Website Design Tips to Improve Your Site SEO in 2021

Businesses strive to get their SEO right with the intention of getting higher rankings and organic traffic. They usually focus on different aspects of their site including the content posted on the website and other technical SEO pain points.

Although these points are very important to optimize, website design also greatly affects search engine rankings. The importance of website design cannot be stressed enough. It is very important to optimize it for search engines. What should you look out for and how can businesses improve their websites?

Here are the best website design tips to improve your site SEO in 2021.

Switch to animated navigation technology

When developing your business website, there are certain decisions you should make about its appearance and User Experience. It is critical to understand the target audience’s demographics and their preferences to create an experience they enjoy.

The rule of thumb of developing a new website is making the customer journey interesting and as modern as possible. When users visit the business website and find an ancient technology, they will likely bounce the site and turn to your competitor. 

One of the most efficient ways to modernize the website design without compromising loading speeds is using animated navigation technology.

Users will experience the website in 3D by sliding through slideshows, swiping to navigate across pages, and watching each page fade into a new one. Switching to animated navigation technology will benefit your SEO strategy by making users stay longer on the site.

When customers interact with the user interface you have created for them, they will be enticed to open up more pages and get more of the website experience. Google Algorithm will take note that users spend a lot of time on the business’ website and consider the site valuable to customers, subsequently ranking it higher.

Optimize mobility further

By now, almost all businesses should know that mobility is very important when choosing a website design. Recent studies have shown that the majority of search engine queries were conducted using a mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet.

Hence, it is of utmost importance to choose a responsive theme that is accessible across all devices. Apart from that, the website design you are using should be optimized further by considering voice-activated searches.

Mobile devices easily allow the use of voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Google Home, and others to search the internet. If the design of your website is not optimized for that, you will lose potential valuable clients.

To optimize the website design for voice-activated searches, add schema markup for each page. The schema markup will provide context behind the words you have used on the website page.

When there are voice-activated searches related to the context written in the schema markup, your website page will rank higher than those without this feature.

Add and maintain an active blog

Although this might seem like a no brainer, some businesses think a blog is unnecessary or too much for them. Some think it will aimlessly consume resources that could be put to better use but a blog is very important.

Adding it as an extension of your site (microsite) will help boost SEO efforts being implemented by the business. When search engines see that there is a section for customers to get valuable content, it will increase the rankings of the site.

Adding a blog to a site communicates that the business would like to add value to customers and not just profit from them.

Having a blog is not enough, though, it should be actively managed and loaded with content. You can then use that platform to create a content marketing strategy that can help regain the financial resources used to set up the blog.

The returns will be much more than the capital investment if this strategy has been done correctly. You can also use the blog to post the latest news about the company and other PR related content like Starbucks on its stories page.

Make each page unique

Creating unique content has been the foremost ranking factor of Google Algorithms, sniffing out any plagiarized content. Another feature of this tool is identifying if the website is adding value to potential customers.

One way it completes this task is by identifying any repetitive content across all pages. If a website constantly repeats the same words or phrases, this can be considered as repetitiveness and spammy as per Google. Using the same phrases on all website pages might signal that a company does not have fresh ideas for diverse content.

The company might repeat phrases to promote a certain product or their motto but this can be detrimental. To avoid being receiving a lower ranking from Google, find different creative ways to get your message across to the audience.

When designing the website, you must optimize each page to handle different types of content by using different templates. Also, optimize the site to easily imbed pictures and videos, displaying them in an aesthetically appealing manner.

Improve the readability of the website

Viewers will bounce websites if the content cannot be read easily and effortlessly, resulting in negative ratings on search engines. Improving readability does not only apply to the creation of content but also to the website’s design.

For example, using colors that do not contrast each other can lead to unreadable content. Ensure that you choose the colors of the website wisely and carefully.

Conduct an A/B test to see which colors work the best and utilize them, mostly black font on a white background does it the best. Also, look into font types and their sizes, ensure that they appear clearly with readability taking priority over appearance. 

Forbes.com stuck to a simple black and white website design but the website still looks elegant. Fonts that are widely in use amongst the most successful digital companies is the serif font category. Choose fonts like Calibri and Arial for the content you have created.

Make full use of sitemaps

Sitemaps are another tool to boost SEO efforts that can help the business get higher rankings on search engines. Google Algorithms prefer ranking sites they understand and sitemaps serve that purpose as they help search engines comprehend websites easier.

Sitemaps unify all important pages of the website into one readable format instead of search engines crawling throughout the entire site to find each one.

XML sitemaps help search engines index the images found on the website and there is also a section of videos. Various tools can help create dynamic sitemaps and boost the search engine visibility of the website.

The bottom line

SEO is a very important aspect of website design and businesses should try their utmost best to implement the best strategies possible. You should further optimize the site for mobility and look into ensuring that voice-activated searches are compatible with the website.

Also, add a blog to the website you use for business purposes to enhance the chances of implementing a content marketing strategy. Upgrade to the latest technology of animating the customer experience to be 3D to increase the time spent on the site. If you don’t have time to manage your SEO work, or simply do not have the required expertise, it may be best to turn to an SEO agency. Companies like SEO company Austin TX  have the required expertise to make sure your SEO strategy is a success.