The intersection of SEO and Web Design: How to optimise your website

When it comes to creating a successful website, it's essential to consider both search engine optimisation (SEO) and web design. These two elements are closely intertwined and can significantly impact your site's overall performance.

According to a BrightEdge report, as many as 68% of online experiences start on a search engine results page, whereas organic searches generate over 53% of all website traffic. On the other hand, Top Design Firms reports that 50% of consumers consider website design crucial to a brand’s image.

This post will explore the intersection of SEO and web design and provide tips on optimizing your website for both search engines and users. Read on!

User Experience and Website Design

The design of your website can have a significant impact on how users interact with it. A well-designed site that is easy to navigate and visually appealing will keep visitors on your site for longer and encourage them to explore more pages. This can lead to increased engagement and, ultimately, more conversions.

An overwhelming majority of internet users (88%) say they wouldn’t return to a website after a bad experience. Studies have also shown that ¾ of all users rely on a website’s aesthetics to judge its overall credibility.

This means they tend to stay on sites that are visually appealing and easy to use. They are also more likely to return to such sites, even if they couldn’t necessarily find the information that they were looking for the first time.

Web design also influences the user's perception of your brand and company. A clean, professional design can instill trust and confidence in your brand, while a poorly designed site can have the opposite effect.

Content Optimisation and SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimizing your site so that it appears higher in search engine rankings. And the higher your site appears in the SERPs, the more likely users will click through.

One of the critical elements of SEO is content optimisation. This includes using keywords throughout the content and in meta tags, as well as ensuring that your site is structured in a way that is easy for search engines to understand.

In theory, sites with higher-quality content should have higher search engine rankings. In reality, things are more complex. Different factors, like backlinking and other SEO techniques, come into play, but the principle holds true.

You need to produce valuable and insightful content if you want to see your website among the top search results for a particular search phrase (or, better yet, for a specific search intent). You also need to make sure the site is a breeze to navigate and provides a top-notch experience, both visually and technically. Let’s get into some specifics of how you can do that.

Tips for optimising your website

In this section, we offer some actionable tips on how you can make your website more appealing to both search engines and internet users. Applying these tips will lead to higher SERP rankings, more traffic and conversions, and ultimately a boost in profits.

• Conduct thorough keyword research — Before you start optimising your site, it's crucial to understand what keywords your target audience is searching for. Use tools like Google's Keyword Planner to research keywords and find those that are relevant to your business and have a high search volume.
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly — With more and more people accessing the internet on their smartphones, it's vital to ensure your site is mobile-friendly. Google officially made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor all the way back in 2015.
• Use videos and images — Visual content can help break up text and make your site more engaging. Additionally, photos and videos can be optimized for search engines by including keywords in the file name and alt tags.
• Produce high-quality content — The content on your site should be informative, engaging, and well-written. It is also important to update your site regularly with new content to keep visitors coming back.
• Use headings and subheadings — Subheadings help to break up text and make your content more readable. They also help search engines understand the structure of your content.
• Hire a boutique branding agency — Boutique branding agencies can help you optimize your website for search engines and improve the overall user experience. They can perform a comprehensive analysis of your site and provide recommendations on how to improve it.

Comprehensive 5 step plan for optimising a website for search engines

1. Pre-website launch website planning

Competitor analysis

Begin by identifying your top, most relevant competitors. You can conduct this competitor analysis using specialist tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz, or complete the analysis yourself manually using your intuition. 

This analysis is designed to help you analyse their content, finding out which pages, content types and keywords are performing well for your competitors. By doing so, this can help to guide your content strategy, identifying key areas of content you need to focus on.

If you have the tools, it is beneficial to study the backlink profile of your competitors. What kind of sites are linking to them? Are they high-quality sites earnt through good content, or irrelevant spammy backlinks bought by a dodgy SEO agency? A key aspect to look out for is what type of content is helping your competitors to gain backlinks, such as whether blogs are attracting coverage.

Whilst on your competitors websites, assess the overall user experience of the site. How intuitive is their navigation? Can you easily find what you are looking for? Use this assessment to identify key areas you need to deliver on, or areas for improvement for your site. 

Keyword research

Selecting realistic and relevant keywords is the cornerstone to a thriving SEO campaign. Begin by using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush and Ahrefs to gather ideas for keywords. Prioritise keywords that are realistic for your website authority and SEO resources. Look for ‘long-tail keywords’, these are longer phrases that often have lower competition and higher conversion rates, even if the search volume is lower. 

Create a keyword map, where you assign primary and secondary keywords to specific pages. This will help guide your content writing strategy and to understand your early priorities for the SEO campaign. Make sure you understand the search intent for each keyword, making sure your content aligns with what the user is expecting when searching for those terms.

Sitemap and site structure

Start planning out your site structure, focusing upon organising your URLs into a clean, logical structure. For example, yourwebsite.com/category/subcategory/page

Use keyword-rich URLs, keeping them concise and descriptive. Not only will this be good for SEO, but certain users will still type out pages, so do not put them off with overly long, irrelevant URLs.

When planning the site structure, begin to plot out the internal linking. The pages should link to other relevant pages, helping to aid user navigation and boost SEO. Ensure every page can be reached within at least three clicks, especially the pages you are targeting major keywords on.

2) During the build - On-Page and Technical SEO

Using the analogy of building a house, technical SEO is the foundations and on-page SEO would be the blueprints.

Technical SEO

When in the development phase, most developers will set the dev site to not be crawlable to search engines. However, when the site goes live, it is imperative to ensure that your important pages are crawlable to search engine bots. This is achieved through the robots.txt file, which is a set of instructions given to the search engine crawlers about which pages on the site they can access. It is typically located at the root of the website, often included in the source files. The robots.txt file is mainly used to avoid overloading your site with crawler requests; it does not keep a web page off of google. If, for whatever reason, you want to keep a page off google, using a no-index tag.

Sitemap.xml

Your sitemap is a vital part of your SEO. It is a list of all of your different essential pages, submitted to google to make sure the search engine can find and crawl these pages. Once you have created your sitemap, make sure to submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is one of the more overlooked aspects of web design for SEO, however it can have a big impact on click through rates. Schema lets you add structured data to your search engine listing, adding ‘rich results’. This could be stars showing your review ratings, snippets of recipes, FAQs etc. All help to draw attention to your listing on the search engine results page. There are different types of schema markup, such as product pages, articles and local business, so make sure you choose the most suitable for your site.

Page load speed

How quickly your page loads is a vital ranking factor for SEO, whilst also important for user experience. Nobody wants a slow, unresponsive website. To maximise your load speed, the following can help:

• Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify key areas for improvement

• Minimise HTTP requests

• Compress images and files, consider using WebP file format

• Enable lazy loading for images

• Enable browser caching and compression

It is also worthwhile to add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues, as well as maximising your site security using HTTPS rather than HTTP.

On-page content

URL structure

On-page SEO includes your URLs. Focus on having concise, relevant keywords in your URLs and where possible, avoid numbers or special characters. Dynamic URLs with parameters (such as page?id=123) are best avoided.

Title tags and meta descriptions

Keep title tags to under 60 characters, with primary keywords near the beginning of the tag. Meta descriptions should be kept below 160 characters, delivering a concise summary ending with a call to action.

Header tags (H1 to H6)

Using header tags gives a proper hierarchy to your web content. Use H1 for your main title, H2 for subheadings, and H3 to H6 for all further divisions. Include keywords in your H1 and related keywords in your subheading.

Internal linking

Internal linking will help you to pass SEO value towards key pages, whilst also helping to provide contextual information to google about the content of your website. Ensure your internal links ‘go deep’ around your site, not just linking to your main pages such as homepage or category pages.

Content optimisation

When optimising content, it is important to avoid unnatural keyword stuffing, make sure to retain a natural keyword density throughout for better readability and UX. Including images, videos and infographics can help to increase engagement. 

Alt text

Primarily to help web accessibility but also has some advantages for SEO, adding alt text to your images can help to ensure they are bringing in maximum benefit for your site.

3) Post-launch SEO Checklist: Ongoing optimization

Content strategy

Regularly updating and adding new content to your site will keep it fresh to your visitors, whilst also showing to the search engines that your site is active and growing. As well as adding new articles and pages, you could focus on repurposing your old content into new formats, such as podcasts, infographics and videos that target different audiences and platforms. User generated content is a great way to boost engagement and SEO, if you can entice people to leave comments and reviews. 

Link building

Building links to your site is a vital part of growing your online presence. There are a few different methods you could try to earn backlinks:

• Writing valuable content for reputable sites, known as guest posting

• The ‘skyscraper technique’ of creating content better than your competitors, then reaching out to sites linking to theirs to replace the link to point to your website instead

• Find broken links on other sites and suggest your own content as the replacement

• Find collaborative link builders with whom you can build high joint-content pieces with

Technical SEO

Regularly check Google Search Console, checking for crawl errors that might be affecting your online visibility. Tools such as Screaming Frog and Semrush can help you to identify and fix 404 errors. 301 redirects should be used to ensure deleted or moved pages lead to new content, rather than an error page.

Core web vitals

Your core web vitals are seemingly growing in importance with every google algorithm update. Ensure that your main content (Largest contentful paint (LCP)) loads within 2.5 seconds, and your First Input Delay (FID) is below 100ms - do this by optimising the JavaScript. Make sure your content doesn’t unexpectedly move during page load, known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Mobile SEO

According to Statista research, 53.42% of all web searches were from mobile in Q3 2023. Therefore, it is vital to ensure your website performs well and is fully accessible to mobile. Use Google Search Console to check the mobile usability report, and consider Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile load speed. 

4) Local SEO Checklist

If your website serves a close audience, optimising your Local SEO will be vital to your online success. 

Google Business Profile

Previously known as Google My Business, you should claim and optimise your business profile to include accurate business information, categories and attributes about your business. There should be ‘NAP’ consistency across your Name, Address and Phone number are consistent across all online platforms including social media and directories.

Localised content

Where relevant, create pages specific for each location that your business serves. Use geo targeting keywords such as “best [service] in [city]” throughout the content and metadata.

5) Analytics and Monitoring

To monitor the success of your SEO efforts, track key metrics such as your traffic, referring domains and conversions. Google Analytics will be a useful tool to help you keep a track of how users are interacting with your website. Supplement this data with heatmaps and scroll maps to help you further understand your web visitor behaviour. 

Google Search Console will help you to track keyword rankings, clicks, impressions and click through rates, as well as helping you to identify issues with indexing in the ‘Index coverage report’. 

Conclusion

Optimising your website for users, as well as search engines, is crucial for the success of your online presence. By considering the intersection of SEO and web design, you can ensure that your site is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and optimized for search engines.

Following the tips outlined in this post, such as conducting keyword research, making sure your site is mobile-friendly, and creating high-quality content, will help you improve the performance of your website and increase engagement and conversions.

Finally, by collaborating with a boutique branding agency, you can receive expert guidance in optimizing your website and achieving your business goals. Take time to optimize your website and position your brand for success in the online world!

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