While it isn’t uncommon for marketing agencies to primarily focus on content marketing, where does this leave web design regarding search engine optimization? Of course, reaching the target audience is vital, but marketers often put the cart before the horse when examining content marketing efforts ahead of web design.
There’s a thin balance between SEO and web design, and when this occurs, an increase in traffic will likely result. With the right web design, a company can effectively achieve brand identity. However, SEO in conjunction with web design and development aids in the company’s inbound marketing efforts.
In this article, we will discuss the significance of collaboration between web designers, developers, and SEO. Also, we shall examine how this partnership, or the lack thereof, can affect your organic rankings. Without further prepping, let’s get started!
What is SEO in Web Design and Development?
SEO in web design and development involves reviewing the various stages of your website development, ensuring that technical and content SEO best practices have been met. An SEO specialist carries out the review and must be involved in the process from the start, as early on as choosing the CMS platform and reviewing the design wireframes.
Before a website goes live, SEO experts must consider the crawlability and indexability, site architecture, content, and mobile-friendliness of your site. These elements are important for organic rankings, and if search engines cannot find your content, it won’t rank and therefore won’t drive traffic to your site.
After all, Google only examines over 200 factors when ranking a page. This is the reason working with technical SEO specialists is critical and that’s exactly what a web design agency in New York offers.
A web design firm doesn’t only make your page credible, they also help increase revenue, minimize bounce rates, offer better Google rankings, and a lot more.
This said, let’s delve into detail, into the significance of SEO in website design and development below
How SEO is Important in Web Design and Development
Getting things right from the onset of a project saves a lot of hours of reviewing and redesigning a site to meet the search engine’s best practices. Incorporating a proactive approach in conjunction with your online marketing will help develop a search engine-friendly site.
This makes it easy to scale and takes advantage of online search behavior. Below is how SEO is significant in web design and development.
Crawlability and Indexability
Whether your content can be crawled and indexed by Google means the difference between day and night when it comes to your organic rankings. With the help of SEO specialists, you can review the wireframes and staging environment of your site.
Also, they will be able to detect if important content or internal links are controlled by JavaScript and therefore present difficulties for Google to render. It is advisable and vital to review this early so that you have time to fix it before your site goes live. Remember that any crucial content must be controlled by HTML and should be server-side-rendered.
Whilst Google is getting better at rendering JavaScript, the process still takes longer as Google needs more resources to access and render the content.
Keyword Research
You may think keyword research is only what you should be interested in as part of a marketing campaign. However, that is far from true when it comes to your organic ranking or presence. Being aware of how people search for your products and services affects the way you build your categories, navigation, filters, informational content, and URL structure.
Site Architecture
Evaluating the site architecture timely can offer great benefits. As part of this review, SEO experts and web design firms access various elements, including:
- Canonical tags
- URL structure
- Breadcrumbs
- Internal links
- Filters
Here, it is critical to understand the relationship between pages, the hierarchy of the content, and how easy it is to add new pages to the site.
Mobile Friendliness
It won’t come as a surprise to you that most websites are now built with mobile-friendliness in mind. Significantly, the same content is displayed across mobile and desktop devices. Depending on the devices used to visit your site, you mustn’t have different navigation items.
With mobile-first indexing, Google takes the mobile version of the site for ranking and indexing purposes. So, if any content is only present on the desktop, you may lose out and or be considered a bad experience as you are presenting different content on different devices.
Thus, it is essential to test your stage environment to see whether the content displayed in tables is mobile-friendly. This is particularly important because the majority of your traffic comes from mobile devices.
Website Speed
Google has confirmed that the Core Web Vitals metrics are the only factors playing a role in the website speed ranking. Thus, having input from your SEO specialist at an early stage is critical. They will review the design wireframes and audit the staging environment to see if the various content types pass Core Web Vital metrics on both desktop and mobile. Also, they will be able to provide recommendations and actions if they do not.
On-Page SEO Elements
There are several on-page SEO elements that SEO professionals look into when auditing a page. However, as part of a web design review, they review the content on the page that is controlled by JavaScript.
This is to ensure that the important copy is server-side-rendered. The staging environment review includes assessing headings, internal links, and additional content sections on the site. If there are issues with any of these elements, they will be raised with the web development team and fixed before the launch of a website.
User Experience (UX)
While user experience will be taken into account as part of the website design, your SEO specialist will have valuable input. As part of the UX review, experts will check whether the information on the site is presented, readable and accessible. Also, whether there are any issues with mobile usability and interstitials.
Final Thoughts
SEO shouldn’t be an afterthought but part of your online strategy from the onset to give you the best chance of ranking in the search engine results pages. Thus, understanding why the SEO input is valuable, and at what stage of the web design and development process this input is needed, is key to a successful project.
To do that, identifying the stakeholders timely and organizing kick-off calls will be an incredible starting point for bringing everyone together and examining all crucial elements of the project.
Dan has hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007. He has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. Dan also enjoys photography and traveling.
