Nowadays, it’s a requirement for any company to have a website because it’s an excellent way to market themselves and their offerings. Naturally, a website should be appropriately designed because if users see a messy website, they’ll move to other choices, making you lose out on a potential business deal.
Aside from losing prospects, lousy web design can also lead to other issues, particularly search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of using relevant keywords to rank high on search engines. While it may seem that using keywords and web design have no relation to each other, this isn’t the case because if your site is poorly designed, prospects wouldn’t want to stay longer on your site. This affects your SEO and its capability to rank on search engines.
For this reason, one must be aware of web design-related mistakes that can affect SEO for the worse. These include:
#1 – Lousy Website Navigation
Navigation is one of the essential elements of a website because it allows users to move around without hassle. It will be more challenging to discover and browse your products without proper navigation.
Additionally, navigation is also vital because it can help improve your bounce rates. The bounce rate is when visitors leave your website immediately after arriving on it. If you want to reduce it, you should have a proper navigation system because it will help guide visitors throughout your website.
#2 – Slow Loading Speed
Slow loading speed affects not just SEO but also your bounce rates. It’s important to note that bounce rates are getting higher with each passing year, so you should reduce them as much as possible.
The solution for this is to reduce your load time because the longer it takes for your website to load, the more impatient users get. As a result, they will leave your site. Factors that affect load time include graphics, scripts, and rich content. Each of them should be reduced as much as possible to load your website quickly.
#3 – Not Optimizing for Mobile
It’s hard to see someone who doesn’t use a smartphone these days. Search engines nowadays take mobile-friendliness into account when ranking websites. Also, more users access the internet from mobile devices, so it’s essential to make your website mobile-friendly.
To make your website mobile-friendly, you should optimize the website’s elements and design. For example, your website should have a desktop version and a mobile version that adapts to the screen sizes of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. You can also reduce the size of your images and optimize your text, so it’s easier to read from a mobile device.
#4 – Bad Content Layouts
If you want to rank well on search engines, your content must be easy to read and consume, with many keywords and key phrases. In addition to that, your content must have a proper flow.
If your content has bad formatting, visitors will find it harder to read it. The visitors will get annoyed and leave your site. They may also not revisit your site in the future and recommend others to avoid it, resulting in your website losing considerable traffic.
#5 – Adding Irrelevant Images
Images should be relevant to the contents of your site. This is because users like images that relate directly to their searches. For example, if a user searches for sneakers, it won’t make sense if your site contains pictures of kittens.
If you’re using images, you should ensure that they provide real value for your users. In addition, you should also ensure that your pictures aren’t too small or too big since this can affect image quality and load time. It’s important to note that an image’s size has to be following the size of the webpage where it’s used.
#6 – Not Having a Product or Service Page
This is a significant mistake because if you want to rank well on search engines, you need to be able to provide product or service information on your site. When your products and services are listed on your site, this will help you increase your site’s authority, hence improving your rankings.
#7 – Not Including Business Information
If you want your site to be successful, you should make sure that it includes your business information, like the company address and phone number, among others. These are important because they can help users identify your business.
#8 – Adding Disruptive Popups
When using popups, you should ensure that they’re adequately designed and relevant to your site’s subject. Also, they shouldn’t be disruptive to visitors, so they will want to click them. Otherwise, they will just go away, and you’ll lose potential customers.
Conclusion
As you can see, SEO and web design go hand in hand. This is why a company needs to ensure that its web design acts with its SEO efforts. This way, you’ll be able to create a website that ranks well on search engines and attracts more prospects.
If you’re looking for web design companies in Vancouver, Honeycomb Creative can help you! We provide comprehensive web design solutions to ensure that your business will have a functional and aesthetically pleasing website, all for an affordable price. Simply go to our website to request a quote!
Back to Blog