Importance of SEO in Web Design and How We Approach It

The importance of SEO in web design far outstretches eye-catching visual designs and cool animations. This is why we recommend emphasising SEO factors straight from the get-go. A bottom-up approach to SEO will ensure that digital marketing goals are met and the new website has all the foundation to rank better in search engines.

Consumers today rely heavily on Search Engines to help them find what they are looking for. As such, every website built for customer acquisition, retention or even for brand reputation needs to have an SEO strategy in place from the ground up.

Here we try to discuss the importance of SEO in Web Design and why we almost always go through an SEO Strategy exercise for any new web design project.

In this post, we’ll look at:

SEO in simple terms

Search Engine Optimisation, which we know as SEO, is the practice of increasing both the quality & quantity of website traffic and improving your brand exposure through organic search results. In other terms, ranking websites to the right people at the right time without having to rely on paid ads (PPC). Besides, it’s proven that users prefer organic search results over paid ads.

SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines.

SEO is about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they are using and the type of content they wish to consume. Understanding these needs will allow you to connect to the right audience with your product or service offerings.

Just knowing your audience’s intent is not enough though, you also need to act on those intentions by delivering your website in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand your offerings.

A study has shown that around 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. It’s rare for users to know what they want. They may have an idea, but they need a search engine to guide them.

“Search Engine friendly website” you say

I am sure you have heard the term “Search Engine friendly websites” being thrown around a lot in the digital sphere. So what does it actually mean?

Being search engine friendly essentially means that Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo can efficiently crawl each page on the website, effectively interpret the website content, and index those web pages in their database. Once indexed, they can serve the most relevant pages to their visitors based on their search queries.

In other words, when you use SEO best practices to build a website, you make it easier for search engines to crawl and index the pages on your website. SEO in web design improves your odds of securing dominating spots in search engine result pages or “SERPs”, bringing you more traffic and conversion and ultimately revenue.

At Underline, we aim to seamlessly integrate SEO into our web design and development processes, ensuring that every website we build has the best chance of ranking well in SERPs. This is because SEO is not an optional extra for us—it is woven into every step of our process.

Importance of SEO in Web Design?

SEO is Google’s way of determining which sites deserve to rank highly for each query entered into its search engine.

Users trust search engines and achieving a top spot in search engine rankings signals to searchers that your site is a credible source. Today, organic search drives more than 50 percent of all website traffic. That’s more than paid and social combined.

Underline – being a leading digital marketing agency in London, we aim to seamlessly integrate SEO into our web design and development processes, ensuring that every website we build has the best chance of ranking well in SERPs.

1. Increased organic traffic.

Did you know that less than 30 percent of users navigate past the first page of search results? This further drops down to only 5% going beyond page 3!

That being the case, you must have an SEO-friendly website to maximise your organic traffic and show up in the top positions of search results. Securing the top spots in search results demonstrates “social proof” that your website is the best place to answer your audience’s queries.

Search engines like Google are constantly tweaking their search algorithm and ranking system to ensure that the most relevant sites rise to the top, so there is a lot of convincing to be done.

2. Improved customer experience.

Once you manage to successfully attract more visitors, the next biggest hurdle would be to keep those visitors on the site.

Inconsistent designs, confusing navigational structure, unreliable contents and baffling CTAs are just a few reasons visitors would simply bounce off your site without giving your site a second thought.

A WordPress SEO web design pretty much guarantees that every inch of the site is consistent and user-friendly on any device. Your customers will have no trouble finding what they came looking for.

Although customer experience is at the heart of everything we do, SEO allows us to take that a step further.

3. More conversions.

It is crucial to attract potential customers to your website and keep them there. However, it’s inevitable that you must also be able to “seal the deal” with them.

SEO web design also focuses on conversion rate optimisation (CRO)—it enables you to do something with all of this high-quality traffic.

A solid SEO website design guides your site visitors through the site’s internal links with ease. It makes performing the desired action—such as scheduling an appointment or placing an order—a no-brainer.

4. It is a long-term strategy.

SEO web design is a sustainable investment that continues to pay dividends as long as it is properly set up and maintained.

With monthly SEO maintenance, you will not only be able to secure your current position in search results, but you will also see a snowball effect as the returns start to multiply. On the other hand, other online marketing channels require ongoing funding to drive traffic to your website.

Our Approach to SEO in Web Design

For us, SEO is not an optional extra – it is woven into every step of our process.

SEO in web design consists of multiple strategies, best practices and actions, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines. Below are some basic outlines to help you understand how the team at Underline tackles small business SEO in web design.

This process is split into two parts: on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.

On-Page Optimisation

On-page SEO in web design consists of anything you can control on your own website to improve your rankings. This refers to things like site speed, keyword presence, header text, and so on.

Our on-page optimisation comprises web SEO tactics that affect how search engines crawl and interpret your web content. These include:

Conducting keyword research to find important, relevant, lucrative keywords and creating content based on them.
Optimising HTML Tags, such as title tags, meta description tag, heading (H1-H6) tags, image alt tags and schema markup, correctly.
Creating a URL structure that is both user and search engine friendly.
Building a solid internal linking structure, navigation, and information architecture (IA) that allows search engines to crawl the website while still meeting the expectations of your users.
Creating high-quality content that can be used to acquire quality backlinks from trustworthy websites.
Focusing on responsiveness to deliver a great user experience across devices.
Designing a visually appealing website that reflects your brand identity.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page SEO consists of anything done on external websites that may influence your rankings.

Our off-page optimisation techniques help your website acquire more qualified links and social mentions, which boosts your website’s authority, increases your search rankings and bring you more traffic. These include:

Use competitor analysis to learn more about your current and potential competitors’ tactics to rank in search results.
Use keyword-rich anchors in your backlinks.
Acquiring backlinks from websites with high domain authority.
Acquiring links to content on your website that is buried deep within it.

Get in touch with us to meet your website SEO objectives

When done correctly and integrated into the web design process, SEO adds excellent value to the website by making it more search engine friendly, improving customer experience, and helping it achieve its online marketing objectives.

We understand the importance of SEO in any web design project. As such, any website design project we undertake, we start off by building an SEO strategy from the ground up. We ensure your website at least has the foundation required to rank higher in search engines.

We are an award-winning Digital Agency. We specialise in SEO optimised Website Design and Digital Marketing. We are not only known for creating stunning website designs but are also highly regarded as a leading digital marketing agency in London.