What is the first thing you notice when you enter a new website? We tend to see its mobile-friendliness, the color schemes, the layouts, the ease of navigating the menu, the quick site-wide search options, the page loading speed, the quality of the information on each page, website security and so much more. In short, we notice its usability as a whole in place of regarding each of these factors individually.
Ever since Google began updating its search engine algorithms to match the needs of human users, all these factors have assumed paramount importance in determining a site’s ranking and performance. There are other factors like link juice, Metadata, and redirects, although users rarely rendezvous with these elements directly.
How can your design team optimize your site for search engines?
All in all, almost all aspects of modern website design affects are usability and ranking. It is no longer enough to make a website “pretty” or “creative.” Website developers and designers need to think hard about its usability before making the site accessible to users like you. Today’s website visitors are smart. The level of user satisfaction reflects directly on their bounce rate and session time. And Google has no time for websites that don’t care about the experience of their users.
Website design and schema markup
Interestingly, SEO and website design are no longer mutually exclusive of each other. It has become impossible for any business to manage their website design and SEO while keeping them in silos. A deeper understanding of the website structures (schema) can give your business an edge that your competitors don’t have. Updating your XML sitemap regularly can help the Google search engine bots understand which elements of your site need crawling.
It will not only improve your crawling budget, but it will also increase the visibility of particular website elements that were earlier obscure to these crawlers. Indexing your site content regularly will boost their potential visibility for desktop as well as mobile devices.
Website design and mobile optimization
We are standing at the brink of 2020, and it is impossible to ignore mobile traffic at this point. You can turn your regular site into a mobile responsive one quite easily. If you have a dedicated site designer cum SEO team, they can take charge of the redesign and migration process, while you focus on the nitty-gritty of the business.
Honestly speaking, optimizing a site for mobile viewing takes some effort and time. Without the right design company beside you, you might even face significant down-time. Follow Vigor Seorchers Brooklyn Web Design Company to find out about the easiest ways of adopting a mobile-responsive design for already active websites.
Design and website speed
One of the most important aspects of any website people notice first is its loading speed. Now, you may have a fast-loading landing page. However, your product pages are slow-loading. That can create several problems for your site, including high traffic inflow rate, but low session duration and plummeting conversion rates. Cart abandonment is also an issue for checkout pages that take ages to load.
A light template, with seamless coding, can clock faster loading speeds than heavier sites with hundreds on in-built and added plug-ins. Revisiting your core code as well as trying each page on a speed checker tool regularly are necessary steps to monitor the site’s speed performance.
Website templates and media optimization
When you are working on loading speed, you need to check the rate of each page. That is crucial since each page has a varying number of images, videos, and content that can drag it down. Check if all your images and videos are optimized. Introduce small-sized thumbnails for all media pieces and only allow loading of a video when the user clicks on the thumbnail.
These small steps can shave off seconds from the page loading speed, and that can save your site from the apparent downfall. The modern user is not big on patience. In fact, millennials refuse to wait longer than 3 seconds for any page to load. With each additional second, websites lose 70% of the incoming traffic to their competition.
Do not forget to ask your team for competitor monitoring!
Check out the competition – do they have a faster loading speed? Do they have customized landing pages? Are they using better tools that help in monitoring overall site performance? Keeping a close eye on competitor performance is indispensable for business success. Hiring a team proficient in website design as well as SEO can give you the upper hand in this respect. They will not only have the skills for creating a superior looking site for your brand, but they will also have the technological insight to craft a personalized user experience for each of your visitors.