A well-designed website is a great way to grow your business. But showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs) so potential customers can find you is also important.
What many people don’t realize, is a big part of search engine optimization (SEO) has to do with the design of your website. How your website performs and its overall user experience can make (or break) your SEO efforts.
If you’re working on your SEO game, we’ll show you some tricks to optimize your website design to help you get ahead.
What is SEO Web Design?
SEO web design is a strategic approach that blends website design with SEO best practices. This involves creating a website that is not only visually appealing but also structured in a way that search engines can easily understand and rank.
While traditional website design and development focuses on usability and aesthetics, optimizing a website for search engines can take your website to the next level.
Ways Your Website Design Can Improve SEO
Google’s algorithm uses over 200 ranking factors to judge a web page and decide whether to show it in search results. The good news is, you don’t have to know all of them, or even adjust your website to compensate for them. By focusing on a few key areas, you can make a difference.
Some ways changing your design can improve your SEO include:
- Mobile-first, responsive design
- Fast page load times
- Intuitive, user-friendly navigation
- Indexability and crawlability
We’ll look at each of these and give you ways to implement them.
Mobile-First Design
Making sure all of your content and functionality works on a small screen ensures anyone who comes to your site will have a positive experience. Mobile friendliness is just good design, as the devices we use online now come in a wide variety of screen sizes.
From an SEO perspective, Google takes a mobile-first approach when deciding whether to rank your website. In 2023, Google announced they had completely switched to mobile-first indexing.
The easiest way to ensure your website is mobile friendly is using responsive design. This means your site uses the same HTML regardless of who visits it, but changes the layout according to their device. That way, someone on the mobile version of your site has the same information as someone on a laptop.
It’s how we build websites here at HustleFish, but it’s also the method that Google recommends.
Fast Load Times
There are several ways to measure page speed, but what you need to keep in mind is the longer your website takes to load, the more likely users are to leave.
A popular tool is Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, which will show you how your website loads and grades its performance.
Your website design plays a big role here. If you have a ton of plugins on your website or huge image files, they can drag your website performance down, and hurt your SEO.
Ways you can speed up your website include:
- Using an image compression tool to reduce file sizes
- Reduce the number of plugins you have
- Minimize or reduce any unused CSS or JavaScript
- Defer offscreen images, also known as lazy-loading images
Intuitive Navigation
Laying out your website so users can find what they’re looking for is a good idea regardless, but intuitive navigation can also boost your SEO.
Think about it this way: If you go to a new grocery store and they have lunch meat next to carrots, but potatoes are across the store with the ice cream, how are you supposed to figure out where the tomatoes are?
You could spend all day looking, or you could leave and go to a store that’s organized in a way that makes sense.
Your website functions the same way. By providing easy to navigate paths throughout, first-time visitors can easily find what they need, giving them a positive experience of your brand.
Navigation on a well-designed website will usually include:
- Clearly labeled navigation with concise language
- Logical menu and URL structure
- Visual consistency across pages
- Prominent calls to action to guide users
- Contact information that’s easy to find
Indexability and Crawlability
Similar to intuitive navigation for users, Google (and other search engines) have web crawlers that need to understand your website.
Website crawlers do exactly what it sounds like; they crawl your website to see what’s there. They also come back periodically to see if you’ve made any updates or moved things around.
After your website is crawled, the next step is to determine what each page is about. This is called indexing. Once search engines understand what information is on your website, it indexes the pages to be served in results pages later on.
If your website doesn’t allow crawling, it can’t be indexed, and won’t be shown in search results. But if your overall navigation is confusing, or you have too many redirects in place, crawlers may also miss pages altogether.
To make sure your page is accessible to crawlers, you can:
- Have good internal linking that makes your website structure clear
- Submit your sitemap to Google so crawlers know what to expect
- Properly configure your robots.txt file
- Only use noindex tags on pages you don’t want to appear in search results
Web Design and SEO Services: What to Look For
If you’re not sure how to go about improving your website, hiring someone to help might be a good option. But there are a few things to keep in mind if you do:
- Most SEOs are not web developers. Some SEOs have a basic working knowledge of HTML, but not all are comfortable making needed changes for more technical SEO tasks. If you’re hiring someone for SEO, ask about their development skills.
- Most website designers aren’t SEOs. A good developer will make sure your website is easy to navigate and functions well, but there are other SEO factors to consider too. Make sure your designer either understands basic SEO principles, or has someone on their team that does.
- Focus on users. Successful websites and SEO strategies put your users first. Any redesign or SEO campaign should be able to explain how they plan to serve your current customers and potential new ones.
- Ask about past success. SEO and web design are both a big investment, and can impact the long-term success of your business. Be sure to ask about their past designs and success with SEO.
Let’s Chat About Your SEO Web Design
HustleFish is a web design company that grew into a marketing agency. We have both web developers and an SEO on staff, which gives us a different perspective for SEO friendly web design than your average agency.
If you’re looking for help with SEO web design, we’d love to chat more about how we can help.