As a business owner, you’ve probably invested a great deal of time and effort into building your website. It looks polished and beautiful, which is great. However, how do you now ensure that Internet users can easily find you on search engines like Google or Bing? The fact is that the majority of webmasters typically don’t take SEO into account when designing a site, which leads to a host of bad website design problems. Numerous businesses concentrate on the aesthetics of their website, without recognizing that good-looking but poorly designed websites have an impact on their SEO. Contrary to what you would think, SEO tactics and website design are closely related. Read on to learn about the 12 web design mistakes to steer clear of so you don’t hurt your SEO efforts.
Web Pages take Forever to Load
First things first. Videos can make you some serious money. Adding a product video on your landing page can increase conversions by 80%.
Video can also lead directly to sales. Studies show that 74% of users who watched an explainer-video about a product subsequently bought it. So better start crafting your exciting product videos now!
If you think about it, the effectiveness of video is not even that surprising. After all, vision is our most dominant sense. Most information transmitted to our brain is visual. So if already pictures can boost engagement massively, imagine what moving pictures can do to your business. Undoubtedly, video marketing is one of the newest additions to your promotion toolbox. You might still have your doubts. Is it really worth to consider using videos for promoting your business? Do you have enough resources to create and use video content in your marketing?
The answer is simple: Yes, it’s worth it. Not only because everyone’s doing it but because video is one of the most versatile and profitable digital marketing tools out there. Here are 8 reasons why you should use video marketing right now.
Web Design not Translating Efficiently to Different Device (Non-Responsive)
These days, consumers are always connected to the web. Because of this, it’s crucial to provide a consistent user experience across all platforms, particularly on mobile. Creating distinct user experiences and sitemaps for various devices and operating systems is one of the biggest web design pitfalls that will hurt your SEO! According to findings from Google, over 40% of customers who had a bad mobile experience exited the page to visit a competitor’s site instead.
Therefore, to provide a seamless mobile experience that will get you ranking higher, your designs should be responsive (adaptive to size) and uniform throughout different browsers and gadgets. Most people nowadays use their mobile browsers at a frequency higher than on desktops, so look at making mobile responsiveness your priority if your website lacks it.
Difficult to Navigate Website
Many web design blunders stem from neglecting the key steps of planning, wireframing, and developing a sitemap. Among the obvious ones are a shoddy header menu and navigation design. When it is difficult to maneuver through websites that are haphazardly designed, a poor navigational layout might turn users away from your site. If you’re creating a website containing a multitude of pages, it’s sensible to categorize them and organize them hierarchically so that visitors can easily explore your website. Furthermore, navigation differs depending on the device. You must select the appropriate option. A responsive hamburger menu design, for instance, is good when browsing on mobile devices as it’s compact and neat.
Implementing an Infinite Scroll Plugin
The infinite scrolling method pre-fetches content from another relevant linked page and adds it to the bottom of a user’s currently open webpage. A website constructed as a continuous single-page site means on-site SEO is limited to just that single page. This means that there are fewer chances to rank for multiple keywords and web pages on the results pages because there is only one meta title, one meta description, one primary keyword, one group of organized data markups, and one H1 heading. Your rankings will suffer as a result.
The keywords and metadata on each webpages’ content are used to rank your pages on search result pages. Your website has a greater chance of appearing on search results pages for specific keywords the more web pages you publish.
Not Naming Web Pages, Images, and URLs Properly
A common misstep is forgetting to assign suitable names that include your keywords to meta titles that display on browser windows, URLs, as well as images and alt texts that display when an image is hovered over. However, keep in mind that trying to cram your alt text with keywords will instead harm your rankings. Rather, utilize alt texts to clearly and concisely explain the contents of your webpage and images.
Avoid letting your web developer or any employee posting the content choose these names, or worst of all, leave your CMS to generate random ones. An effective SEO name should properly reflect your content and keywords. Every webpage should have a distinctive title, URL, and alt text that describes the topic on each page.
Discontinuing On-Page Optimization Efforts
It’s necessary to invest in ongoing on-page SEO because it helps Google comprehend what every bit of information on your webpage is about. This entails matching user search queries to a particular group of keywords in your page components like URLs, h1 tags, meta descriptions, subheadings, and text. Your search ranking will improve the more Google is able to understand your content.
Some good on-page SEO practices to always ensure are:
- Creating concise, meaningful page URLs
- Writing engaging meta descriptions
- Providing useful information that actually meets search queries
- Including the focus keywords within the opening hundred words and naturally throughout your content
- Integrating internal and external hyperlinks
When you construct your web pages with these on-page optimizations in mind, you’ll be on your path to improved rankings.
Placing Important Text in Embedded Images or Videos
A pretty, eye-catching image can draw a reader’s attention, so you might feel inclined to embed significant content in your images. Although they might seem like a cool aesthetic choice, they aren’t good for SEO. Search engine crawlers can’t discern or understand text placed on images. To rank your webpage, Google evaluates keywords in the content, headers, and subheadings. Google would be unable to do so if these key components were embedded in images. Furthermore, this can impact how accessible your website is.
The text you put on images is not readable by assistive software for users with disabilities. Hence why it’s best to give your images keyword-rich alt texts instead and only use HTML format for any words to ensure your content is as accessible as possible.
Failing to use Proper H1 & Header Tags
The H1 tag is the headline you place at the beginning of your article so that both users and search engines can understand what it is about. While your content intuitively feels more significant, an effective H1 tag and its subsequent headers are critical for SEO. Your primary headline, typically the H1, should accurately summarize the information on the page and contain the focus keywords. All further subcategories on that webpage should follow below with a subheading containing more in-depth target keywords on the topic.
Your H1 tag should be succinct, and informative, and highlight the subject matter of your content. Importantly, good H1 tags assist search engines in deciphering the concepts of your article so they may rank your webpage more favorably.
Writing Thin Content on Home, Product, or Service Pages
Our society is overflowing with information—that’s why Google filters out “thin” content from its search results. Thin content is published material that provides minimal or no extra value to readers because it’s not unique enough. Thus, making sure your website has a ton of meaningful content with target keywords is one of the most fundamental ways of boosting your ranking. Note that Google will, however, penalize websites that attempt to rank by publishing cookie-cutter content or scraped (copied) material that does not offer readers any real value.
Therefore, it’s crucial never to mass produce webpages with a lot of text but very little substance. This can result in your webpage being excluded from Google’s search results entirely!
Forgetting to Create an Effective 404 Page
Broken URLs are always bad for brands. Moreover, the standard 404 pages are usually unsightly, unbranded, and offer little more than a simple error message. Visitors might think the webpage feels fishy or isn’t a reputable business, in which case they might exit immediately. This can therefore negatively affect your website’s entire SEO ranking. Lower bounce rates and increased customer engagement can be achieved by designing a brand-personalized 404 page that includes a site search bar, useful links to popular pages, and a sitemap.
Or else, it signals to Google that your information isn’t helpful for a specific keyword search, and if this occurs frequently, you’d likely see a decline in your ranking.
Upload Large Media Files
Publishing large media files like images can significantly slow down page loading speeds, particularly if you upload a massive picture only to display it at a tiny size (for instance, a 2000×1000 picture only shown at 200×100) since the complete image must still be fetched. Page loading speeds affect both user experience and SEO. The quicker it is for people and search engines to view and analyze your website, the less probable it is to lose visitors or harm your SEO.
Therefore, be sure to scale all of your images to the exact sizes as they’re going to appear. Next, ensure that your resized picture is compressed before publishing it to ensure that it’s uploaded at a minimum file size.
Excessive Pop-Ups that become Disruptive
Pop-ups should only be used sparingly and with caution, because they often have some major downsides. Most people who browse websites find them bothersome and unwelcome. Many website visitors will get so irritated by them that they’ll exit the website as soon as disruptive pop-ups appear. Most significantly, because Google warned in 2018 that it would penalize websites with invasive pop-ups, using pop-ups has become riskier. Your page loading speed may also be slowed down by excessive pop-ups, which irritates and upsets time-pressed users all the more. They’ll almost inevitably leave your website and go to one of your competitors instantly. And again, slower page loading speeds also decrease your SEO rankings!
In a nutshell, SEO and web designing should work seamlessly together. Whether you’re working on your web design or your SEO strategies, both components must always function together. Look out for these 12 key web design blunders if you find that your SEO initiatives are still not yielding the results you were hoping for. Remember to ensure you have a responsive, easily navigable web design, fast loading speeds, proper header tags and alt texts, small-sized media files, and an effective 404 page. Avoid infinite scroll pages, image-embedded text, thin content, and excessive pop-ups. You should see an increase in your rankings after correcting these problems. This way, you can give your website the ranking it merits without worrying about design factors impeding your progress.
If you’re having trouble getting started with web designing for SEO, or if it still feels overwhelming, our specialists at FMO Media can assist you. Hundreds of organizations and individuals have benefited from our expertise in website design, SEO, branding strategies, content marketing, paid advertising, and consultancy services. You can work less and earn more when you choose FMO Media as your full-spectrum digital agency. Contact us today to get the most out of your website SEO!
