Can website design impact your SEO efforts?

Design and User Experience (UX) are paramount to the SEO journey. How? One primary goal of a great website is to have your website visitors stay on your site as long as possible AND have them view as many pages as possible (or take the action you want them to take).

We often come across websites that have done really well with their keyword analysis and other SEO strategies. This normally results in bringing free traffic to the website.

The "average" looking website

However once visitors arrive on the website - they get a rude shock. Some common experience include:

• The website is difficult for them to navigate - i.e. it takes a lot of effort to try and find out where they need to go
• The site looks messy - i.e. it's feels "wrong"
• There is a loss of trust from the website visitor - i.e. it's really tough to ever win them back

Typically, the visitor ends up jumping out of the site (a BOUNCE), jumps to a competitor's website that looks better and chooses to work with them instead!

If your website has a large number of these bounces, and a trend of people sending less time on the website - Google won't prioritise your website in searches - i.e. you get pushed down the search rankings. The result is that all that your SEO efforts effectively count for nothing.

The "great" looking website

Website that have had a lot of effort poured into their design and UX tend to perform really well from an SEO perspective. This means a small amount of SEO wins can snowball into BIG wins.

On paper, we tend to see results such as:

• Increased time spend on the website
• A drop in "bounce rates" - i.e. people stay on the website rather than clicking the back button
• People view more pages of the site
• Website visitor conversion rates increase - i.e. the number of leads generated from the site per number of visitors increase

What else impacts your SEO?

Having great website content (the words on the website - also known as "copy") is also key. The majority of our clients engage a copywriter who is capable of QUICKLY writing keyword rich content that results in website visitors lapping up the website's content. Check out our ‘Top 10 SEO Tips and tricks‘ blog post for more information on this topic.

Would you like better results from your website?

Do you feel that your website should be getting better results for your business? We're more than happy to offer advice from our 20+ years of building websites. Simple type in your first name, email address and website below and we'll get right back to you: