Nowadays, digital marketing is an essential strategy for the success of one’s business. As part of online marketing, web design is crucial to your SEO progress.
Poor web design can hurt your SEO and search engine rankings. Great visual elements of your website are not enough for it. To rank high in search engines, you need to consider the user experience, response time, and page speed of your web design.
Here are some of the most common web design mistakes you can avoid to have optimal SEO results:
Poor Navigation Menu
User experience (UX) is one of the many factors that affect your website’s SEO. Website navigation informs your visitors and search engines what topics are on your site. It is essential that your navigation menu has overall accessibility so that users will navigate it easily.
However, if users don’t know what to expect from your site or they have difficulty navigating it, they will probably leave. Or it will decrease their time spent on your site, thereby, increases your bounce rate which affects your SEO.
When in doubt how to properly do it, hire professionals like SEO Dubai to avoid compromising your progress. Also, here are some tips you can use when designing your website to prevent damage:
- Use Standard Navigation Style – horizontal navigation is the most preferred and most common style to help users get around your site
- Avoid Drop-down Menus – drop down menus are hard for search engines to crawl and are annoying based on usability studies
- Make Concise Navigation – concise links offer most authority or link juice for search engines to make your site rank high
Unresponsive Design
Responsive web design simply means catering to a user’s screen size and platform such as a laptop, desktop, and mobile devices.
Moreover, your website must have a single version for every gadget, especially for mobile devices to automatically accommodate users in switching from their desktops to their mobile devices. Google calls it mobile-first indexing which is one of the most critical factors that affect your SEO.
However, if you have a different index for desktop and mobile, you will likely have a lower ranking. Here are other factors that can damage your progress when you have an unresponsive web design:
- Decreases Mobile Traffic – since mobile browsing has surpassed desktop browsing, unresponsive web designs close the doors for a large no. of mobile browsers
- Slow Page Speed – speed is one of the significant SEO ranking factors. Unresponsive designs cannot condense full website into smaller screens thereby making the pages load slow
- Higher Bounce Rate – web browsers that visit your site and leaves immediately due to poor user experience create higher bounce rate which lowers your ranking
Unoptimized Media
Images and videos add up to your website’s attractiveness. However, too large media files can make your site speed slow resulting in lowering SEO rankings.
To make your web design aesthetically beautiful without compromising your page speed, check out some of the following tips to optimize your media:
- Ideal Format – JPG is best for images while MP4 is for ideal for videos
- Media Compression – compress your image and video to reduce taking up too much space on your site that adds up to slow page load
- Use YouTube or Vimeo – upload your videos on YouTube or Vimeo and use the iframe embedding code to save up some space
Too Many Popups
Popups are highly disruptive and annoying for visitors and regarded in bad taste by search engines. Some are not even indexed as part of the website. Therefore, Google refrained businesses from using certain types of popups that compromise UX.
Here is a list of popups to avoid and popups you can use that factors in your SEO rankings:
- New Window Popups – search engines don’t like this popup which opens outside the main browser window since it hurts the UX and website navigation
- Interstitials – it is the use of a window that covers the whole page and requires visitors to wait for a particular time before they can access the content. It has been penalized in SERP rankings and therefore not recommended
- Overlay – it opens in the same window and is on top of the page content which makes it acceptable since it maintains good navigation and UX
- Modals – similar with overlays but used in essential actions such as cookie usage agreements making it an SEO friendly due to its importance to the UX
Conclusion:
Proper web page design not only attracts users from different devices, but it also helps in the SEO ranking. If your website is both appealing and functioning well, it gives an excellent UX that makes your rank higher in search engines. Therefore, it is vital to creating a web design that considers the factors affecting the SEO progress of your site.