How Web Design Affects Your Business Seo

When it comes to “additional investment” in business, business owners often find it difficult to understand the importance of many aspects of business that are necessary to be included in their business plan and additional investment, such as web design, web development and SEO. Oftentimes it has something to do with budget. Although business owners nowadays know the importance of having a website for their business, many of them still don’t understand the meaning of quality. Let me illustrate the example for you:

Michelle has a skincare business and is looking to grow her business by creating a website. She then asks her friend Maya who works at a creative agency that provides web design, web development, SEO and other services related to growing business about how much it costs to have a good website. When Maya tells her the rather expensive price, Michelle is dumbfounded and says, “My friend told me I could make a simple website with less cost than that.” Maya then tells Michelle why her website is more expensive.

A cheap website with simple design may still be considered as a real website; however, when we are talking about quality, it is so much different than an expensive website. I’m not trying to underestimate simple websites; a simple website is good in its own way. In fact, if you do it the right way, a simple website can turn your website visitors into your real paying customers, but that’s not the point in this article. It is about how every aspect of a good quality website is combined in the process, which includes web design and SEO. A simple website with good quality SEO can work wonders than a well-designed website without SEO. With that, comes this question: how are web design and SEO connected with each other? What makes web design affect SEO and what makes SEO affect web design? Keep reading this article to find out!

Bad design can hurt SEO and without SEO, it’s just plain design

When Michelle tells Maya that she can get a simple website without having to pay for a very expensive price, Maya explains that there are a website is not just designed – it is also optimised. When someone goes online and looks for an answer, a service or a product and they are led to your website, wow, that’s good! But! If they see your website and your website is poorly designed, chances are, your visitor may choose to leave your website without even engaging with your content. So, what does being poorly designed mean? A website is poorly designed if it is not readable with colours overlapping, bad selection of typefaces, and some features and layouts that seem to be off and just simply not pleasing to the eye. When this happens, they will return to the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to find a better answer to their query. This action is also called bouncing or “pogo sticking”, which tells search engines that their query was not satisfied and you weren’t the right answer or solution to their search. Google's RankBrain update picks up these behavioural signals so that it can continuously optimise the algorithm to rank the best results. If your design is turning people off, your rankings will drop.

However, if you focus on creating a good looking web design without using SEO for your website, your website doesn’t have a chance at good search rankings and very few people may ever get to see it. Simply put, when your target audience is typing certain keywords looking for your products on search engine; however, if you are not using SEO techniques for your website, no matter how good your website design is, search engine may have a hard time indexing your website.