Top web design mistakes that hurt your SEO
Before you do a website redeisgn, make sure to contact a SEO specialist to avoid losses in organic traffic.
Web Design VS SEO
Weather it is 2021, 2022 or 2005 web design changes continue to plague the SEO world. In this topic we won't cover web development mistakes in a redesign that hurt SEO, just web design.
1. Low word count/ text on the page
Web designers like nice, clean sites with photo/video usage than text. Unfortunately, Google isn't on that level yet to rank websites without reading the text on the page. Google uses the text on the page to understand what the page is about and help it rank. Some SEOs advise on using 300 words + on a page and that amount of words posesses a challenge for web designers.
2. Content/text placement on the site
It makes a difference in SEO if your text is on top or at the end of a page. The higher on the page, the better for SEO. For an example, if you put the text only at the end of the page vs on the top of the page, after a heading.
3. Read more/hidden text
Some studies/tests have shown that having an "open" text on the page helps rank better than a "hidden/read more" text.
4. Site speed
Not all web designers make websites or use plugins that have the best site speed results. This takes special effort and knowledge on choosing the best page optimisation for both speed and web design.
5. Site structure and what pages to have on the site
For an example, instead of having one service page, it is better for SEO to make a couple of pages for each service that the business offers.
Real life example
Keyword Ranking drop after a site redesign.
New site: better speed, green Core Web Vitals, better design. But certain keywords have decreased after the site went live. The word text and keywords have remained the same.
Reson: the big, "ugly" text content was pushed lower on the page and re-designed in a FAQ (with read more) "hidden" format.
The rankings went up after we removed the text in a read more format and placed the text higher on the page. We did this by not jeopardising the site deisgn.
CONCLUSION:
Make sure you have a good SEO by your site before, during and after a website re design.
The truth is SEO and web designer rarly get along well, becuase often they make each others work more difficult.
We often see business owners wanting to hire an SEO after they done a redesign, when they noticed the organic traffic losses. This is something that would hade been cheaper if they hired an SEO in the first place. Especially an SEO expeirenced in re-designs.