You’ve probably heard about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and its importance to digital marketing. But do you really know what SEO is and how it works? You may know the basics, but you must fully understand its complex and multifaceted process. If you have a business website, you want it to rank highly to increase organic traffic. For you to achieve this, you must learn about web design and SEO. This duo refers to creating a website that follows SEO best practices. Keep reading to learn more about SEO and why it is essential for web design.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services you offer. Visibility increases your chances of attracting attention from prospective customers and maintaining existing ones. Unlike paid ads, you cannot pay search engines to rank highly on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is why you need SEO to earn a place at the top.
What Are the Essential Elements of SEO Marketing?
Keywords
You must choose your keywords wisely, research, and strategically place them within your content. Keywords are words or phrases that users use when searching for something online. Brands use these phrases to connect with prospects. Always look for keywords with high search rates and low competition.
Content
Content is like a vehicle you use to reach your audience. Begin by understanding your audience to create the content they want. Always ensure that your content is educational, engaging, relevant, and shareable. Content comes in several forms including, videos, blogs, podcasts, infographics, web pages and social media.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves optimisation processes that take place away from your website. The primary off-page technique is backlink building. Quality backlinks from other websites tell search engines that your content is valuable and worth ranking. Other off-page SEO techniques include social media marketing, guest content, forum posting, and local listing.
Local SEO
Local SEO has become crucial since most users use their mobile devices to search for products and services. About 60% of all searches are performed on mobile devices, and around half of those searches have local intent. Local SEO ensures that people around your area find your website when they search for products or services that you offer. Local SEO best practices include:
- Using local keywords.
- Claiming directory listing.
- Creating location-specific pages.
- Creating Google My Business local directories.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can help you reach highly targeted audiences. SEM practices include native ads, Google AdWords, social media ads, pay-per-click, and Google shopping ads.
Reasons Why SEO is Important for Web Design
If you wish to improve your website’s performance, you must look at several factors simultaneously. Most digital marketers tend to focus on one or two essential elements while neglecting something equally important. Ranking highly on the SERPs takes more than SEO. You also need a well-designed website, or your SEO efforts will not pay off. SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than you may realise. Below we will discuss some reasons as to why SEO is important for web design.
Help in Customer Retention
Whether you are in e-commerce, blogging, or a small local business, website traffic is essential for the success of your business. SEO and web design help to improve your search engines position. This means that you are more visible to potential customers. You can accomplish this by having a responsive web design. Responsive web design matters to your audience, and this is how you attract new clients while keeping onboard your existing clients. When you focus on what your audience wants, you will increase your organic traffic.
Speed
Every second matters in web design. Research proves that visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. An additional two seconds could mean you lose around 12% of the people who clicked to visit your website. Now imagine what four seconds can do. You can lose almost 25% of your potential customers. Optimising your website to load fast will double your traffic, reduce bounce rate, and increase revenue. SEO strategies can help you improve your page load speed.
Provides a Seamless Customer Experience
Have you ever visited a website that looked one way but started to look different when you visited another of its page? The design looks old, the headers are different, and the fonts are unmatched. The navigation is disorganised, and you have trouble moving from one part of the website to another. A website with such characteristics may have applied some SEO strategies and ignored others. Most visitors will not waste their time trying to work their way around the inconsistent design and hard-to-follow navigation. They will abandon their carts and will probably never revisit your website.
An SEO website design offers a seamless experience, and visitors do not struggle when interacting with the website. Every aspect of the website is user friendly as it leaves nothing to chance. An SEO web design guides visitors through content, features, pricing, and wherever else a person may want to go. Visitors will find what they want quickly since there are no distractions. Such sites increase leads, sales, affiliate clicks, sharing, and repeat customers.
Increases Organic Search Traffic
Organic search results are the results in Google that are not paid ads. Organic search results drive over 50% of traffic around the web. Research proves that most internet users prefer clicking on organic Google search results over ads. Appearing at the top of Google’s search results is social proof that your website has the best answer to a search query. Over 75% of this traffic goes to websites on the first page of search results. Search engines constantly change their algorithm to ensure that they show only the best websites. This increased visibility offers you several SEO benefits such as increased traffic, better customer connection, and reduced marketing costs.
Creates a Secure Website
The security of your website is among the crucial things that web developers focus on when creating your website. Search engines consider factors such as HTTPS when ranking websites. For instance, if you and your competitor have equally SEO optimised websites, but yours is not HTTPS, Google will rank your competitor’s website.
Creating a secure website from an SEO perspective helps you attract more users to your website. Security also enables you to avoid data loss or breaches, thus impacting how users trust your website.
Improves Your URL Structure
URL structure is how you configure your URLs to reflect your page in a more simplified way. Web designers focus on keywords that describe a page to ensure that your links are optimised. SEO in web design optimises these links by making them shorter and targeting the primary keyword. This strategy allows search engines to display that link when a user types a phrase that matches it. Well optimised URLs will help search engines and users identify the web pages with the information they are looking for.
Improved Social Media Attention
An SEO optimised web design incorporates everything to ensure visibility all over the digital space. Social media provides platforms that you can leverage to improve your website performance. It also promotes business to people of all ages. An SEO optimised web design makes social media sharing directly from the website possible. The website can also include widgets that will show you social media popularity. When visitors share your content on social media, this can be very powerful in comparison to an ad.
Page Authority
Page Authority (PA) is essential to search engines and web users. Authority means that your website is trustworthy, relevant, and high quality. The scores range from one to 100, and the higher the number, the more authority you have. SEO experts recommend working on your link building strategy to gain higher page authority. You can find your page authority by using tools like Moz’s Link Explorer.
Cost-Effective
While an SEO web design will cost you money, the long-term benefits outweigh the initial capital. SEO web design is also cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing methods. Some people prefer getting traffic through platforms like Adwords, Facebook, and others. They dedicate their time to publishing the right content to gain traffic. However, this process is long and costs a lot of money. The profit earned from your customers might be equal to the total amount you spent on your marketing campaigns. However, when SEO and web design work hand in hand, they deliver the best results and offer a relatively cheap option due to its benefits.
Conclusion
As more businesses move into the digital space, you will notice that designing a website is not enough to become competitive. You must consider SEO web design to stand out among a million other businesses in your niche. SEO is essential to web design and further to increasing your organic traffic and creating a better customer experience.
