How to Balance SEO and Web Design at the Same Time?

When building your client’s website, you need to consider customers and search engines. All you need is an SEO friendly website optimized for search engines so as to let the customers find you when they search on Google. At the same time, you also need an attractive, user friendly website so that it becomes easy for them to find what they are looking for. This poses as a challenge for a web design agency because they have to strike a balance between being user friendly and SEO friendly at the same time. On the contrary, you also need to have loads of content to rank effectively on the user search queries.

This article lists some ways on how to create a balanced harmony between SEO and web design for your client’s website.

Website navigation

Web developers are always focused on the overall feel, look and user experience of a site. Designers and developers will be focused on the visual elements and how users interact with the same. They try to keep the things as simple as possible because nowadays, most of the users browse the site by their mobiles.

On the contrary, SEO should be focused on the navigation efforts for search engine optimization. Nowadays, it is found that longer tail terms are in use that helps in driving traffic to the site. When the website features a lot of products, site navigation is an important thing to consider.

When integrating the both, the gist is the same, to build organic search visibility easy for the users. You need to make the website easily navigable and optimizing for the search engines without messing with the user experience. The best place to begin with is how the page ranks on Google with the keywords and checking what the sites are up to.

Content: more or less?

Content can be everything on your site: the text, animations etc. Content helps in keeping the users apprised and engage them through their journey until they make a purchase. But according to Google, not every content is equal. SEO teams place a lot of emphasis on the content, but they don’t understand how it impacts the site design, layout and functionality. Empower your SEO team to consider such factors and build a copy that doesn’t impact the user experience. Development and SEO teams should work hand in hand to place SEO content in perfect spot that doesn’t affect UX or overall design at all.

When it comes to creating content, you should consider every phase of the customer journey. This helps in planning the layout of the text and to determine where the visual content is required.

You should have content on the following pages:

1. Homepage
2. Collection pages
3. Category pages
4. Subcategory pages
5. Product pages

Once you decide the type of content the website needs, the design team will always come in handy in such case to come up with a solution that harmonizes every aspect of the website together.

Indexable content makes a website SEO friendly. When a search engine can crawl a website easily, then it has higher odds of ranking higher. For making the site indexable, the main content on every page must be in HTML text format. The use of JavaScript and HTML is also one of the biggest challenges. HTML is great but it doesn’t have the necessary functionality that JavaScript bestows. Hence, developers love using the latter. But these programs can cause issues for search engines like client side rendering, code errors etc. Both teams need to consider making the content indexable to improve the site speed and crawl budget of Google too.