Any business just starting to focus on its SEO efforts is likely working to create optimized content for their site and get valuable backlinks. While these strategies are certainly essential for successful SEO, there’s another element that could actually hurt your hard-earned results: your website design.
If you’re among the 14 million small businesses in the United States that have invested money and time into SEO strategies, not considering how your web design affects your SEO could be having a costly effect on your business. That’s why many full-service marketing companies offer both web design and SEO services. The two go hand-in-hand and having one experienced company help you with both is often the best way to see the results you want.
Let’s dive into a few different ways your current web design could be negatively affecting your SEO efforts and how a website design and SEO company could help remedy these issues.
Slow Loading Speeds
Search engines and human users alike prefer websites that have quick loading times. And in the digital world, a quick loading time is about two seconds. Any longer than that and users are more likely to abandon your site while they wait for it to load and search engines won’t rank it as well in the search results page.
The loading time of a website often depends on its design. A complex web design or a design that is heavy with content or images are the main culprits of slow loading times. By utilizing experienced web design and SEO services, you can have professionals help you develop a minimalist, streamlined website design for faster loading speeds.
Heading Tags
Although they may seem minor, the heading tags on your website are another important component of your SEO. Visitors to your page use these tags to quickly glean what a web page or section is about. A good heading will convince them that a page is worthy of them clicking on it, giving it more traffic. Search engines also use heading tags as indicators of what relevant information is on the page.
An SEO web design service will know how to optimize the heading tags on your website to both catch users’ attention and appeal to search engine algorithms. For instance, professional SEO strategists know that the H1 tag is the most important on a page or blog post and that it should smoothly incorporate the targeted keyword phrase. Without their knowledge, your site might have heading tags and title tags that aren’t adding any SEO value.
Image Issues
Images are important elements in your website design. Not only do they represent your company and its services, but they easily add aesthetic value to your website. However, images that have low quality or are too large for the page can quickly make your site look amateur. Visitors may take this as an indication that your services or products aren’t up to snuff either and leave your site as quickly as your SEO efforts got them there.
The placement of images on your website is as important as their quality. Thoughtful image layout is essential in making your website look streamlined and pleasant to the eye. Poorly placed images can also create awkward framing on mobile devices. As a site’s mobile-friendliness is becoming more important to search engines, strategizing your site’s images is a critical step in your SEO efforts.
Web design and SEO services can help you avoid all of these digital marketing faux pas. Contact Studio98 today to learn more about how working with experienced professionals can give you a website that supports your SEO strategies as much as your SEO strategies support the success of your website.