Should I Focus on Web Design or SEO?
Business owners often ask themselves where they should put their priorities in for improving their website. Should the focus be on improving the website design or should they pay more attention to the SEO aspects instead to rank better in search engines? The correct answer to that is actually both! Much like how a car requires tires to run, SEO and web design work hand in hand with the same goal in mind: to provide users with a good and intuitive user experience. Besides, what’s the point of ranking in the first page of search engines if your website is poorly designed which gives users a bad experience? It may do more harm than good in the long run. That is why web design agencies often provide SEO services as well.
Now that we understand why both SEO and web design is necessary for your business’s success in the digital world, let’s take a look at all the components you need in order to have a web design that’s fully compatible with SEO that provides a good user experience.
Optimize for Mobile
This is a no-brainer and has been a recurring topic throughout our many blog posts because the impact of having a responsive website design is significant for both improving user experience as well as increasing the rankability of your website on search engines.
Content and Readability
While web designers mostly focus on how the website will look like at the end, more often than not they will opt for a cleaner interface with minimal copy. However, as we already know, content is king when it comes to SEO. Hence, it’s important to ensure that your web design incorporates more space for informative and optimized content which will help your website rank higher on search engines.
Image Optimization
If you haven’t already, your content is not the only thing that can be optimized on your website. Images play an important role in web design and user experience. While high resolution images with a large file size may be nice to look at, it will harm your website load speed significantly which could lead to a poor user experience. When users are having trouble loading your website within 3-5 seconds, they tend to exit and increase your bounce rate. This can significantly damage your rankings in search engines.
Besides that, your images can also be optimized with alt tags which are additional descriptions for each image. These alternate texts help search engines to determine what the image is showing as well as providing visually impaired users with a better experience on your website.
URL Structure
The structures of your website’s URL play a more important role in SEO than you may think. A good URL structure often helps users determine where they are currently on your website and gives a good idea of what content they can expect.
Good URL structure:
www.example.com/services/web-design/
Bad URL structure:
As shown above, including descriptive words in your URL structure gives relevant context as opposed to having random letters or numbers that serve no meaning to users.
Heading Tags
Heading tags like H1, H2, H3 and so on can help structure your website and is a good indicator for visual hierarchy that tells users what the title is, and what are the points. This makes it easy to understand your content not only for users, but for search engines as well!
In conclusion, for your website to rank well on search engines, don’t overlook the importance of integrating both SEO and web design. They are the best duo in providing a great user experience as well as increasing the rankings and traffic to your website. If you are looking for an experienced web design and SEO agency in Malaysia that can help build your brand’s presence and improve your website design while maintaining SEO-friendly, LOCUS-T has the expertise you need. Contact us today to find out more!
