SEO Web Design Why The Look And Feel Of Your Page Matters

When you're worrying about search engine optimization, it can be tempting to focus purely on keywords, density, link building, and other very technical elements. But that's only half the battle. A page that ranks perfectly for all the phrases it is targeting doesn't guarantee any kind of actual sales. SEO packages are about getting more traffic to a page. Once that traffic is gathered, there has to be something compelling for them, or they won't turn into actual customers. What is that something? For many businesses, the solution is SEO web design.

Not A Direct SEO Factor...Mostly

Most of the things you do to a site's look and feel won't change your ranking in Google. The company looks at code just enough to determine that you've got the appropriate meta tags, title, and descriptions. It doesn't judge whether or not a site looks good, and it won't rank you based on how good your site is or isn't. Anything actively broken (image links, hyperlinks, etc) will certainly harm you, but a simply unattractive but otherwise functional aesthetic isn't going to make you tank.

Understanding Bounce Rate

Bad design won't hurt your rankings. People refusing to stay on your site because they don't like how it looks, because it doesn't provide the information they want, or because it isn't easy for them to navigate will cause your rankings to drop. Bounce rate involves measuring how long an individual stays on your site after coming to it from a search engine. The higher your bounce rate, the more people are "bouncing" away from your webpage once they land there. Google measures that, and if you've got a higher bounce rate, you're going to see an impact in your rankings.

Bounce Rate Is A Measure Of User Experience

Google doesn't judge the way a page looks, but it measures how visitors judge it by measuring bounce rate. Visitors bounce when bad aesthetics, poor usability, or bad content fail to give them what they're looking for. Thus, aesthetic, usability, and content are all direct factors that impact the success of search engine optimization. Most SEO packages are already going to address content, but it can be easy to forget about the contribution of actual web design and user experience.

Make sure that you take a critical look at how the site looks, feels, and functions for users as well as search engines. Are people able to quickly find the information that they are looking for? Is the structure appealing? If not, re-do everything sooner rather than later. Remember, if you're working with a sub-par webpage, results you're getting from SEO are going to be confounded and even counteracted by a high bounce rate.