You can have an impressive-looking website, but if it doesn’t rank well on Google, your business won’t benefit from it. That’s why it’s important to use good SEO principles when designing your website. Organic SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) refers to practices that help Google index your content effectively so that when people enter keywords related to your business, you show up at the top of the list. Here’s how on-page SEO services can benefit home page design.

Site Speed

If your site takes a long time to load, people won’t stick around for very long. That’s why Google lists page speed as a ranking factor, so the faster your website loads, the better it is for SEO.

Using a content delivery network (CDN) helps reduce load times by serving pages from servers that are close to the user rather than the closest server to you. Other practices include shrinking images, minimizing redirects, and loading JavaScript files asynchronously.

Efficiency in Navigation

Another aspect of user experience that is important to Google’s search rankings is your site’s internal structure and navigation. The ease with which customers can find what they’re looking for on your site contributes to its user experience score, so you should keep this in mind when designing the layout and navigation of your home page. (We have lots of examples of what websites with clean, efficient navigation look like!)

On-Page SEO Services Can Optimize Indexing

The hierarchy of your pages should follow a logical path from top to bottom and use descriptive titles and headings to make it easy for search engine crawlers to understand and index your content.

One example of this is content silos. Content silos are groups of related pages under one keyword category. So if you have a website about pets, you could create a silo category on your home page for dogs, with subcategory pages for chihuahuas, poodles, and other breeds. This helps Google better understand your content and see you as an authority on that keyword. (It makes it easier for humans to navigate your site, too!)

Mobile-Friendly

Mobile devices make up more than half of website traffic worldwide, so a mobile-friendly site is a must. In fact, Google’s mobile search results will be formatted to reflect a “mobile-first indexing strategy” in 2018. So if your site isn’t responsive or mobile-friendly, it could perform poorly in search rankings.  

You can also look at your site’s analytics and see what percentage of visitors are on mobile devices to see whether it makes sense to create a separate version of your site that is optimized for those platforms.

Remember that Google’s primary objective in ranking a site is to provide the best experience to its users. By incorporating SEO into your design process, you can help your website rank higher while also improving the user experience at the same time. Could you use help with your site design? Contact us at Blue Zone Marketing today, and we’ll help you with a wide range of SEO and digital marketing services.

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