Although many believe that web design and SEO are two separate elements that can be worked on independently, they are actually two things that should always go hand in hand.
Most websites today do not have adequate web design and SEO strategies. Usually, many companies or businesses create their website first and later, when they see that they should introduce SEO strategies, they work this second part.
Web design should not be understood only as the visual aspects of a page, since to achieve the maximum performance it can offer us, we must understand that SEO is influenced by many other factors, such as keywords or other technical aspects.
At the end of the day, if we have SEO covered this will make it easier for Google to better locate our page and position it better.
1. What is web design?
Like any other technique associated with the word “design”, in the world of websites it is everything that makes up the visual and aesthetic part of a certain page, as well as its structure and content.
Web design is what you see when you enter any website.
As you will see in previous posts like this, the visual part of a website plays a very important role when it comes to retaining visits or potential customers. After all, we “buy” with our eyes, right?
2. How do you combine web design and SEO?
Web design and SEO is the combination of a visually attractive design with elements that meet the SEO specifications necessary for search engines like Google to “understand” what the content on the web is about.
From the beginning of the design process of a web page, it will be key to include code elements and aspects that are not visible to users that are visible to search engines. These SEO elements that people do not notice when browsing a website are what will help that site to be detected by Google and potentially be ranked on the first page of search results.
This is how we will get more visits and traffic to our website.
3. Creating a web design with SEO included
The most important thing when defining which ranking strategies we should follow is to be very clear about what we want to offer, sell or promote from the beginning.
We must clearly define what product or service we offer since this is the way can we design the necessary actions to reach our target audience.
This is where we would begin to define a keyword strategy based on the goals we have. Thanks to keywords, we can optimize each section of our website so that each one reaches our audience effectively.
Once this aspect is clear, we will begin to design our web with much better set goals that can ensure greater visibility on Google.
4. The importance of web design and SEO
We saw that these two elements are important when starting to create a new website. The combination of these two factors will help the effectiveness of a page so that it can be a sales tool.
On the one hand, the visual part of a website will be the one that attracts our users for the first time each time they visit us. Nothing is more effective than attracting them through the eyes making them stay on your page and want to continue browsing.
Aspects such as structure, the use of colours, fonts or the use of blank spaces are especially important at this point. The combination of these elements will give your page a suitable image aligned with your brand.
Regarding SEO ranking, visible sections of the web must be taken into account as well, such as:
- Page title
- Headers
- Meta description
- Alt attributes for images
- Loading speed
- Internal and external links
These elements correctly included in the design of your web will be the ones that will help you to be more visible to your audience.
That is why it is so important that web design and SEO always go hand in hand when designing a new (or existing) website.
5. Keys to a succesful web design
The home page is precisely where your visitors usually arrive for the first time. Therefore, it must be striking and engaging to catch their attention. This can also be one of the keys to a good search engine ranking strategy since they detect that your website makes your users stay. And that is always a good sign.
If your home page is not attractive or does not offer something visually attractive to the users, they will quickly abandon it, which will not translate into sales or other business goals that you have set for your website.
Make it simple, less is more
Sometimes we want to show so much about what we can offer to users that we make the mistake of overloading our website with information, text, images or striking colours.
This can have an adverse effect: scare away our visitors.
An overloaded website or with an untidy appearance can lead to rejection among our audience. Do not forget that we must always offer solutions, never obstacles. This way we will guarantee a better user experience and, therefore, a better ranking in search engines (remember that Google takes everything into account).
Use visually attractive images and other media
We saw earlier that as users we allow ourselves to be attracted by the visual part of things. With the images included on a website, it works no differently.
The photos, illustrations or graphics we use must have a minimum of quality, resolution or alignment with the rest of the web page.
A pixelated image, of poor resolution, or that simply shows something unattractive can speak negatively of our website and, ultimately, of our brand.
The page’s loading speed
Another thing that sets the users back the most is a slow loading page speed.
Nobody is willing to wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load and show us the content. Current users operate with much shorter times.
Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that your website loads fast. We achieve this thanks to actions like optimizing the resources we use on the web, such as images, videos or any other piece that can take up a lot of space.
You can check your page speed with tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool is very simple and free.
6. Keys to a good SEO strategy
The SEO part of our website will be the one that places it in Google’s first position on the search results page. This will be what guarantees us more visits and, finally, more sales. These are some of the actions that we should always keep in mind.
Keyword strategy
Keywords are one of the pillars of any SEO strategy. They will lay the foundations for our ranking actions since they are the ones that can place us on the first page of Google results.
By creating your content around your researched keywords, you will be offering relevant information to users who search for them. And that way, your website may be the one they turn to in that search.
Look at your competitors
While this may sound like you are “copying” your competition, it is nothing like that.
Observing what other brands or companies like yours are doing means that you will be taking note of everything you could be doing to differentiate yourself from them and place yourself as a benchmark among your target audience.
Stay focused on content
In the first point, we talked about keywords and how they are one of the key tools of SEO. This is especially useful when creating new content in any of your communication channels with your audience (web, blog, RRSS, etc).
There is nothing more effective for good ranking than consistently creating and promoting new content. And if that content is also based on previous keyword research, success will be guaranteed.
In this previous post, I talk about the value of content when it comes to achieving our ranking goals, make sure you read it for more detail!
7. Have your next project combine web design and SEO
We saw in this post why these two elements must always go hand in hand. From now on, whenever you want to create a new website for your business, remember that these are the two pillars on which your planning must be supported.
Do you need help getting started with your next web project?
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