SEO and Web Design – A Match Made in Heaven
If you are a New Orleans entrepreneur or small business building an online web presence for your brand, your website will be the cornerstone of your digital strategy. It is critical that when strategizing for and creating a website you keep SEO at the forefront of your mind. SEO, or search engine optimization, helps your website, and individual pages of your site, rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing. Without a good amount of web traffic, you will not earn leads and sales, and you’ll be closing off a big potential component of your sales funnel.
Launching a brand-new website can be a very challenging task. Many new webmasters struggle with getting search engine optimization right, which in turn makes it harder for them to rank the sites well on search engine result pages (SERPs). This article looks at how SEO and web design work together to make your online business a success.
SEO – What is it?
SEO is the process of making your website friendlier and more visible for relevant searches. The more visibility your site has, the more likely you are to attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
An attractive and functional website design, coupled with the right settings and content strategies, can really help visitors find your site, which in turn will increase your revenue. No matter what industry you work in, you won’t sell many products or onboard many clients if people don’t know you exist.
When it comes to better ranking and placement, SEO alone will not get you where you want to be. It is a combination of pieces working in sync that will get the job done right. A convenient fact is that these moving parts don’t only apply to new websites – existing websites can benefit from SEO services as well.
How SEO and Web Design Work Together for New Orleans Small Businesses
When online searchers view a piece of content on the web, a link back to your site lets them view more content or discover your products or services. If your site is not set up for simple and easy-to-use navigation, visitors may leave (“bounce”) if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Web design is more than just having an attractive theme, it needs to have the right settings, be designed with User Experience (UX) in mind, and be easy to navigate with clearly defined navigation routes.
Five Important Aspects of SEO
- Functional web design
- Mobile-friendly
- Loads quickly
- Efficient sitemaps
- Improved user experience
Web Design
You may not be aware of it, but your website design makes a huge impact on your SEO. If you choose a pretty theme for your website, but you don’t make it easy to navigate or find things, your visitors will not stay, and they will have no reason to return. People often choose colors for their design because they’re nice-looking, but sometimes it can make your content harder to read. The text may also have a font size that is too large or too small, or have glaring grammatical errors. If it is hard to read on a laptop or desktop, it will be equally hard to view on a mobile device.
Mobile-Friendly
Another aspect of web design is setting up a website to appear proportionate on mobile devices. A website that isn’t set up properly won’t load right, and will be hard to view on a smartphone or tablet. A large portion of the population uses their phones to search the internet and make purchases.
Starting in 2016, Google switched their web crawling “spiders” to a mobile-first approach. Their SERP algorithms prioritize websites that perform well on mobile, and penalize those that do not. Since then, it’s never been more important to have a great, clean, fast, and functional mobile-friendly website.
It is important that your site is viewable on mobile devices. Local SEO also helps users find your business easier if you have a physical location. Users searching for businesses “near me” or “in my area” will pull up listings close to their location, giving you more customers if you have a brick and mortar store.
Pages that load quickly
There are several factors that can affect your site loading speeds. Website speed is an important part of technical SEO. If your website has slow loading speeds, it can affect your ranking and cause visitors to leave your site due to impatience or even frustration. It is important for webpages to load quickly to avoid disrupting the flow of mobile transactions, like purchases, contact inquiries, and downloads.
Efficient Sitemaps
A sitemap is an indexed collection of your website’s pages and posts that tells the search engine spiders what your site is about and what pages are the most important to search. Sitemaps also make it easier to navigate your website and help users find related information, giving you a chance to rank higher.
Improved User Experience
The user experience (UX) is an important factor in getting and keeping website visitors. Sites that are neat, easy to navigate, and load quickly mean that visitors have a higher chance of signing up for your lead magnets, making a purchase, or booking a service. If the user has a good experience on your website, he or she is more likely to return or tell others about you. A poor user experience can have the opposite effect.
SEO + Website Design = the Formula for a Winning Web Presence Strategy
Not everyone is proficient in designing their own website, therefore, you should hire a New Orleans web designer to build your site and optimize it for desktop and mobile visitors. SEO services such as technical SEO, On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, content strategy, and data analysis show you where your weaknesses are and can inform the strategy for how to improve upon them.
Proper technical SEO and a well-planned out website are match made in heaven when it comes to creating a foundation for your business. The combination together ensures that your site ranks well and that people can find you via search engines. If you need a good New Orleans SEO company, look no further. We love helping businesses understand how technology can help them evolve and grow.