Did you know that website design can have a significant impact on the performance of your site across the search engines? As you go about optimising your website, you might find yourself focusing on page relevance, link building, keyword selection and other SEO metrics. However, you also need to think about how the design of the site will affect its search rankings.

Trust

Although trust factor is not an actual design element by itself, it relates to the impression users get from the overall functionality and design of your website. To this degree, everything your visitors see when they land on your website will tell them something about you – your level of professionalism, what makes you tick, and whether they can trust you to deliver quality products and services for their money. With a professionally designed website, therefore, you will get more visitors returning to your site and also more referrals. With Google now focusing on brand searches (the number of users searching Google for your brand name), this will, in turn, increase your search rankings.

Site Structure

For search engines to adequately index your content, you need a website with a sound structure. If your site is small, this won’t be too difficult. However, as it grows, you need to ensure that the structure makes it easy for both human visitors and crawler search bots to navigate through the website.

Additionally, you should aim for a design that has intuitive navigation menus and a structure in which users can move to where they want to with the fewest clicks possible. Where appropriate, therefore, add internal links into your website.

In the same way, never deviate from the theme you are using. Instead, let it flow all through the website and keep things in their correct channels. If Spiders are able to easily crawl all of the content available on your site, you’ll be better placed to rank for relevant search terms.

Page Speed

Google checks page speed as it ranks websites. Although the impact of page speed on SEO performance is debatable, you still need to ensure your website loads fast enough. In particular, page speed will really improve the user experience on your website, which will in turn raise your rank on search engines.

Responsiveness

Designing from an SEO perspective requires that you make your website responsive. This way, more people will be able to enjoy your site which will in turn encourage more social shares, return visits, and recommendations. All of these are metrics that Google takes into consideration while ranking websites.

If you want the greatest number of people to enjoy your site, you have to make sure that it can be accessed and it will work well irrespective of the device your users have. This way, desktop, tablet, and mobile users will be able to get the most out of your website, and you will enjoy higher search engine rankings.

So, there you have it – the main ways through which the design of your website will affect its search engine rankings. Use the information above to make any necessary changes to your website to help give your SEO efforts an extra boost!