This is precisely what Google’s algorithm is looking out for, and your web design helps you achieve all this.
Your web design needs to have a customer-centric approach, and that’s the only way to rank better. The first impression of your website matters a lot.
Web designers have a window of 50 milliseconds to make a solid first impression on the users. If your web design can do that, you’re already driving more user activity and helping your SEO process alongside it.
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3. Page Speed Helps Sites Rank Better.
We’ve already mentioned that your site’s loading speed is a critical aspect of your website that you need to keep an eye out for. But how do you improve your website’s speed and performance?
It is fundamental to de-clutter your website. Implement a design that is simple, making it load quickly and cleanly.
Clutter-less design improves your page speed since the server has to load fewer things. For Google, this makes a massive difference in how they rank your website.
Keeping your design simple and your page clear of clutter helps with page speed, which is one of the critical components Google measures when it’s indexing.
According to one study, slow pages hurt your conversion rate. Similarly, according to Moz, pages with long load times are more likely to have a higher bounce rate and lower user time spent on-site.
But it isn’t hard to optimize these things to increase your performance. Here are some tools and tips to improve your site’s loading speed.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Leverage browser caching
These are SEO tips that can help improve the site’s performance and help you rank better on Google.
4. Relevant Content Will Always Win The Race.
Web content is an essential tool in SEO. This is where web design and SEO come together to improve your site’s performance.
Your site’s design helps you place keywords in the right place and enables you to place relevant content in areas that are easy to locate.
For Google, an intuitive content structure is essential. If your web content is easy to follow, creates a user journey that helps users find information, then you’re already in Google’s good books.
Some content strategies that you can use to enhance your ranking are listed below:
- Providing information in the form of a list makes content easy to read and accessible.
- Use FAQs to help your users navigate your website
- Target Google snippets by answering common user queries in your blogs.
So you need to ask yourself the following question. Is your web content clear, intuitive, and relevant to your service and your target audience? The answer to this question needs to be yes.
This helps you rank your keywords better, climb the metaphorical staircase of Google Search engine results, and improve your web performance and SEO.
5. Site Map Planning Puts You In Google’s Good Books.
Site Map is a crucial structural aspect of SEO and Web design. It informs search engines and users to navigate your site.
When you map out your site, it is vital to ensure two things.
- Are there any dead ends? If there are, remove them to ensure visitors don’t leave your page due to lack of information,
- Is your site map directing users to a solution they’re looking for? If it’s not, then you’re losing potential conversions and search engine rankings.
- Is your internet linking structure easy to understand? If it is not for users, then it won’t make sense for Google crawlers as well.
Here, it is crucial for your design team and SEO team to sit together and plan out a site map that ensures sensibility to users and allows for accurate internal linking.
It is also important to understand how anchor text helps websites rank better on Google. Anchor texts should ideally provide users context to the link, and it can help you rank better. You can follow the best practices based on Ahref’s guide about anchor text.
So Have You Got Everything You Were Looking For?
I think the best takeaway for you should be to understand that the world of web design and development is complex. It’s not about individual components working in isolation, but rather about finding synergy between these components to make the most of their potential.
SEO and Web design implementation are crucial aspects that you need to focus on to rank your site higher on search engines, and they need to work together to drive better results.