How to combine web design and SEO to create more efficient pages

How to combine web design and SEO to create more efficient pages and delight your users

Various factors can make a website truly amazing. Generating user engagement through pleasing visuals and navigation are among the most relevant, but memorable pages matter little if people can't find them when using search engines. This is why anyone who recognizes how to combine SEO and web design will have an influential digital asset.

Why combine web design and SEO?

There are many arguments in favour of considering SEO and web design as allies when it comes to creating an extraordinary website. Let's look at 5 of the main reasons to balance them.

1. Most web traffic usually comes from organic search

According to a study by BrightEdge—a company that has a sophisticated search engine optimization platform and other Internet marketing solutions—on average, organic search accounts for 50.1% of website traffic.

This means that no matter how effective a paid traffic strategy is, natural searches are the ones that ultimately drive the most visitors to your website. Therefore, we must look at SEO as an excellent opportunity to optimize our pages to strengthen this channel with the highest probability of attracting prospects.

If your company has already had a website, blog or eCommerce for a long time, consult your web analytics tool. Organic traffic is most likely your biggest channel for acquiring visitors. That is why it is important to have an SEO-friendly web design.

2. The appearance of your website reflects the dedication of the company

When we access a page and notice a carelessness with the choice of design, fonts, colours, images and other visual elements, it is common to assume that the brand is not dedicated to providing a good experience to its visitors.

Therefore, it is essential to invest in a quality website, with a design in accordance with the company's values ​​and in harmony with the characteristics of the buyer persona.

3. Bad design drives users away

In addition to damaging brand reputation, a website with a poor visual and user experience often has an immediate consequence on user behaviour: people tend to leave that page.

It is worth remembering that this frustration does not only occur with websites that have poor design, but also with those that have too many visual elements.

The excess of features and images with a resolution much higher than desirable also makes navigation difficult and increases the desire to click the back button.

4. Certain technologies don't work well with search engines

When Flash was in its heyday, it allowed you to create websites with effects and animations that were barely allowed by web standards at the time.

The possibilities in terms of design and development were incredible. However, search engine robots cannot crawl this technology, which makes it (very) difficult to index websites built in this way.

Flash is one of the most notable examples, but it demonstrates very well how using a technology that values ​​only the design aspect can ruin a brand's presence on search results pages.

5. Doing SEO during website building sidesteps redraft

As SEO is about optimization, it is common for companies to leave this step for later, when the web design or even the entire development of the website is already finished.

It turns out that this requires a number of modifications that could be avoided if SEO was part of the page-building process from the start.

Conclusion:

The importance of web design and SEO lies in the fact that, when we invest in the development of a site, we want it to be very presentable and friendly to search engines, with pleasant visual elements, as well as offering functional, simple and intuitive navigation.

Although there are several challenges in integrating search engine optimization and web design, this is a very viable and necessary combination.

This becomes clear when we understand the importance of creating attractive pages for both people and search engines, while also better understanding the design errors that affect their optimization.