Do you want to make your fence business search-engine friendly and increase conversion rates? Then it helps to understand the relationship between web design and SEO. While web designers and SEO experts perform very different tasks, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work together.
Both SEO and web design have a tremendous impact on your company’s bottom line. SEO can influence your web design, and web design can improve or damage your SEO. Failing to combine SEO and web design may end up costing your business time, money, and rankings.
Call Fence Marketing pros today at (888) 622-2964 to learn the role of keywords in SEO and much more.
Factors to Optimize for Web Design and SEO
When designing an SEO-friendly website, you should consider a few best practices. This post highlights some ways you can ensure that your SEO strategy aligns with your site design. Some of these tips may go beyond the abilities of your in-house staff, but they’re so crucial that it’s worth hiring digital marketing experts to get them right and have them incorporated into your site.
Mobile-Friendliness
More and more Internet users browse websites on smartphones and other handheld devices, and you need to make your site accessible to all of them. Now that Google added mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor, optimizing your site for mobile will provide a better user experience and increase the chances that your site will rank higher. Learn about the Google experience update.
Rather than have a separate mobile site, adopt a responsive, mobile-friendly website design that makes your site accessible on all browsers and devices. The biggest advantage of a responsive web design is that you design your website only once, allowing you to save time and money.
Prioritize Readability
Web designers primarily focus on the design elements of your website. However, it’s crucial that they also choose easy-to-read fonts and sizes. If your site has jarring design elements, pale colors that blend, or tiny fonts, visitors likely won’t stick around to read your content or place an order.
Speed Matters
Anything that slows your website’s load times can decrease your conversions significantly. This includes JavaScript code, plug-ins, slow-loading images, social media buttons, and anything else that results in slower load times. Internet users will quickly abandon a slow website, and at the first hint of a delay, users will move on to the next website.
Focus on Content and Images
A beautiful website without valuable content to match won’t rank well on search engines. High-quality content signals to search engines that you’re providing valuable information. Because things quickly can become outdated in the digital world, internet users are always looking for the most recent content. Keep content fresh and updated with information that adds value to your users.
Don’t forget to have your web designer optimize all images. Optimize image files to reduce load times, and always add meta descriptions to your images so search engine bots can also index your images. These descriptions help search engines determine what’s being depicted, and users can also read the descriptions when they hover a mouse over an image.
Design a Simple, Clean Navigation
Invest in a simple website design that’s easy to navigate. Users should have an easy time finding the information they need. Easy-to-use navigation lowers the chances that your visitors will get confused and leave the website. And the better user experience can improve your site rankings and potentially boost your conversion rates.
Simple navigation also makes it easier for search engine crawlers to sift through your website and get valuable information. If you have complex URLs and barriers, simplify them by making them short and easy to remember. Try to limit categories within your URLs, and remove any duplicates.
Limit JavaScript and Flash
Flash and JavaScript are programming languages that search engine crawlers have a difficult time crawling. While these languages allow you to incorporate interesting design elements, try to limit how often you use such elements in your web pages.
How to Combine Web Design and SEO
Because SEO and web design are closely linked, you need to make sure they work well to achieve the best results for your fence company. That’s why you should avoid hiring a web designer to create your site then bringing in an SEO expert as an afterthought.
Involving both a designer and an SEO expert at the early stages of your project ensures things run seamlessly from the get-go. That way, the designer can create an SEO-friendly site architecture, and the SEO specialist can see the intricacies of your site design.
You may opt to hire one individual who does both SEO and web design, but it’s often better to hire separate professionals who are great at each rather than one individual who’s mediocre at both. Alternatively, you could hire a full-service internet marketing agency with an established team of developers, designers, and SEOs to work together on your site.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, the goal of both SEO and web design is to provide users with a great customer experience. Both elements of digital marketing aim to achieve the desired result: a site that helps your business succeed and gives visitors what they need.
Your site needs to be visually appealing and functional to provide the information that visitors need to become customers. Many people assume that outstanding web design can compensate for or even outweigh bad SEO. However, they’re both essential, and they work together to draw users to your site. Solid SEO attracts users to your website, and outstanding web design is what keeps them there.
Need help combining web design and SEO to optimize your fence marketing? Reach out to Fence Marketing Pros for top-notch SEO services for fence companies. Dial (888) 622-2964 to schedule service.
