Web design and SEO guide

Improve the positioning of your website

A website is the essential means of attracting customers for many companies, and various factors influence its efficiency. A good website design is responsible for generating leads, providing useful information to visitors, and the overall reflection of a brand. SEO (Search Engine Optimization), to put it as simply as possible, helps to promote a website in organic searches to attract qualified visitors.

In this brief article, you will learn how to connect these two areas along with some essential optimization strategies to help improve your website. You must develop your website design, guided by the visual aspect and search engine recommendations, to make it more beneficial for your business.

Relationship of web design with SEO positioning 

The website’s overall look and feel, including the choice of size, the colors, the typography, the placement and the structure of the elements, are all factors that largely determine the time that users stay on the website, regardless of the content.

The time users spend on the site is one of the essential SEO positioning factors. The web design as a whole dramatically influences the adaptation of the site itself to the requirements of search engines such as Google.

5 Keys to have an SEO friendly web design

It’s essential to comply with certain aspects to ensure positive results. Therefore, we have compiled the strategies and practices applied by the best web design companies in Houston for you to analyze and apply to your website.

Attractive site structure

The home page must able to quickly awaken the user’s interest and then maintain it!

If a website does not effectively capture the user’s attention, they will quickly leave your website, which will reflect poorly on the ranking. For this reason, the information must be well distributed so that users can identify each of the aspects of your web page.

In addition, just as images are essential, titles and typography is another essential part, so you always want to ensure that your content can be easily absorbed. Pro tip: break up the content in smaller bits, so the users aren’t having to read an essay; keep the titles short and to the point, along with the rest of the content.

Loading speed

Speed is one of the most critical aspects of technical SEO and is the primary deficiency of many websites. This factor should not be overlooked, and its influence on the user is relevant from the moment they enter the website. Think about it on a personal level, what’s your initial impression when a website takes too long to load? Do you scroll away? Do you get annoyed by the experience?

It’s necessary that you use the right plugins and tools to optimize the content (code, images, etc.) so that your website has the minimum loading time. Another huge factor in loading speeds is the server response time, so it’s important that you do your research in selecting a host with the fastest response times. We recommend DigitalOcean or AWS for our clients.

In addition to that, you have to consider that the website’s speed is also a ranking factor for search engines. Now you may be wondering whether or not your website loads fast enough, how to measure it or how quickly exactly it must load for the best user experience. One of the tools we use is the Website Speed Test by Pingdom, and a good benchmark is below 2.5 seconds. If it takes longer than three seconds to load, approximately 50% of the users who visit the website will abandon it.

Eye-catching pictures and videos

Nowadays, people prefer to see business information through visual resources; your web page must have adequate pictures and videos to transmit your message. This is the digital take on the quote, “a picture speaks a thousand words”.

We recommend that you only use good-quality images from the same color palette of the other elements of your website design, so that there is uniformity in the content – the only exception is when there is a need for contrast (e.g. you want to bring user’s attention to something specific).

Simplicity in web design

Less is more, and that is something you should pay attention to when creating your website design. People often make the mistake of loading up their site with a lot of information – clashing colors and elements, heavy text and improper placement – which can be overwhelming to the visitors. If you want further reason on why you should pursue simplicity, we suggest getting familiar with the KISS Principle (Keep It Simple Stupid).

Mobile-friendly design

Anyone slightly familiar with SEO or web design knows the importance of a mobile-friendly website because Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor in 2015. In spite of this, many websites have yet to update their websites.

The number of people searching on computers has been declining for years now, while people searching on mobile devices have steadily increased. More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile, which means it’s likely that more than half of your audience is also on their mobile devices.

For this reason, businesses that do not have a responsive web design can potentially lose more than half of their users. Since a website with a high bounce rate sends the wrong signal to Google, it will negatively affect your ranking!

Create an SEO friendly web design and boost your business 

Implementing an SEO strategy by creating a responsive web design focused on generating conversions ensures that your website is not only optimized for search engines, but it’s also appealing and engaging to visitors. We are a Houston web design company that can help you create a website that can convey your message correctly and ensure that you are discoverable.

If you want to get a few quotes, here are some other reputable Houston web design companies. Choose a company that is knowledgeable in applying SEO strategies and design strategies simultaneously, so that you will be able to get more traffic and also increased leads and more sales. If you want read further on this,  we also wrote a guide on hiring the right Houston SEO company