Your website is a big aspect of your online presence. Its design tells people so much about your brand and whether it would be worthwhile to engage with your business or not. Web design can also be an important consideration in the early stage of the customer journey. Whether or not potential customers actually find you in the first place may depend on the design you use.
For example, poor web design can translate to poor search rankings for your business. It can mean not getting seen at all by your market, even when they search for keywords relevant to your brand.
But does web design really impact your rankings?
While not a direct ranking factor, web design plays a huge role in your SEO and business visibility. A well-executed website design can provide the needs of your audience and make it easy for search engines to rank your content.
Benefits of Web Design on SEO
1. Positive Page Experience = Better Rankings
Good web design is responsive, appealing, and engaging. It provides a positive user experience that keeps visitors on your site for longer.
With good design, people will be able to easily find the information they need and browse different areas of your site. This can send signals to search engines that indicate your website is useful for solving people’s problems. From an SEO point of view, a positive user experience can translate to a better SEO score, including Core Web Vitals such as site responsiveness and content loading time. With these improved metrics, you can potentially earn higher search rankings.
On the other hand, 38% of users will leave a site if they don’t like your web design. This can have the opposite effect on your SEO and make you lose business visibility. Watch out for slow load times, hard-to-read text, outdated designs, and poor device compatibility, which can provide a negative page experience that can hurt your rankings.
2. Makes Your Site Easier to Crawl, Rank, and Index
As much as you should design your site with the user in mind, you also need to look at things from a technical standpoint. Search engines should be able to index your site easily to determine what it’s about and what it contains, and a lot of this depends on how well you design and structure your website.
For crawlers, good web design is logical, organised, and functional. Watch out for URL formats and structures, content labels, schema markup data, and other similar factors. Also, keep in mind that some themes and extensions can interfere with how search engines crawl your site, so make sure to review your design for compatibility and fix any issues you find.
Boost Your Search Rankings with Great Web Design
In conclusion, web design has a very strong effect on search rankings. Having a great design means generating positive site experiences not only for human visitors but also for search engine crawlers, which essentially increases the odds of your site ranking well for relevant searches.
If you’re ready to take advantage of what good web design can do, reach out to our friendly team to get started. We’ll help you use web design as a tool to boost your search rankings and make more sales. We can design, launch, and maintain a website that meets all your requirements, giving your business greater visibility than your competition.
Talk to us today about our custom web design services.