Does website design effect SEO?
It’s a question that we very get asked on a very frequent basis, that is, “does the design of my company website, have a direct bearing on how successful the organic seo will be?”
Now, in a nutshell, we would say yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than that, so we will elaborate a bit more later on.
If you’re looking for a short-answer, well here’s just that, a website needs to be well-designed, for the organic seo to improve, otherwise, if the design makes it hard for customers to purchase a product, the bounce rate will go through the roof, the time on site will drop through the floor, and the business will have a lot of abandoned shopping baskets.
So, SEO must work hand in glove with the design of the website, now when we say design must be good, this doesn’t always mean you need to fork out a ton of your marketing budget on website designers, it just means, the website needs to make it easy for your customers to buy products, it must offer answers to questions that they have, plus, it must be relevant.
So, the seo if you like is the engine of a car, it drives things forward, but an engine without a good car body, is useless.
So, this is why the website design must be good, and the organic seo must be strong.
Is it important to have a well-designed website before I start to pay an seo agency to improve my SEO?
Yes, we wouldn’t recommend signing an SEO contract, so paying for an agency to improve your organic seo, unless the web design is of good quality first.
The reason being, let’s say Google Analytics says that your now receiving over 1,000 organic visitors per day, yet the bounce rate is 99%- well this simply means that the seo company may have succeeded in their overall goal of getting more shoppers to your company’s website, yet, with 99% of them leaving on the first page, due to a very high-bounce rate, well, this could be sometimes down to the fact that the web design is very poor.
So, let’s give you an example of what we mean by this, let’s say that you sell ice-skates online, so you’ve paid a web design company to design an e-commerce website, yet the design isn’t very good at all.
So, for example, there’s over 1000 pairs of various ice-skates on your website for sale, yet no way to sort via brand, price or whether they are in stock or not. This annoys your customers, so they leave, to find another company that sells ice skates. So, as you can see, sometimes an seo company can be really good at what they do, that’s to say, they can bring thousands of visitors to your website daily, yet if the design is poor, this could mean the bounce rate simply increases.
Why are company websites, that don’t look very well designed, ranking higher than my company on Google?
This is another question that our seo company gets asked a lot, that is, when you look at Google’s SERP’s, and a business checks where they rank, and they see for example their 7th, they may start to evaluate which businesses rank above them.
And when they start to look at the other companies, that rank above them on Google, well, they may think, my website is better, its better designed, it looks better, why are we not at the top of the SERP’s?
Well, the simple answer is this, sometimes a company website will look dated, yet, it might still be very good at answering a customer’s query, or just good at selling a product.
Yet there’s a lot more to it than just design, as look as the websites design does what it supposed to, so for example, a divorce solicitors website states where they are based, the solicitors that work at the practice, and also some customer reviews, then the website design might be good enough to answer what the customer is looking for, it gets more complex when you start to think about the SEO, because Google, and other search engines, such as Bing, use “ranking factors” to work out how good the companies seo is.
Now, there are thought to be in excess of 200 different ranking factors which Google’s algorithm uses in order to calculate how good or bad a company’s seo is, so these are things like the companies’ backlinks, now these can’t be weighed up if they are good or bad just by a customer looking at the appearance of the homepage.
No, ranking factors, like backlinks, business citations, and AI can’t therefore be measured just by looking at the design of a site, SEO tools, such as AhRefs, and other tools, such as Google Search Console need to be used, in order to work out how good the companies organic seo is.
So, as you can see, where a business ranks in Google’s SERP’s is not solely worked out by Google algorithm on the basis of just the websites design alone, no, that’s because its also calculated on the strength of the organic seo as well, therefore the companies ranking factors will also ultimately determine where the website should rank.
Will Google rank my companies website, based solely on its design?
No, Google will also use “seo ranking factors” which the strength and quality of will be calculated by Google’s algorithm, to determine how good the companies seo is, and then Google will rank the business accordingly in the SERP’s.
How we can help:
Here in Cardiff, we have many brilliant web designers, seo consultants, and also link builders which all work for our seo company. There are indeed many seo companies to pick from, however we believe we have the edge over many, as we offer quality white hat work, plus we offer competitive prices.
For a no obligation quote, why not call us?
