So you’ve set up a professional website and want to improve performance in search engine rankings? As beautiful and user-friendly as a website may be, it’s still very possible to see little to no increase in visitor traffic.

If it’s not your web design, then it’s surely your SEO! In order to see the best results from your investments, it’s important to pair sleek web design with a proper digital marketing strategy. That’s the only way to can climb to the top of the Google pages.

So, let’s talk about how exactly SEO and web design work together to draw in a larger crowd for your business.

SEO and Web DesignHow exactly do SEO and Web Design work together?

Anyone who gets involved with their own website will quickly realise that there’s quite a bit of crossover between web design and SEO. This is mainly because they rely on the same underlying principles, establishing the credibility of your voice and providing genuine value to customers.

The more SEO-friendly your website, the easier search engines can define and categorise your website, ultimately leading to improved rankings and higher traffic. How you approach your SEO has a direct influence on your web design, and vice versa.

Here are the most significant ways in which SEO and web design work together to enhance your business website:

1. Lower Bounce Rate

When a visitor enters your site and leaves shortly after, it’s considered a ‘bounce.’ A ‘bounce rate,’ then, is a measure of how many people are prematurely leaving your website. There are so many possible reasons for a bounce, but you’ll often find that people are bouncing because they can’t find what they’re looking for.

You may assume that this is only a web design issue, but actually no. While it’s true that clean, convenient web design will encourage users to remain on your site for longer, it’s also crucial that you market your business truthfully.

Adopting ethical SEO ensures that your information is reflected accurately in search engine ranking pages (SERP) entries. This will not only increase your overall engagements, but also attract the right kind of visitor, i.e. those who are most likely to benefit from your site and business. This will lower your bounce rate, which can help you keep hold on your search engine ranking.

2. Engaging Content

One of the first things that professional web design agencies do to a new website is put into place some proper content marketing. Having a healthy amount of quality content not only makes your web design appear more authoritative, but also attracts a greater number of people to your business.

Providing that your content is well-written (clear, concise, informative), search engines are more than happy to send people your way. The more quality content you publish to your website, the higher your chances to gain reader trust.

With a greater catalogue of content, you’ll also be able to provide very precise information to specific topics, gaining an edge over any competitors who haven’t invested in SEO and thus cannot answer those questions.

3. Cleaner Site Structure

Top web development is all about giving users a great experience without exposing any of the internal workings. Clean, efficient code helps your site to run smoother, which has the knock-on effect of enhancing your SEO efforts.

Your site map is essentially a plan of your site, including navigation panels for human visitors and structured listings for web crawlers (bots). In either case, this crucial website element tells you where to find things and how to get around.

Adopting an integrated approach with your web design and SEO allows customers can easily navigate your site. At the same time, it means that your site is generally more appealing in the eyes of search engines like Google, which will improve your rankings.

4. Accommodate Mobile Users

A massive proportion of people searching online are doing so with a mobile device, not just smart phones but tablets, smart watches, e-readers and comparable kit. With around half of the market on the move, professional web design agencies now focus heavily on mobile-friendliness.

If your site is inaccessible to mobile users, even if it’s just a few pages, you can hugely damage your SEO success. Google has repeatedly said that sites not providing an equal experience across devices can harm their rankings, leading to a loss in traffic and sales for your business.

Mobile-friendly web design can help to maximise site visibility, so it’s crucial that you make sure content is viewable in multiple display sizes, and that your navigation, media and text elements stay consistent for everyone.

5. Optimize Site Speed

If your website has a poor load speed, it’s incredibly unlikely you’ll get anywhere close to the top spots of SERPs. Google revealed long ago that site speed is a crucial factor in their rankings, which is a pretty good reflection of the quality of your web design.

Certain SEO analytic tools can measure your site speed. If things are running slow, you’ll have to optimise plug-ins, compress media and generally tidy up. If you don’t make these improvements, you risk a high bounce rate and thus lower conversions.

Once again we can see that web design and SEO marketing both revolve around the same principles: a convenient, uncluttered experience for users. Simple is the best way to go, keeping your website in favour with search engines and attractive to visitors.

Putting SEO and Web Design together

There are more than a few hurdles when it comes to setting up a fantastic business website, though rest assured that there are lots of web design resources and SEO tools available to help make the process easier.

So whether you do your own web design or work with specialist web developers, the biggest thing is to remember is that web design and SEO are intertwined. Whenever you’re making changes to one, consider how it affects the other – good luck!