The Link Between Web Design and SEO Success
November 2017How does your law firm view website design within its marketing strategy?
Many firms (and many other businesses) assume that website design is a standalone part of marketing. After all, when you have an aesthetically-striking website with an intuitive user interface, those facets are going to help with visitor engagement, dwell times, conversions, and return visitors. However, it is important to recognize that website design does not exist in a vacuum. Web design can impact virtually every other part of your business—including your SEO success.
Related: Why Quality Matters in Law Firm SEO
How Web Design Factors into SEO
The idea of web design playing a crucial role in SEO can be tough to digest for people who conflate “SEO” with “keyword-driven content.” After all, a website’s look and interface have very little to do with the keywords and written content that tend to be the bread-and-butter of search engine optimization. Make no mistake: keywords and content still matter. Without these elements, you have nothing on which to build your SEO campaign.
However, thinking about what search engines are and how they work will help you see why design is a crucial part of the equation. Search engines are not magical sensors that instantaneously spot a keyword or phrase as soon as it appears on the web. Rather, search engines are made up of software that crawls the web, rapidly browsing countless websites in search of content users will want to read.
The mission of SEO is twofold. First, you want those search engine crawlers to have the easiest time possible crawling your website. Second, you want the crawlers to latch onto specific words or phrases that might identify your site as interesting or relevant for a target group of searchers.
Keyword-driven content accomplishes the second part of the SEO mission. The first part is largely up to website design. There are a lot of different ways to design a website, but not all of them are conducive to search engine crawling. For instance, the modern trend of “continuous” websites—where new content keeps populating the page as the user scrolls down—is confusing for crawlers and therefore not ideal for SEO.
Continuous scrolling is just one example of how web design impacts SEO. There are dozens of others, from HTML to meta-tagging to Flash features and images. One huge component for modern websites is responsive design, which ensures your site is optimized to recognize both desktop and mobile browsers. Not only does responsive website design impact the usability of your site, but Google also rewards sites that have responsive designs.
Give Your Website a Redesign to Boost Your SEO
Find out if your website design is hurting or helping your law firm’s SEO. At Inherent, we offer a wide range of digital marketing services, including web design and search engine optimization. We can help you understand how these two services work together or work with you to create a site that is more search engine friendly.