Why Your Website Design Shouldn’t Conflict With SEO

A lot of people have launched a new website design, with all sorts of cool features, images and so on…only to notice that it doesn’t get any traffic. “We’ve have all these cool animated features!” the refrain goes, “and all those cool links at the bottom of the page. Where did all of our traffic go?!”

It isn’t that you shouldn’t have a professional, quality website. It isn’t that your site shouldn’t have high-quality images. It isn’t that your site should look like you got it from GeoCities…if you’re old enough to get that reference. However, it’s more that you don’t want your site design to conflict with SEO.

Ask any decent SEO services company, and one thing they’ll tell you is that some people get hung up on how the website looks, to the point that they sabotage optimization efforts and potential. How can you make sure that doesn’t happen? Let’s go over that a little more.

Keep Code To Text Ratio Restrained

One of Google’s ranking factors when it comes to technical function (as well as on-page optimization) is the code to text ratio.

Why is this important?

For one thing, it tells Google that there is a whole lot of stuff on a particular page but there isn’t a whole lot of substance. Think of it like soft drinks. There’s a whole lot of calories, but basically no nutrition to speak of. If you tried to live on Coca-Cola alone, you’d probably die. So, when you install fancy visual effects and so on…they figure your site is all hat and no cattle.

The other reason, and this is a point that you’ll find any SEO agency hammer on about, is that stuff like that doesn’t translate well to mobile. If you haven’t caught on yet, more people are looking at websites and looking for things on their mobile phones and at that, they’re looking for those things using a voice search.

Cool carousel of images, bro. What the heck am I supposed to do with that when I search for something by saying “Hey Google. What are some good Thai restaurants in Seattle”?

Mobile Content and Desktop Content Must Be The Same

Something you might be tempted to do is to hide certain elements from your mobile site that are fully present on your desktop site. Not a bad idea…but you had better make sure that all your desktop content is available as mobile content.

Google doesn’t like people hiding things. They may not see WHAT you’re hiding…but they can tell that you ARE hiding something and that makes them suspicious. It might be popups. It might be something worse, such as a hidden media player playing music.

And why, pray-tell, do a lot of sites get penalized for having drastically less content on their mobile site than on their desktop site?

Responsive design. Website elements that respond to user behavior. Oh, we know how much you like how Wix makes your website look. We know that you’ve heard responsive pop-ups can actually help net more conversions…but that’s with desktop users.

It isn’t that responsive design is completely bad for your SEO. It’s more that it has to be employed judiciously, and more to the point it has to be done in such a way that it scales to mobile or that your mobile site doesn’t lack content that your desktop site has on account of responsive design.

Bad Page Speed = Bad For Your Rankings

The more features are built into a website, the slower your page speed (the amount of time it takes for a browser to load a page of your website) and the worse for your rankings.

This is bad on two fronts. First, Google believes that people who use their search engine have a better experience with web pages that load quickly for them. Google wants to provide a good service, meaning delivering the best of the web in their search results. If users don’t get good search results, they’ll go back to Yahoo! or Bing or whomever.

And they’re right. When people are surveyed about what causes them to abandon a website, slow load times are one of the chief complaints.

Secondly, a website that takes forever to load on a desktop will also take forever to load on a mobile phone browser. This point gets hammered on about a lot by SEO service companies and industry experts, and that’s because Google and other search engines are concerned about it more so than ever.

There’s usually a direct correlation between complicated design and load times. The more stuff you build into a site, the longer they become.

Once again, it isn’t that your site shouldn’t look good; it should. It isn’t that you can’t come up with innovative and helpful website features that help your customers; you can and you should. It’s more that you have to be careful with what you add to your site. It can’t compromise website function or mobile scaling, or else your rankings will suffer for it.