The job of an SEO professional is a complicated one — especially in today’s online marketing world. SEOs not only have to tackle keywords and content, but they are also expected to manage a great user experience and a faster loading website.
That’s why SEOs should collaborate with website designers to make sure that everything is correctly designed in favour of website visitors and search engines.
Here are a few tips on how these two teams can collaborate with each other.
1. An easy-to-read website design
A website design that promotes readability is one of the most important elements for SEO professionals — especially if it is for a content-heavy website that relies on sharing useful information with readers.
An easy-to-read website design then directly and indirectly affects metrics, such as bounce rate, dwell time, average page on time, average session duration, etc. These metrics send positive (or negative) signals to search engines and may have a meaningful impact on the search engine results pages (SERP) rankings of the web page.
It is important for SEOs and designers to work together to design an easily navigable and readable web page design. For example, avoid using light-coloured text on a darker background, or placing blocks of content in unfamiliar and weird places.
2. A mobile-friendly and responsive design
More than 50 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. After Google’s introduction of a mobile-first index, mobile traffic has gained even more importance.
If a website isn’t designed with mobile in mind — if it is not mobile-friendly and responsive — SEOs will have an extremely tough time to rank it higher in the SERPs. Apart from the higher rankings, your website takes a massive credibility hit if it can’t be accessed properly on mobile devices. You can’t alienate more than 50 percent of your potential website visitors with an unresponsive website.
3. Fast loading speed
The loading speed of a website is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. It is so because a slow-loading website not only has a negative impact on the site’s search rankings, but a slow-loading site also frustrates visitors and encourages them to quit your site.
Lastly, a slow-loading website also negatively affects the site’s conversion rate. Amazon found that every delay of only 100 milliseconds may cost the company up to 1 percent in sales, and it may suffer a revenue loss of up to $1.6 billion.
SEOs cannot improve the loading speed of a website without the help of designers. There are many variables at play simultaneously on a page that determine its loading speed. From large media files to unoptimised code, there are many factors that may require fixing by designers and SEOs.
Use tools, such as Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights Test to check the loading speed of your website.
4. 404 error pages
404 error pages are the ones that your website visitors see when they land on a broken URL. Ideally, a website should not have any 404 error pages, but they are practically impossible to eliminate. Therefore, the next best thing is to design a custom and intuitive 404 error page that would help retain visitors and assist SEOs.
The first reaction of most online users is to quit the site when they encounter a 404 error page. The idea, therefore, is to create an interesting 404 error page that has relevant information for them.
The following design elements might help:
- A clear copy and message that indicates it’s a broken link.
- Links to the most important, popular, and commonly visited web pages on your site.
- A functioning search box that the website visitors could use to find specific content before leaving your site.
5. Pop ups
While pop ups may be important in certain situations, search engines do not like intrusive pop ups at all. SEOs and web designers have an important job to make sure that pop-ups — if any — aren’t obtrusive and frustrating.
For example, a pop up should never greet users when they land on a web page. Most users would just quit the website right away. Even if that’s not the case, search engines penalise websites with pop-ups that take priority over user experience.
Conclusion
Without website designers, SEOs cannot be successful. Use the above-mentioned tips to make sure you are giving your website the best possible chance to rank higher in the SERPs.