Why Your Web Design and SEO Teams Need to Work Together

If you ask multiple people what makes one website more successful than another one, the number of answers you get might be the same as the number of individuals you ask. Although that’s a possibility, two things are often cited as the reason a given website is a hit – web design and SEO. The problem is that they’re usually not given equal credit for the success of the same website.

In many cases, a business will invest more resources into web design or SEO depending on what’s viewed as more important. Similarly, web design and SEO may be considered two separate, unrelated activities that are performed to design or redesign the same site. 

One contrary fact is true in today’s connected marketplace – web design and SEO are equally important to the ultimate success of a website. And they shouldn’t be siloed and handled independently of each other. Instead, your SEO and web design teams should work hand-in-hand because, whether they realize it or not, they are the perfect partners whose joint work can take your website to an enviable level of success others can only dream of achieving.

To Do Them Right, SEO and Web Design Must Be Done Together

User experience is one of the factors Google and other search engines use to determine how sites are ranked in their search engine results pages. If you’re doing them right, web design and SEO will combine to create a UX that pleases your site’s visitors and impresses search engines. When you do them separately, they will not yield a website that’s as successful as it could have been.

Search engine optimization and web design involve areas that overlap. SEO includes all the activities you undertake to attract high quality, organic traffic to your website, which includes how your site is designed. Web design impacts the effectiveness of your SEO because it influences things such as the layout of your content. 

Because the two are so interrelated, you need to do web design and SEO together if you want to do them right. And doing them together is as simple as hiring our Boston, MA digital marketing agency to handle your search engine optimization along with your web design.

Increase the Mobile-Friendliness of Your Website

To better understand how important it is for your web design and SEO teams to have a seamless working relationship, it’s helpful to consider a few areas where they can – and should – work together. One such area is your website’s mobile-friendliness.

Mobile overtook desktop in internet usage several years ago, and it’s only dominated the landscape even more recently. While it’s widely known that most searches are performed on mobile devices these days, too many businesses haven’t prioritized mobile-friendliness in the context of their web design.

It won’t matter how successful your SEO is at attracting people to your website if they’re using a mobile device to view your site and they have a different experience than they would viewing it on a desktop. In this sense, your web design can directly undercut your SEO efforts by causing mobile visitors to navigate away prematurely.

When our team employs web design and SEO to design or redesign your site, you can rest assured that your website will have a responsive design so it provides the same UX across all of today’s devices and those that will be invented in the future. You can also rest easy knowing that the design of your website will support your SEO efforts by providing a UX that will inspire people to stick around and keep coming back for more.

Improve Load Speed

Many things contribute to the user experience people will have when they visit your website and load speed is one of them. As you probably guessed, SEO and web design both influence load speed and therefore impact UX.

Today, SEO requires content to have more than just some relevant keywords scattered throughout to rank well. How that content is presented also affects how it ranks in SERPs. While SEOs often decide how content is formatted, they shouldn’t do so without consulting their web design peers. 

Web designers will lay out web pages so that they can load quickly by compressing images, removing JavaScript and optimizing code. They may even use the same or very similar page designs so users can move between pages quicker. SEOs need to be aware of these things so they can create content that will “fit” web pages seamlessly.

Our web design pros and SEO experts will work together to create content and page formats that will allow your webpages to load faster. And a better UX will be the happy result.

Better Site Map Fluidity

One of the best ways to judge how closely your web design and SEO teams are working together is to look at your website’s sitemap. Your sitemap is exactly what its name implies – it’s a link- or roadmap that visually depicts the relationships between the pages on your website. If the structure of your sitemap seems random or nonsensical, it’s likely that’s how your site is perceived by visitors and search engines.

A sitemap is the product of both web design and SEO, or at least it should be. The content created on the SEO side will determine the anchor text that takes users and crawlers from one page to another. A webpage’s design determines the placement of that text and has built-in links that will lead to other pages. If your SEO and web design aren’t in sync, your sitemap may come across as more of a Rorschach inkblot test rather than a map that clearly depicts your website’s underpinnings.

You won’t have to worry about your sitemap being confused for a personality test when you choose GoingClear, however. We’ll ensure your web design and SEO are aligned to produce a sitemap that’s easy for users and search engines to follow.

Trust GoingClear with Your SEO and Web Design in Boston and Beyond

If you want to enjoy the benefits that only the marriage of web design and SEO can yield, we invite you to partner with our Boston, MA digital marketing agency. GoingClear is your trusted source to bring your SEO and web design where they need to be – together.