For your website to get a lot of organic traffic, you will need to tweak it a bit to optimize it for search engines. When you ask web designers for advice, they will usually tell you about technical SEO and mention stuff like keywords and meta tags. While these are important, there are also other web design tricks to boost your SEO that aren’t as commonly known.
1. Create separate local landing pages
Most of the business you are likely to get will be from customers in your area. It makes sense to boost your local SEO. You can do this by including your name, address, and phone number on your site. However, what are you supposed to do if your company has offices or stores in multiple cities? In that situation, we’d recommend hiring an affordable web designer to make individual landing pages for each of your locations. For example, if your UK business has offices in Manchester and London, dedicated landing pages which mention the addresses individually will get you more hits on local searches.
2. Have a blog
Google will give your site a high rank if you offer valuable information to your website visitors. That’s why blogs can be a great way of boosting SEO since they can host your featured articles. Content creation is an integral part of any SEO strategy; however, there are a few additional web design tricks to boost your SEO that you can utilize if you have a blog.
You can write articles that highlight the usefulness of your products and services. Of course, you should be careful and avoid being overly promotional. Make sure to write informative articles, but you can also include links to your store when you mention solutions for the problems users might be facing. This can help you build a strong network of interconnected pages. You can also collaborate with other websites by inviting guest writers and using your blog to build backlinks.
3. Engage users in conversation
When it comes to SEO, you will frequently hear designers mention the importance of user engagement. Most designers talk in broad strokes and generalize user engagement to include any form of interaction with your site. However, Google pays special attention to websites where users actively participate in meaningful interactions with each other and the site itself. One of the best ways to achieve this is to engage users in the conversation since the search engine algorithm holds that in high regard.
Here are a few web design tricks to boost your SEO and engage users:
- Have a comments section. Write open-ended questions in your blog articles and ask your users for their opinions.
- Host user reviews and testimonials. This is a great way to showcase your dedication and professionalism. However, you will need to address negative comments and swiftly take care of customer issues.
- Use polls and questioners. Both can be great ways of getting additional user interaction and important feedback from your customers.
- Implement widgets and single button sharing. If you are trying to engage users on your site, widgets can be an excellent way to keep them from leaving your pages. Single-button sharing can make it easy for users to spread your content across the internet and continue the conversation on other platforms.
4. Make every page on your website count
Designing a website can be a lot of hard work. As tempting as it may be to take shortcuts, you should avoid cookie-cutter templates with pages that serve no purpose. Work with your web designer to develop an elegant design where every page is unique and contributes something important to your website.
This means that you should avoid duplicate content since that can result in a negative SEO penalty. Remove repetitive wording from your pages. Make sure that each page has enough unique text and content. If the information on a page can be found elsewhere on your site, why create it in the first place? There are better ways to build internal links that won’t result in negative SEO.
5. Use popups to boost conversions
Some users aren’t going to be thrilled at the prospect of website popups. However, the truth is that they work well to increase your conversion rates. If you are still on the fence, you can consider the data and look at the statistics on how popups help your business grow. Popups don’t have to be irritating or intrusive; they can be designed in a way that helps the user by guiding them through the important actions on your site.
6. Compress your media files
Website speed is a critical factor when determining your rank on SERPs. Unfortunately, large media files can slow down your website and increase load times, especially on mobile devices. Luckily, you can apply a few clever web design tricks to boost your SEO and speed up your site. Since images and videos are the biggest culprits of slow load times, here’s what you can do:
- Compress the files to be smaller. Jpeg images can easily be compressed to 90% or 80% without a noticeable drop in quality.
- Crop and reduce the size. If you are going to be using images in thumbnails, you are much better off using a smaller resolution.
- Use web-friendly file formats. Always pick the right tool for the job. Know when to use a .png and when a .jpg is better. The same can be said about video formats. For example, .webm is smaller and faster but lacks iPhone support.
- Embed videos instead of hosting. Video files tend to be large. Instead of uploading the video file on your site, you can host it on YouTube and use an embed code.
The bottom line
As you can see, SEO isn’t necessarily complicated to understand. Whatever makes your website function better and provides more value to the end-user will usually result in an SEO improvement. However, it’s still handy to know a few web design tricks to boost your SEO.
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