Your website might look beautiful, but if it’s struggling to pick up traffic all that hard work will be for nothing.
If your site traffic is disappointing, you need to pay attention to Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of improving your search ranking to make your site easier to discover. Using specific SEO strategies, search engines like Google and Bing can easily find and index your content for improved ranking results.
Want to enhance your website's ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages)? Here are the five best practice SEO tips for web designers from a team of expert professional SEO consultants.
1. Site Speed
Your users expect speed, and slower pages are harder to index. According to research, if your site takes too long to load, 40% of users will leave.
As well as usability issues, search engines such as Google are rewarding faster-loading websites with higher rankings. Issues like large images, external code scripts and poor quality hosting can all cause website’s to load slowly, and could result in a penalty for your site.
Test your website performance with Google's Page Speed Insights then ask a website developer to make these changes to get your site on the right track.
2. Mobile-First Design
By 2025, an estimated 72% of users will only use smartphones to access the internet. So if your website doesn't use responsive design, you could be missing out.
Apart from some niche or B2B industries where desktop may still be the most popular, the majority of website designers should prioritise their mobile design as this will receive the most traffic.
Users should expect a seamless experience whether they access your site on mobile, table to desktop. Developing a dynamic and responsive design is an essential ranking factor that also boosts conversion rates.
3. White Space is your Friend
Looks are important. But users are visiting your site for specific reasons, not to evaluate the slickness of the design. That's why, from a UX perspective, simplicity is your best friend.
If your design is cluttered with unnecessary elements, your users can't find what they're looking for, and they'll go elsewhere. So, for example, including multiple intrusive pop-ups that randomly relocate page elements are a big no-no.
In fact, the best modern website designs feature lots of white space, quality imagery and small amounts of clear, easy-to-read text.
Focus on getting the basics right to help your site rank more competitively. The correct page elements, matched with straightforward navigation and calls to action, will increase page interaction and boost your rankings.
4. Organize Content Logically
Your site structure can give Google vital clues about where to find your essential content. And it helps a search engine understand your site from the ground up.
Google uses its own Googlebot to crawl your website, following internal links to discover the content. Links help Googlebot to understand the relationship between your pages, so the structure of your site is critical because it acts as a guide to Google.
Best practice in website design means organizing the important pages closest to your homepage. Pages that require the fewest clicks to be discovered are considered the most important so it’s best to make these easily accessible within at least 2 clicks from the homepage.
In terms of blog content, it's good practice to create grouped topic clusters that give Google additional context. For example, for cooking websites you could file all recipe content about your services in a subfolder that appears as URL /recipes/ before the post URL.
5. Make the most of Internal Linking
Internal and external linking is critical to building trust and authority in your website. This is because external linking from other websites can act as an endorsement of your brand or your content. But internal linking also has its advantages.
First, internal links are vital to connect different pages and guide visitors towards your most important content. Using internal linking well can increase time spent on site, enhancing user engagement and boosting opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
In addition, they're essential signals for Google to rank different pages across your site for specific terms. So, including the anchor text ‘frying pan sets’ to the URL on your site that offers these products will help Google rank that page for those terms.
Ensure that Web Design & SEO Work Together
Many web designers can create beautiful sites, but lack the knowledge of SEO to help them perform well in search engines. By following these SEO best practice tips for web designers you can ensure that your site not only looks great but also ranks highly on search engines!
