Excellent web design is vital for several reasons, but one of the most significant is its influence on your site’s SEO performance. Understanding how web design affects SEO should give you a new (or renewed) appreciation of how the design choices you make impact your website’s performance in search results.
With that in mind, let’s look at which specific SEO ranking factors web design influences the most.
Well-Designed Websites Have Lower Bounce Rates
A bounce rate is best described as the percentage of people who visit just one page on your website and subsequently leave without clicking anywhere else. You can assess your bounce rate within your Google Analytics dashboard, and you should be aiming for less than 80% as a minimum figure.
According to leading SEO authority SEMrush, bounce rates are the 4th most crucial ranking factor in search engine results pages (SERPs), so it’s definitely something you should be paying attention to. Furthermore, it’s something your website’s design will have a considerable influence over.
For example, if you have an easy-to-understand navigational menu, users will quickly click onto another page to find what they’re looking for, lowering your average bounce rate, and improving your SEO performance.
Beautiful Websites Have Higher Dwell Times
Dwell time, or “time spent on site,” is another significant SEO ranking factor. The longer a user spends on your site, the more likely Google and other search engines are to push your website higher up their search results.
Once again, your web design has a significant influence on how long a visitor will stick around. As highlighted above, functional and easy-to-grasp navigation is vital, but it won’t save you from making poor design choices.
Put simply, if your site looks great, then they are more likely to browse for longer. A horrible-looking website, with garish colors and impossible-to-read fonts, will have your users heading for the exit as fast as possible hurting, your dwell time metrics.
Well-Coded Websites Load Faster
Load speed is fast becoming one of the most critical metrics when it comes to SEO performance. In fact, it’s been an essential prerequisite for SEO success since 2010! While it’s true that in some part load speed depends on your web hosting provider, you need to invest in a well-coded website that leaves your competitors behind.
Therefore, you need a web designer experienced in minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to ensure that your website loads as fast as possible. Not to mention building a website that automatically compresses images, videos, and other bulky items to ensure your page load speeds are lightning fast.
You can always check if your website page load speeds are up to scratch by using the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool, which even gives you recommendations for speeding up your website.
Mobile-First-Designed Websites Always Outrank the Competition
Here at Faith Web Designers, we’ve already spoken about the importance of mobile-first web design. But it’s crucial to remember that it’s vital not just for your overall user experience (UX), but for SEO purposes too.
Google has been ranking the sites that perform best on mobile above those sites designed with desktop in mind for over five years. So if your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you’ll get left behind by those that are.
Not only do you need to ensure that your web design agency has a mobile-first approach, but you also need to choose a team that delivers responsive websites that adapt to screen sizes. From the smallest cell phones to the Smart TV screens, your website has to look beautiful across each individual viewing method.
Invest in Web Design That Helps Visitors to Discover Your Website
Even if you have the most beautiful and helpful website in the world, it will mean nothing if no one can find it. Optimizing your site for search engines is one of the most important marketing activities you can undertake, and hopefully, you can now appreciate exactly how web design affects SEO.
If you’re looking for the best web design agency in the Raleigh, NC area, then you need to choose a company that designs with search engines in mind. A mobile-first approach, easy navigational menus, beautiful design, and lightning-fast load times will all help to secure more visitors, more leads, and ultimately more sales from your website.
Whether you need to upgrade the design of your existing website or you have a new project in mind, don’t hesitate to contact Faith Web Designers to discuss your requirements.
