The Biggest Mistake Your Web Designer is Making that will Affect your SEO

It’s one issue I come across consistently when performing SEO audits. It’s a simple fix that starts with your web designer or developer.

We often leave the designing and development of our websites to outsourced professionals, then hire or perform SEO once a site is live. The issue lies in the fact that website designers are often unaware of SEO best practices. They design with your specifications in mind, and develop your site with all the bells and whistles you request. Unfortunately, they may lack the ability to guide you in the best direction for website ranking.

A site not developed for SEO can contain heavy HTML that increases page load times, Javascript which negatively impacts your SEO, or stock images that can lead to issues with the way your site loads.

The best way to rank your site quickly is to hire an SEO professional when developing or redesigning your site. Your SEO can work with your designers and developer to ensure that code is structured properly and that everything is optimized for better performance before your site goes live.

So what’s the biggest mistake your web designer can make? Designers often use stock images to fill your site. While the use of images on your site is important for user experience, they can also significantly increase the time it takes for your site to load. Too many images with large file sizes can cause your site to load disjointed, which provides a poor user experience. Long loading times can lead to high bounce rates, lower time per page, and inevitably lower rankings.

The Good News

It’s easy to decrease your page load time by compressing your website images before they’re uploaded to your site. Your designer can remove current images and upload compressed images which will decrease load times and improve your site’s performance.

There are many easy ways to compress or reduce your image file sizes. You can do so in editors like Photoshop, but TinyPNG is a free tool that works as well.

Contact us today to receive your free SEO site audit and improve the way people interact and engage with your website.

Why is User Experience important? Small business owners spend hundreds to thousands of dollars each month to increase the “traffic” or visitors to their site in hopes of generating more leads or sales. However, all those clicks are wasted when a user visits your site, and bounces immediately.

Bounce rates increase when visitors have an unsatisfactory experience when interacting with your site. A bad user experience can start with poor navigation or site layout. When designing a site, it’s not only important to create something that’s visually appealing, but that’s also easy to navigate.

If a user visits your site, but can’t find what they need quickly, they are more likely to leave your site without converting. Whether it’s your goal to have a visitor fill out a form, submit their email address, or make a purchase, user experience is key to increasing conversion rates.

I often encounter clients who put keyword stuffing at the forefront of strategy. They want links with multiple keywords, pages stuffed with them, and blog posts featuring them. While utilizing keywords is important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of a good user experience (UX).

At I Dream of SEO we provide website UX reports. We will analyze and review your site, then provide you with a list of changes we know will help increase sales and drive conversions.

Running online marketing campaigns? We can add specialized code to your site, which will track and report visitor behavior. We will be able to identify what’s causing visitors to leave your site without converting, and help you make the changes necessary to see better results.

Contact I Dream of SEO today to find out how we can help you provide visitors with a better user experience.