As a local Surrey digital agency, Thunderbolt Digital are experts when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques that can help increase your organic rankings in Google and get more traffic to your site! However, everyone wants to make sure that their site is also functional and aesthetically pleasing, which is where some SMEs run into trouble.
Our SEO Surrey team understand it’s vital to balance rankings and web design when it comes to your site, as good SEO allows potential clients to find your site and visit it, but aesthetically pleasing design and good UX (user experience) keeps them around and can lead to conversions – having one without the other will hinder your business massively!
Making your site mobile responsive can help with both of these, as good design is thought to be inseparable from mobile responsiveness these days, and since Google released an update last year (also known as mobilegeddon) that meant non-responsive sites would get lower rankings than sites that properly catered to mobile users.
Some websites are starting to create weirder navigation methods in an effort to be original and creative, but sometimes UX and SEO needs to be prioritised – and this is one of those times! Navigation that’s difficult to find or use can frustrate users, and sites that are difficult to crawl won’t score highly for SEO and will rank lower in search results.
People are highly visual, and can be encouraged, swayed, or put off by design elements and various aesthetics, but the same cannot be said for crawlers! People who actually view your site are best to judge design elements, but when it comes to SEO, search engine crawlers don’t ‘see’ any images – what’s important to them is text! This means that if your site has sacrificed text (that could have been keyword optimised) in favour of images, then your rankings could suffer a hit. A way to rectify this is by adding Alt Text to images, which allows you to essentially optimise any images for your keywords and allow them to be crawled by search engines properly.