Search engine optimization or SEO is really important for a business to gain more traffic and conversions. But it’s not easy to optimize a website in a way that it will rank higher in the search engines; you’ll have to work on many different things.
One of the many things that you’ll need to work on is your website design. Without an impressive website design, SEO alone won’t be able to help improve your website’s performance in organic search results.
You’ll have to design and develop your website in an SEO-friendly way so that SEO can do its trick properly.
Among other things, your website will have to provide a mobile-friendly experience, descriptive URLs, fast load times, etc., so that the website follows the best practices of SEO. By doing these, you can make your website rank a lot higher in the search engines, and increase the traffic and conversion for your website. In this article, we’ll see why web design matters in SEO, especially on-page SEO.
Why Web Design Matters in terms of SEO
You might think that how a website looks has nothing to do with how higher your website gets ranked in search engines. It might seem so, but there are deep interrelations between them, as your faulty web design can hurt or damage your SEO works.
There are things such as site architecture, page speed optimization, etc. that get directly influenced by your website design. If you don’t design your website properly, it’ll cost your website rankings, and will cost you your money and business. Here are some reasons why web design matters in terms of SEO.
User Experience and SEO are Interconnected
We have already said that bad web design can hurt your SEO ranking, while a good design can boost the ranking a lot. If users don’t get a good experience from your website, they’ll leave your site soon.
If search engines pick up on the fact that a large number of users are leaving your site quickly, then your ranking in the search engines will face a drop. If you have an outdated site design, broken links, har to read texts on your website, it will create more hurdles for people to engage with your website. All your SEO work will go in vain due to these problems.
Quality Design Increases Time Spent on the Website
Good-quality web design can build trust with the users, and boost your authority through the website.
You can format your high-quality content within a pleasing and nice-looking visual, and that will keep your users on the website for a longer time. And this is good for SEO and getting conversions. And if the design isn’t pleasing enough, users will leave your site and you won’t get enough conversions.
About 38% of users leave a website if they don’t find the web design or layout attractive or pleasing.
Time spent on your website is a really important ranking factor in determining the value of your website, and if people leave your site soon, it will hurt your search engine rankings.
On the other hand the more time a user will spend on the site, the more value your site will gain. So, make sure that your website is beautifully designed, and is enough to hold the attention of the users.
UX design is important too. 59% of people will properly browse a beautifully designed website instead of a website with boring or plain design.
Convenient and Attractive Design Attracts Valuable Traffic and Customers
Proper web design will help your website attract more visitors that have the potential to become your customers, and later they might share your business with others too.
If you focus on developing your website in an attractive way, it will bring more and more traffic to your website, and you will get your expected conversion rate too. You’ll need extensive research, and you’ll have to incorporate specific design processes, texts, visuals, style elements, widgets, features, etc.
If you can specifically attract your target audience with your website design, imagine how much your SEO work will get boosted by it.
Fast Load Time and Good Aesthetics Decrease Bounce Rate
You need to put a lot of importance on the aesthetics of your website and think if the color scheme you are choosing is enough to make a satisfactory first impression. If the website is easy to navigate, and if the users find the user interface easy enough to linger a bit more on the website.
If these things aren’t ensured, the bounce rate for the website will increase. Bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors that navigated away from your website after only viewing one page.
Also, it is really important to ensure a fast loading time, as the more your website will take to load a page, the more you’ll lose potential visitors, and the more the bounce rate will increase.
You can lose around 12% of your potential traffic if it takes more than 2 d=seconds to load. The rate increases to 25% if the loading time goes up to 4 seconds. And you can lose more than half, if it takes even more time to load.
You should know that 47% of people expect that a web page will load within 2 seconds.
If a website has a high bounce rate, your website will be perceived to have a low value, and vice versa in case of a low bounce rate. So, make sure to work on your webpage loading time, and make positive changes to the UX and web design of the site. Then your SEO work will be able to bring in expected results.
Mobile-Friendly Website Design Helps SEO
Nowadays almost everyone uses a smartphone, and most of them try to browse various websites through those mobiles. But many businesses forget to make their website mobile-friendly, which hurts their website and business as a consequence.
About 40% of users tend to switch to a different website if the one they are browsing isn’t mobile-friendly. And this reduces the time spent on the website and increases the bounce rate a lot, which as a result hurts the search engine ranking of the site.
So, make sure to design your website in a mobile-friendly way, or all of your SEO works will go in vain. Around 62% of companies managed to increase their sales as they designed responsive mobile-friendly versions for their websites.
Final Words
From the above discussion, it is clear that web design has a huge impact on SEO, and one can’t function properly without the other. While bad web design can hurt SEO, a convenient and attractive web design can highly boost up SEO. So, make sure to work on the UX and design of your website to gain a higher rank in search engines.
