You’ve spent months developing your product, building your social media presence, and designing your website. But you’re still not attracting the audience you want. What’s the next step?

Even with the best strategies, a core component of your business will be the organic customers you generate through internet searches.

This is where the interplay between SEO and web design becomes important. For your website to be visible on the search engine results page, it needs to both adhere to a few basic principles of SEO and be visually appealing.

During the process of designing your website, make sure that your development team includes SEO services in the process. We’ve put together the following guide explaining the advantages of SEO.

Basics of SEO

If you’re new to SEO services or have been out of the game for a while, here’s a quick refresher.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way to increase the amount of organic traffic you get. You do this by making your website appear higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

Search engines decide which website ranks the highest using a process called indexing. Search engine bots “crawl” websites to collect the information that will make up the index.

Then, search engine algorithms analyze your websites’ index, along with the other 4.38 billion indexed pages. If your website isn’t indexed, it won’t be able to appear on search engine results pages.

But even if bots do crawl your website and add it to their engine server’s index, it won’t do your site much good if you’re on the 10th search results page.

Your development team needs to integrate the following SEO components into your web design for you to see the results you want.

Visual Elements

Search engines like Google record the amount of time that a user spends on a page before exiting. This is largely dependent on how users interact with that website.

If a webpage is attractive and easy to use, a visitor will spend more time there.

While a design team may create a beautiful template for your website, it may not follow the ideal guidelines common to SEO for business growth

An SEO team knows that a website with a better SEO ranking typically will have quite a bit of white space. The more simple your design is, the more intuitive the user experience will be.

Certain factors are more important than others for the impression that your site gives to viewers.

40% of customers are attracted to the colors that business websites use more than any other element. Choosing the right colors will keep visitors engaged with your site. It may even increase sales.

Other best practices include using the same font throughout your website, keeping your background color muted, and following a heading hierarchy.

Quality Content & Link Creation

The more that visitors trust your website, the higher that search engines will rank it. The best ways to increase trust include one of two methods: consistently upload quality content and generate backlinks.

Quality content will encourage readers to spend more time on your site, showing search engines that your content is credible.

A website development team that offers SEO services will often have a content team that can create researched, well-written content to upload to your website’s blog on a weekly basis.

Most importantly, the team will include relevant keywords without overstuffing them into posts.

This may even lead website visitors to make a purchase on your website, a further indication to search engines that your site fulfilled their request.

Another way to gain trust involves using backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites that take visitors to your website. A few backlinks from other trusted websites will signal to search engines that your site is of the same caliber.

An SEO team can pursue a few strategies to generate backlinks.

They can pitch your products or company to digital publications that may be interested in writing about what you do. They can pay quality sources to include your website as a guest post in articles on their site. They can also create other websites and digital profiles for you that can link back to your website.

Optimization

Your website’s functionality needs to be working at its best in order to get the full benefits of SEO.

Website visitors will expect your website pages to load in a few seconds or less. While a website design team may make your site look beautiful, it also needs to load quickly.

A design team with an understanding of SEO will make sure your website gives visitors the information they need without making them wait. This will make your site rank much higher.

With mobile searches becoming one of the most popular ways to browse, a mobile-responsive platform is a necessary part of SEO for websites.

You should expect your development team to make your site work perfectly for anyone using the internet from their phone.

Advanced optimization options include schema markup, a way for your website to contextualize its content to help search engines crawl it more easily. If you’re in an especially competitive market, this may be a feature you want to discuss with your design team.

Start Using SEO Services

Your website’s design and SEO services should go hand in hand. The most successful sites will integrate both a visually appealing user experience and algorithm-friendly functionality.

Get in touch with our team to learn about how we can boost your website’s search engine result standing and transform the way you generate leads.