If you are looking to improve your search engine ranking, you will likely have tried many different techniques. From content creation to paid advertising, there are many different practices that businesses can use to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. However, unless your website design is built for search engine optimization, then your results will always be limited in effect.
What Impact Does Website Design Have on Search Engine Optimization?
Website design is fundamental to search engine ranking success; in fact, as web design Stafford explains, without the right website design, you will never be able to achieve the coveted high search engine ranking results.
There are many reasons why website design affects search engine ranking potential; the list below outlines just a few of these reasons.
1. Loading Speeds
One way in which website design has an impact on search engine optimization potential is through loading speeds. Search engines like Google understand that users want sites to load quickly. In fact, research from Google has found most people will click off a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
Search engines are providing a service to their users; that service is to recommend the highest quality and most relevant websites. Since internet users do not stay on sites that take too long to load, search engines simply will not recommend these sites.
2. Crawlability
Another way website design can impact search engine ranking potential is related to how crawlable your website is. Search engines cannot employ humans to go through every website out there and rank them one by one for different keywords; this would take so long it is infeasible. So instead of using humans to rank websites, search engines use bots, otherwise known as crawlers. These bots will rank a website based on a search engine’s criteria or algorithm.
If your website has not been built in a certain way, search engine bots will not crawl it. When a bot cannot crawl your website, it will automatically give your site a negative ranking, which will have a negative effect on your SEO and online business.
3. Responsive Website Design
The majority of internet traffic is now coming from mobile devices, which means that it is increasingly important that you have a responsive website design. As the name suggests, responsive website design responds to the device that a visitor is using. This means that you are able to offer the highest quality user experience, regardless of device. This can greatly impact the time that users spend on your website and your bounce-back rate, two important metrics for SEO.
4. Intuitive Navigability
Websites that are too difficult to navigate will frustrate users, causing them to click off and go elsewhere. This, in turn, will affect your SEO potential as you will suffer from having poor time-on-site metrics. Improving the navigability of your website by using intuitive website design is sure to improve your search engine optimization potential.