Having a website with an amazing and innovative design that is incredibly user-friendly is great. Website designers will always tell you that this is the most important aspect of having a website! However, without a comprehensive, tailored SEO strategy, your customers won't be able to find your website to enjoy what you have to offer. But even with the best SEO strategy, if your website design is difficult to navigate or has an outdated feel, it is still going to struggle to be noticed.
Finding the perfect balance between the design of your website and the SEO strategy that you implement can be truly difficult. That is why most people have a team dedicated to the design of the website, and a marketing company who's sole responsibility is ensuring that your online presence is managed. Here are a few tips and tricks to keeping on top of everything at once, so that you can feel comfortable knowing that your business has the best opportunity to beat the competition online!
Content is King
By now, we've all heard the common quote among digital marketers and creators alike - 'Content is King'. This phrase is not new, and is in fact from an essay that Microsoft Founder Bill Gates wrote in 1996, where he discussed how the internet was soon to be a place where content mattered more than anything. And he wasn't wrong - in a world where content marketing is considered the "new black" of marketing, we all have to strive to keep up.
Presenting your content in different ways will help you to keep on top of your new content quota, without having a detrimental effect on your design. Creating infographics is a great way to present data or information, and can also get you some high quality backlinks! Images are far more digestible, meaning that your infographic has the opportunity of being shared by others, which in turn helps with your brand awareness (and SEO too!)
Share your knowledge
As I mentioned above, Content is King in the eyes of search engines. This means that regularly updating your website with quality content is a really important factor to consider, not only from an SEO standpoint, but for User Experience too. Rather than putting large amounts of content on a range of pages on your site, making it difficult to navigate, having a blog dedicated to this can prevent users from leaving your website and looking elsewhere for the information that they need. You can even categorise the posts and add a search option to make it even more accessible.
Writing quality, long-form articles are great way to update your site regularly (which search engines will thank you for!), as well as give you the opportunity to be shared by other people within your field, who will recognise you as a source of information.
Go with the Flow
Possibly the most important factor to consider when designing a website is ensuring that it flows well, and is easily navigated towards the end goal. Whether that be directing your customers to your shop or contacting you directly, it is incredibly important to ensure that there is enough directive for your customers to know what it is they are supposed to do next. Having links through to your other pages, or linking to previous blogs that you have written, gives search engine crawlers a good idea of the structure of your website. Internal links also establishes a hierarchy within your website, allowing you (and crawlers alike) to determine which pages are more important, so having the right internal linking strategy can really help your SEO.
That being said, these links must seem natural. Placing links in random places to purposely boost SERP can actually in-turn have a detrimental effect. This is called Black-Hat SEO, and can actually get your website blacklisted. Ensuring that your links are placed naturally and are truly there to help with UX will prevent this from happening.
It is a balancing act in itself, ensuring that your customers know what to do next to reach the end goal, without overloading them with links and keeping it natural. Considering user flow when designing your website will have a huge impact on the user experience, and therefore encourage them to stay on your website for longer periods. Some things to consider when designing your website for user flow are;
The goal of the user
The information that the user may need to reach the goal
Things that have the potential to stop a user from reaching the end goal
Having a strong internal linking strategy is a must, to make sure that your users can easily navigate your website and convert into customers.
Finding the careful balance between the design of your website whilst still maintaining a strong SEO strategy can be achieved, through forethought and careful consideration. Balancing the two can be an incredibly difficult task, and there is many more things to consider, but by creating quality content and improving the user flow of your website, you really can make a difference to your search engine rankings.
At Responsive Web Design, our in-house experts work together to improve your search engine rankings whilst maintaining a modern, timeless and effective website design, so that you don't have to! As a digital marketing company, we don't just build and design your website, we will also manage it and create an SEO strategy to help you to beat the competition.
To find out more about what we do, check out our website!
Contact us to find out more about how we can help your business:
01782 497 244 contactus@responsivewebdesign.org