Two things must always be considered when putting your client’s website together – search engines and consumers. When consumers search for products online, your client must have an optimized SEO-friendly website to ensure that it shows up in Google results. Additionally, the website must be a creative, user-friendly design to allow consumers to easily find the products they are looking for. Finding a balance between SEO friendly and user-friendly can cause conflict for site owners. To learn more about different website elements should be considered and how to balance these two goals, continue reading:
Website Navigation
Web designers and developers are concerned about a page’s visual aspects and how these aspects are interacted with by the consumer. Developers are generally focused on how the site feels, looks, and the user experience. They prefer to keep things simple. However, SEO marketers are concerned with the navigation efforts with search engine optimization.
To focus on these two issues, a site must be easy to navigate and optimized for search engines. To start, have a look at what ranks on the first page of Google for your keywords, and check out what the pages are going. Also, consider cross-linking product pages with other areas on the site, such as FAQs or blog posts. Utilizing a content hierarchy to organize the pages through subcategories and categories.
Content
Content refers to everything on the website, from animations to text. Content is what engages and informs the consumer during their experience until they make a purchase. Not all content is equally created according to Google. Consider a ‘.jpg’ image with a text overlay for example. Unless the text is entered in HTML text code, Google is unable to read it and only see the image.
Without have an understanding of how content impacts the site layout, design, and functionality, SEO marketers usually push for more content. These SEO developers should be encouraged to understand and consider the content funnel for the client’s store and create copy that will not disagree with the user experience.
SEO teams and development teams should work together in the placement of SEO-optimized copy to ensure there is no conflict with overall or UX design.
Website and Product Images
One thing many developers often do is add high-quality images, regardless of size. This can slow down the sites load time. On the other hand, SEO marketers want to improve load time with smaller, compressed images. Since the majority of product pages contain many images of each product, development teams do not want to compress every image they upload.
Thankfully, technology advancements have made image compression tools much better. This makes it more convenient to reduce the image without sacrificing quality, which in turn, improves your SEO.
The Thin Line Between Design and SEO
The gap between SEO optimization and web development must be bridged to allow for a well-designed, SEO-friendly website. It is important to encourage both teams to work together from the beginning to avoid the need for last minute major changes.
Cultura Interactive agency is an award-winning Fort Lauderdale website design studio that strives to create unique and attractive websites, and develop strategic digital online marketing campaigns for our clients.
Our team of professionals specialize in web design, logo design, WordPress development, eCommerce, responsive web design, mobile apps, SEO, social media marketing, pay per click advertising and more. Learn more about our services or contact us for a personal interview.
