On page SEO matters as much as your off page SEO when vying for a top spot in the search engine rankings. Bad website design can undermine your search engine results page ranking. Here are six crucial design mistakes that will destroy your SEO. We’ll also explain why these practices, though they may have been common for years, hurt you today.
Screen Sized Popups upon Arrival
Someone has decided to click on your link. They visit your page, and they’re immediately confronted with a popup asking them to sign up for marketing messages before they can see the content. Many visitors will bounce away in frustration, causing search engines to downrank your site. Google is doing this, too, as they discover it because they know customers hate it. This is why the “follow us on social media” or “sign up for our emails” now fill only part of the screen or show up after ten seconds on the page.
Improperly sized media, like putting a video sized for a PC in front of a mobile user, creates the same problem.
A Bloated Webpage
You’ve added interactive infographics on your site no one can scrape and reuse, and visitors are eager to share the link to it on social media. The video marketing pieces have strong branding built into the useful presentations. Yet your website’s SEO seems irrelevant as it sinks in search engine results page ranking. When a page takes too long to load, it may not be indexed by the search engine. When it takes more than two seconds to load at least the first part customers expect to see, visitors start leaving. You lose around 10% of visitors per second, which is why your website needs to be lean and mean. Google rewards sites that load quickly in addition to being mobile ready, and it penalizes bloated pages slow to load in addition to the impact of high bounce rates.
Splash Pages
Splash pages can be a barrier between your page and search engines. The error of using a splash page is compounded if it still uses Adobe Flash, something that half of web users on a mobile device will see as an error as part of their first, negative impression of your site.
Ignoring Website Security
If you run an ecommerce site, a lack of IT security badges will cost your business. It doesn’t matter if your site is secure. If customers don’t see trusted IT security verification badges, they are afraid to enter their financial information and buy from you.
Ignoring Search Engine Rankings for Social Media
Clayton Johnson SEO Minneapolis expert says that if you’re not ranking on the first page of Google, you’re missing out on leads, customers and conversions. Social media sharing is the hot thing in digital marketing today, since referrals for products and content on social media are more likely to result in business than Google search results. And social media sharing does factor into Google rankings; however, social media signals are still only the third or fourth factor search engines use to rank content, while fitting with user intent and traditional SEO remain essential.
Do build social media sharing buttons into your website to enable social media sharing, create a consistent brand presence across multiple platforms that link back to your website, and share content through your social media accounts. However, don’t focus on the social media outreach and ignore SEO.
Using Graphics Instead of Text for Critical Information
Your search engine optimization is based on the text on your site. Some sites avoid spam penalties by showing multiple pictures of products with the brand name and company name. Others make the mistake of putting the article title or subheadings in graphic form that prevents them from contributing to the search engine optimization of the page. Never put your company’s business name, address and phone number in a graphic, since this prevents it from being read by search engines and hurts your local SEO.
Avoid all six of these design mistakes if you don’t want your SEO efforts to be worthless.
