Designers and artists doing website design in India often think that the laws governing SEO or search engine optimization are not for them. However, as per a new article from Association for Computing Machinery, the reason for negative feedback a website often receives lies in its design. So, it is needless to say that how your website is designed will affect how people see it and, ultimately, it’s ranking.
The Hidden Defects In Websites That People Often Overlook
In today’s world, the lines separating graphic design, content, and SEO often overlap. It is an old-school thought that these factors of a website development run parallel to each other; today, as any good company offering SEO services will tell you, their work is interdependent and not free of each other. That has boosted the marketing side but has also opened doors to many mistakes that affect the ranking. This is why, when you hire a WordPress web design company India, the first thing you need to see is if your website has any of the following mistakes and then rectify them.
A website not being mobile-friendly
If you are keeping track of recent updates of Google since 2020, you will find a common theme in them. Talk to any design service agency that will tell you how important your website loads better on mobiles than on PC or personal computers. But why does this focus on mobile devices? The reasons are:
- Since 2018, there has been a surge in the numbers of people accessing the internet through their mobile devices compared to those who do it through their PC or laptop.
- If the pages they are trying to read do not load in the first three seconds, there will be a bounce rate of 32%.
According to Kissmetrics, problems faced by mobile users when they access a website and how they respond include:
- Nearly 47% of them expect the website to load within 2 seconds.
- 40% of them will leave if the website doesn’t load by 3 seconds.
- An overwhelming 75% of them won’t visit a website anymore that failed to load or perform previously.
- A website loses 16% of its traffic if their loading time increase by 1%.
So, from these surveys and research, you can gauge the importance of your website being mobile-friendly and how it will impact your SEO, like any good SEO services India company will tell you. User experience or UX is a big focus area for Google, as they have declared it in their recent Page Experience Update. It is already being used for mobile device search, and by next year, that is 2022, it will be live for desktop searches as well.
As for what UX is, it is the process of understanding the interactions and feelings of users after they engage with a product. This is incorporated in the design of a website to increase its ease-of-use feature. Now that Google is judging a website’s design based on the three core web vitals, the overall user-friendliness of a website is of tremendous importance. So make sure when you hire WordPress developers from from India, they are very clear on this point.
Only by using UX design principles and page experience ranking signals can you stay ahead of others on your website!
Responsive retrofitting getting defied by large images
As you start to update your website to fit the smaller mobile and other similar devices, one of your biggest blocks will be the images on your landing page. If they are very large, it will be like trying to fit a jug of water into a glass! Just like it will overflow when you pour a jug of water into a glass, your landing page with hundreds of images will make the page illegible and small on a mobile device, and hard for the user to navigate. If this is an issue with your website, you need to hire a good website design India company and update your pages.
Recent research done by Searchmetrics showed that when it comes to the top 10 websites in the search result page or SERP, most of them had less than 3 images per page on their website. Unfortunately, more is not as beautiful for search engines as any good web design company will tell you. One of the easiest ways to know if this is a mistake in your website or not is by using Google’s Page Speed Insights feature. It can show you which elements are heavy in your website design and which images need to be compressed. Using this insight, you can increase the SEO-friendliness of your website by a whopping 50%.
Not adding value to the text added to an image
When you hire WordPress developers India to streamline the text in your website, that is a smart move on your part. However, don’t make the common mistake everyone makes: adding texts to the image. The Google algorithm cannot read the text embedded in the image, and hence it doesn’t make any difference to your SEO. You need to add text to the page design code to make a difference. When the text of the image is in the code, the algorithm can easily read it, and hence it will affect your rank if you have used the correct keywords. Another important plus point you will get when you do this is that it can be translated to another language if your page visitor doesn’t understand your language. Therefore, it means more people can access your website. Other aspects also need to be paid attention to like:
- We all know what alt tag is; it is the description of the image added to the page’s HTML code. Adding alt tags to your image makes search engines understand the image’s relevance. With image search gaining popularity, make sure you have an appropriate alt tag in all your images to stay ahead of others. Furthermore, Google also reads the file name, so don’t name the files arbitrarily but use relevant keywords so spiders can easily notice them.
- Use of proper color combination. As per the studies, blue is the most preferred color, while green is the second.
- Avoid adding contact details and other such information in the image. Instead, add them in the footer so that they are subtly presented. Another thing to add in the footer is important links in your website so that spiders can index them easily.
Not using your 404 error page
Most SEO experts miss out on designing the page that opens when a user clicks on an expired link or the 404 error page. But any good WordPress web design company from India will tell you that these error pages can also be a great opportunity for you to gain your visitor’s attention. When people land on a 404 error page, they will hit the back button and forget about it.
However, they are good leads because they must have been looking for something they need, which landed them to an expired link on your page! Hence don’t let them go back without checking your website; just add links to your website or a link to free vouchers and other such marketing tactics to your error pages. That way, the user will appreciate your customer service and check your website/products. You have landed a successful leader from a source that otherwise could have gone somewhere else!
These game-changer idea is already being used by brands whose reputations are well known among users. This is needed when you have revamped your old website and relaunched your website. There will be 404 error pages for your old links, and by adding something like a feedback form, you can find out what kind of information users are looking for when they land on that page.
Totally dismissing Pop-ups
Even Pop-ups, Ethan Zuckerman, laments that he created them, so you can understand how much a common user hates them! However, it is also true that pop-ups boost the website’s sales. This is why businesses continue to use them even when 70% percent of users in a survey said that they find pop-ups not informative or interesting enough. But studies have also shown that businesses can have as much as 162% increase in their sales volume by showing limited-time deals! This is why, even though Google has in-built pop-up blockers for its users, don’t dismiss putting pop-ups in your pages.
However, put them in a way that Google webmasters like, which are:
- Not putting the pop-ups the moment a visitor lands on the page through SERP or when they are just looking for some information. Pop-ups after the visitor have spent some time navigating the page will have better responses.
- Not making the pop-up ad so big that they cover the entire page!
- Not making the layout of the pop-up so that their placement blocks the page’s main content from the line of action of the visitor.
So, do the pop-ups the right way, and it will bring good results to your business/website. Websites like WebMeUp encourage the use of pop-ups as their experience has shown that almost 90% of their subscriber came through pop-ups in a few months. Hence, how can your WordPress design service agency do it right? Simple, follow these tips:
- Offer discounts, sales, freebies, and incentives through them to bring in engagement.
- Set the timer to flash the pop-up to 5 seconds. If the visitor is a regular visitor, show the pop-up after they have been on your page for more than a minute.
H1s missing on homepage
To find relevancy when solving a query, a spider needs to read the meta descriptions, H1, H2, title tags, alt tags, and the HTML codes on your page. If you don’t optimize each of them, you will lose out in the ranking game. One of the elements that often gets missed out on is H1.
H1 is often confused with title tags, and users think they are the same thing. However, that is furthest from the truth. The title tags are seen in the SERPs, and they are the links that will take the visitors to your webpage. But H1 is the web page’s explanation against the query that brought the visitor to that page. So a header or H1 will not be there when search results are shown but will be used by the spiders to find if your page has the information the user is looking for.
Hence, as any good SEO services in India company will tell you, headers like H1 or H2 or so on and so forth are vital for your page. They should be a part of your page’s HTML code, and you should make sure that the words you want the spiders to find when looking at your page are there in the headers. Hence you have to make sure your headers:
- Has the primary keyword of the page especially the H1.
- Don’t cloud your H1 with the above-the-fold advertisement or full-page pop-ups. This header should always be above the fold.
- Make sure it is compelling enough to catch the visitor’s attention in the first few seconds of landing on your page.
Not taking the fact that Google is not a good scroller
You create your page for the visitors and not the spiders that search engines use, but still, you have to consider that the spiders can’t scroll down your page as a visitor can. Hence the spider will not consider any information, no matter how relevant or important it is to the query when placed down the page. This is why sometimes pages with good, original content fail to gain a good ranking.
Martin Splitt from Google was most empathetically flagged this issue in an online conference. He said that spiders only see and index the available content upfront. However, Google Search Control has information to counter this, and they are:
- To avoid the lazy-loading of JavaScript, webmasters should use loading attributes without coding a library allowed by Chrome 76.
- Using a JavaScript library that can load data while viewport is being entered.
- Using paginated scrolling allows users to click on the link present, taking them to the section of the content they are interested in.
When you hire a WordPress design service agency in India, you expect your website design to be the best because you invest quite much. Hence avoid these mistakes and stay ahead in your content and SEO game.
