SEO is a digital marketing strategy where the visibility of a website on a search engine is increased in order to attract more traffic. While the results of SEO are organic or natural, many look at it as involving content addition and editing only. However, SEO involves a number of methods or tools and website design too, plays a huge role in improving the SEO of a website.
One of the main reason’s businesses fail to find a balance between SEO and website design is because they are handled by different teams. SEO falls under digital marketing, where content is seen as the main way to push the website to the top of a search engine results page. Website design, on the other hand, falls under the web development team, where focus would be on user-friendliness and creativity.
It is however important that the teams work together in order to find a balance between SEO and website design, as they both play a role in increasing website traffic, and these are a few ways in which a business can find this balance.
Content
As mentioned above, content is an SEO team’s main focus. However, content may come in the way of a developer’s ideas of website design. Thus, there is a need for the teams to see how content to improve SEO can be accommodated within a user-friendly and creative design.
Firstly, it’s important to decide on the type of content required. What are the main pages of a website that will need content to boost SEO? An online clothing store may focus on the homepage, categories, and product pages. Once the SEO team has an idea of the content required to increase the website’s visibility on a search engine, the web developer can work on how to fit the content within the website design.
There is also the matter of indexable content. Crawling, indexing, and ranking are the three main functions of a search engine used to determine the visibility of a website when a query is made. Crawling involves looking for new and updated content, which is then indexed. When a user enters a query on a search engine, this index is referenced to determine how relevant a website is to the search.
While search engines like Google are updating their services, there is still a lack of support for JavaScript features in comparison to HTML. Since many web developers prefer JavaScript, it is important that web design is done with focus on JavaScript SEO so that the content published to the website for SEO purposes actually makes an impact on website traffic.
Navigation
If a website is complicated and difficult to navigate, users will be hesitant to visit the site even if it has the exact information they need. If an online bookstore has free shipping and a great collection, but hasn’t categorized the books properly or is badly designed, users will look elsewhere even if it is one of the top results on a search engine.
On the other hand, if website navigation doesn’t increase SEO, there will be little to no growth in traffic no matter how good the website design is. A website with a few categories and subcategories may look better visually, but may come in the way of SEO.
Striking a balance between the two when it comes to website navigation is important for this reason. Optimization for search engines may not always allow for a simple website design while a minimalistic look may not always accommodate SEO strategies.
Images
When a user visits a website, it’s not only text they look at. In fact, if the website features products and services, images will play a huge role in website design. A web developer will understandably want to use large, high quality images so that the overall look of the website is improved. However, this can slow loading times and make it less likely that a search engine will prioritize it on a results page.
Thus, the SEO team will push for compressed images while the web development team would be hesitant to compress the large number of images used in a website. Thankfully, there are many tools that can be used to easily compress images.
Content, navigation, and images are three main areas in which a balance can be struck between SEO and web design in order to maintain a website that is simple and user-friendly while increasing website traffic through SEO.
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