Here’s How Website Design Directly Impacts Your SEO
When we think about SEO, a lot of times the content and keywords come to mind. But don’t discount the website’s design.
Research indicates that 94% of viewers mistrusted a site because of its website design. (Only 6% mistrusted the content.)
Yes, content still counts. The study stated that people enjoyed informative content which answered frequently asked questions.
It’s just that your website structure impacts your SEO a lot more than you may realize.
Here’s just how much it affects it…
Read to find out more!
1. Spider does more than indexing
Search engine bots simply don’t index a page and boom! your website’s ranked.
It’s much more complicated than that.
In fact, bots investigate the website’s navigation.
Is it easy to navigate?
Are there dead ends?
Dead-end pages (or orphan pages) aren’t linked to another page on the website. You’re stuck, as the name suggests.
To ensure no pages on your website become orphaned, insert internal links. A good rule of thumb is three degrees of separations.
Think of it like the six degrees separation idea.
All of your web pages on your website are three (or fewer) links away from one another.
So, when a user clicks on one page, they can easily click an internal link that takes them to another.
Why not also insert the internal link to the keyword(s) that web page is ranking for?
Double SEO whammy!
2. Duplicate pages, yikes
Search engine bots don’t like these.
Your website will be marked down for this.
It’s like trying to win a board game by skipping ahead three steps when it wasn’t your turn.
Unfortunately, the rules don’t work that way.
Repeatedly putting up duplicate pages will only increase your chances of suspension from search engines.
3. Bounce rate
In case you don’t know, your bounce rate makes up all the viewers who go to your website, but “bounce” after only viewing one page.
There are several reasons why someone may leave your site. Here are two of them.
Load Time
According to an Adobe study, 39% of users left the site if the images didn’t load fast enough (with 44% switching to another device and 17% remaining unchanged).
This makes sense when we consider two-thirds of people consume content that’s also well-designed. And that 66% of consumers enjoy content that is beautifully designed.
Navigation
Yes, navigation is not only important to search engine bots, but users as well.
So much so that half of users who visit a site via a referral site use the navigation menu to direct them around.
If the navigation menu doesn’t include menu options such as “About Us” or “Contact,” your website’s at risk of having a high bounce rate.
The truth is, website design impacts your SEO just as much as your content. And, in some cases, more so. Take steps such as readable print, quick load times, and bright color incorporation to boost your web structure’s SEO.
And on that note, please feel free to contact this SEO Buffalo NY company for your SEO questions.