The true nature of the friction between SEO and Web Design tends to get less foggy as we begin to grasp what they are all about, how they collaborate, and the point where they more often come into disagreement with each other. For that matter, we need precise definitions, which do not lead us astray in wordy descriptions, of these widely celebrated practices.
SEO is a practice of writing content that serves the ambitiously sought-after purposes such as the quality of being informative and natural while driving your website to the top results by making it effortless for the search engine to crawl through your website’s content.
The website design, however, serves to inform and add a touch of delight through visual details that should not ideally exceed the bar of being just about enough in quantity. Design is crafted and put together to help the user find the desired information that may induce and lead that person to accomplish some particular task or purchase.
The True Nature of the Dispute Between SEO and Web Design
Being an owner of a website, you need to penetrate through the designer’s and the SEO content writer’s minds to get a clear idea as to how both want to shape your website and what essential points they drive home as they pitch in their side of the story to get the better of their self-conceived opponent.
In the pursuit of visual appeal and the user experience, web designers passionately emphasize keeping the layout minimalistic, less pompous, and neatly simplistic. Such exquisite advocacy of their perspective sidelines the fact that it’s the content that the search engine crawlers go through to index every page, a phenomenon that decides how far up your website will go and the fate of other factors such as Search visibility.
To end such profound disagreements and land on some common ground, we have to discuss different website elements to suggest something fruitful to both parties. So let’s dive right into it.
1. The Navigation Aspect of the Website
When we ventured down the designer’s perspective and how they visualize things, it was established that they conceive the “interactivity” of a website to be a fundamental feature, which induces the users to spend quality time on the website besides other aesthetically appealing impacts.
And it is backed by a statistic that tells us that mobile users have outnumbered users fixated on their desktop or laptop screens.
On the other hand, the SEO team seems to devote their efforts to optimizing for search engines.
You might be wondering why each subcategory even exists if we can merge the products and label them appropriately.
There are so many longtail keywords that are searched daily in billions, and such keywords are part of these subcategories because it means there’s a page devoted to a particular type of product. In this case, it becomes straightforward for Google to rank you based on a targeted keyword.
So the key takeaway from this statement is that there should be subcategory pages that target the keywords and get your website higher on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
For larger eCommerce websites, the site navigation becomes more significant because they embody the standard navigation categories that further dissect themselves into a range of subcategories targeting multiple products.
The factors that play an essential role in deciding the efficiency of a website at any given moment are its organic search visibility and interactivity that helps people navigate through your website and complete the action they came for.
Now that’s where the collision occurs between two schools of thought, one in the pursuit of rendering excellent UX while the other seeking better ranking through search engine ranks. Finding a solution that provides the user with ease that can help him do whatever he wants and an improved SEO ranking is the common ground both teams have to achieve.
2. Establishing the Hierarchical Structure of Content
The fact that the website owner has a page specifically in charge of a particular type of product gives Google the signal that the content on this website is thorough, a factor that a search engine as extensive as Google always rewards.
To abide by this principle, you need to ensure you have a neat arrangement of items, products, or other entities, all caged in one subcategory page attached to some relevant category page.
One key practicality of this idea could be that if you have more than ten relevant products mingled within other subcategories, consider making a new subcategory page devoted to one type of keyword. It will help the website in terms of a healthy SEO score.
3. Linking of Standard Category Pages
The smooth navigation, put in practice with caution, lets the user flow seamlessly through the content and make direct ventures across the pages. A user has a delightful experience from, let’s say, getting directed from a product’s page to blogs or FAQs to get further details and avail from the reverse traversal.
It all seems so well coordinated once we see how the relevant information can help you purchase without having to commit to anything extraordinary in terms of searching.
4. Moderation: A New Recipe for Success
This era is defined by the thoughtless amalgamation of colors and designs, something you are confronted with daily on telly ads, social media flexing, and horrendously littered websites and applications. So to presume that designing means using thick bands of colors to seem appealing is a birth of a satirical idea. The designs nowadays are elegantly minimalist, catching folks’ eyes with mere flares and bare-bone structures.
In the same way, wordiness that doesn’t serve the explanation right is also futile. The flashy nature of design and extravagantly used words can leave folks in a state of dissociation.
The task of the SEO and web design team has come down to doing the necessary and not forcing the issue.
You might be confused about the minimalist usage of words and how they can be employed in SEO.
Let’s say you run an online bookstore, and antique philosophical books are your specialty, meaning you sell them in bulk than any other product in your bookstore. The sanest thing would be to keep yourself focused on such books and also add science books to your store as well. This way, you will avoid the “antique philosophical books” keyword being redundant on your website and have a decent range of keywords to target, a sign of letting Google know that you are optimizing your online store naturally.
5. The Wise Selection of Visual Elements
People often fall prey to glimmering fonts and other shiny animations that make your website seem dynamic, carried mainly by the facade of the visuals. It leads to people stuffing their websites with such visual elements disorganizedly, eventually resulting in increased load time and highly affected SEO parameters. Designers who specialize in such blunders drag the website down in Google ranks and provide an awkward navigation experience to whoever happens to stumble on some of its pages by virtue of a mere accident.
It is ideal to use visual elements with a coordinated plan. Do not be forgetful in shrinking the uploaded images and merging them with content so that Google crawlers have an easy time sifting through the content, ensuring the website is worth the first-page ranking.
6. Opting for the Modern SEO Keyword Approach
Many search engines are continually evolving the advisable keyword usage practices and a rank tracker facilitates their correct usage. In doing so, they are persistently de-ranking the websites that are mindlessly stuffed with keywords.
Modern SEO content writing entails an informative and natural flow that helps users and doesn’t seem ridiculously charged with unnatural words. The approach that fetches good rankings has been explicitly devised by Google, and any attempt to get around this ethical practice is penalized right away.
Many successful content writers have been passionately advocating the idea of focusing on effective writing that flows naturally and serves some purpose. They believe that keywords will see themselves naturally becoming part of your writing right away without any forceful adjustments.
7. Checking if Google Crawls Your Website
It’s a simple but effective way to see if Google bots, also known as crawlers, are catching up on your website’s content. In Google, type in a longtail term or phrase from any of your subcategory sites. If your website comes at the top or in one of the top results, then it’s okay. Otherwise, you need to troubleshoot your website because sites built using JavaScript are not ideal for Google crawling.
It is common knowledge that if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load correctly, more than 40% of consumers will leave and go to another.
Final Words
Designers’ output and SEO scores mix well nowadays to provide quality UX and high rankings.
Mobile devices have inundated the digital arena, which is why we’ve seen both of these teams collaborate. They both have overlapping long-term goals that can render excellent fortune to both parties.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
