Tech Tales Team
2025-06-12
If you were to suddenly change the background and text of your website to black, would it be garnering the same visits and clicks, if not more?
The answer is mostly no. A change like this would render your site completely unreadable.
While you may get initial clicks at first, your bounce rate would rise. With your user experience at stake, having a design that gives your users a hard time for your users to explore your offerings or learning about you can hurt your rankings.
Google asks website owners to keep a decent UX (User Experience) in order to make their users stay, albeit there’s no guarantee that a good UX can increase their rankings.
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Key Website Design Factors That Influence SEO
Your UX isn’t just the design; it’s about how your site works. Your page loading time, page structure, and how well it’s connected with other pages all matter. Here’s what to look out for when optimising your website design:
1. Site Speed
Retailers alone lose an estimated $2.6 billion annually due to slow websites. Optimizing images, streamlining code, and leveraging efficient hosting are all design decisions that directly impact your website’s speed and your rankings.
2. Mobile Optimization
With mobile-first indexing now the norm, Google prioritizes the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. A site that isn’t mobile-friendly risks lower rankings, higher bounce rates, and lost business, especially as mobile browsing continues to dominate.
3. Navigation and Structure
Now this one is a must-have for search engines. Well-structured menus, logical URL paths, and a strong hierarchy ensure that both people and bots can find your content easily. Having clean code and internal linking can further enhance crawlability, helping your pages get indexed and ranked faster.
4. Accessibility and Readability
Accessible design, such as readable fonts, high-contrast colors, and alt text for images, broadens your audience while improving your SEO. Google rewards sites that are easy to navigate and understand, and accessibility features help make sure your content reaches everyone, including users with disabilities.
5. Content Placement and On-Page Elements
Strategic content placement and using clear headings (like the H1, H2, H3, and so on) along with keyword-rich meta tags can help search engines understand your website’s structure and relevance.
How UX Fuels Your SEO Game
Your design could be viewed as part of the overall page experience, which affects rankings.
If your website has navigational/readability issues, significant enough to irk your visitors, it will result in an unusually high bounce rate.
This, in turn will signal Google that your site is not helpful UX-wise. That could result in a drop in rankings. Since Google and other search engines prioritize helping users above anything, they wouldn’t lead them to a site that’s not easy to use.
A great user experience (UX) can drive conversion rates up by as much as 400%. This can signal longer dwell times, lower bounce rates, and more pages per session, are all factors that search engines use to assess your site’s value.
Design and SEO: Two Sides of the Same Coin
SEO and web design are two sides of the same coin. Think of it as a restaurant. If you’ve done everything in your power to attract customers, such as doing tons of marketing, got people to talk about your menu and quality, but were to suddenly downgrade your seating experience, not a lot of customers would be happy as before. Small change, but big impact.
It’s important to understand that your SEO efforts are crucial to keep bringing in the traffic, while the design is required to help them stay, connect with you, and make informed decisions. A perfect balance of both will lead to effective branding, recall, and ultimately, more conversions.
Ready to improve your Website Experience?
Ready to not give up on your website yet? We’ll help you with the heavy lifting. At The Tech Tales, seo company in new zealand we’ll guide you on what your website needs, what your goals are, and how to get there. Contact us and we’ll reveal all this for free in our 30-min consultation.
