SEO and Web Design: How to construct a Website That Ranks (2025)

When you construct a website, there are two major aspects to consider: consumers and search engines. 

Finding a settlement between these two aspects is tricky: You require an SEO-amiable website so you display up on Google when consumers are searching for your products. But you also require a creative, user-amiable website so consumers can easily discover what they desire to buy and arrive away from your site with a memorable brand impression. 

To further complicate things, many businesses have two divide teams for SEO and web advancement. Even if both teams are in-house, having them work together to construct a attractive and successful website can be challenging. The advancement throng will fight to keep the visual and user facet of the site very simplistic, while the SEO throng will desire to ensure the site has enough content so Google can rank it effectively for user search queries.

So how do you discover the settlement between being user amiable and SEO amiable when you have conflicting recommendations coming from each side?

In this piece, we’ll receive a deeper look at what SEO web design is, why it’s significant, and which 10 things you should optimize to discover some ordinary ground between these two goals.

What is SEO web design?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the habit of optimizing a website with a variety of tactics, including strategic keyword research. The ultimate objective of SEO is to get your pages to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Website design describes the elements that leave into composing the structure, functionality, and appearance of a website and all of its pages. The ultimate objective of standard web design is to make a visually appealing website with friction-free user encounter (UX) design.

When put together, SEO web design is the design and creation of a website that is optimized for both search engines and humans. 

Why is SEO web design significant?

If your website has a stunning design but you can’t get any of its web pages to rank in search engine results, how are people going to discover your website? 

While social media and PPC ads are great for increasing traffic, it’s significant to discover organic (read: free) ways to ramp up your website traffic and get to page one of the SERPs.

Let’s leave over a few of the top benefits of SEO web design.

Increases organic traffic

Organic traffic to your website is any benevolent of traffic coming from search engines that hasn’t been paid for. These are website viewers who found your site after searching for something on Google and browsing through the top options. 

To be specific, the first search outcome gets over a quarter of all clicks, the second search outcome gets 15%, and it drops off quickly from there.Since the 10th outcome gets 2.5% of the clicks, it’s secure to assume that anything history page one has abysmal organic traffic results. This is why you desire to design and optimize your website as well as feasible to boost the chances that you rank higher on SERPs.

Attracts high-intent traffic

When someone searches Google, it’s because they have a specific query they’re hoping to discover information about. And when your page shows up at the top of the search results with that exact respond, they’re going to click over to your page.

While they may not convert correct after discovering your website, they’re now aware that they can arrive back to you if they have any other related questions. This top-of-mind brand awareness is ideal for increasing conversions—and you can get those results all because they were searching for information about something in your industry. 

Having that high-intent traffic is even more valuable than other traffic, which is why it’s significant to optimize your recent website to boost search engine rankings.

Improves the user encounter

Every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in gain, an ROI of 9,900%—but that’s not the only advantage. If you desire to get on the excellent side of Google’s algorithm, your website needs to be SEO-optimized, and also user-amiable. While Google doesn’t reveal specific metrics for its algorithm, user encounter-related metrics often correlate with better SERP position.

Based on studies done by Backlinko, some of these criteria include:

• Dwell period 
• Mobile usability
• Bounce rate

Improving your website SEO is an essential part of any marketing schedule. It ensures your website works well and is straightforward for a visitor to navigate, so they can discover the information they’re looking for.

Google only wants to rank the best sites to prevent its own user encounter from being impacted by impoverished websites. So having a high-ranking site builds depend with the user while helping them discover exactly what they’re looking for.

Gets the most from your marketing budgetary schedule

An SEO schedule can receive some period to implement, but making the changes tends to be a low-to-no expense endeavor. Many business owners can put SEO parameters in place themselves with a little bit of website knowledge, or they can defer it to someone on their throng. There are plenty of free SEO tools out there to assist you out. 

The point is that SEO is a low-expense schedule for helping your website to reach your marketing goals and boost your overall ROI.

10 things to optimize for SEO web design

Now that you recognize why SEO web design is so significant, let’s talk about how you can optimize your website. Keep search engine optimization top of mind throughout the entire web design procedure to make implementing these 10 items as seamless as feasible.

After all, you don’t desire your web advancement throng to make the entire website only to have your SEO throng tear it apart and make the procedure receive even longer. Instead, having the two teams work in tandem on each of these items during the design procedure helps streamline the entire assignment.

Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank a website. It’s challenging for any one designer to account for them all. 

commence by optimizing the following 10 elements to get your pages ranking:

• Mobile-friendliness
• Website speed
• Sitemaps
• Readability 
• Image file names
• Alt tags 
• Website navigation
• URL structure
• Metadata
• Indexable content

1. Mobile-friendliness

As of 2023, there were 6.47 billion energetic mobile internet users. More people are browsing the web on their phones and tablets than on their desktop computers or laptops. 

Having a responsive website not only helps enhance your SEO. It also ensures your target spectators has a seamless UX, whether they’re accessing your site from their computer or mobile device.

Let’s receive a look at this website example from The Sill. It’s ranking on SERP one for keywords like plants, house plants, and where to buy house plants.

Its desktop website looks like this:

And its mobile website looks like this:

The mobile version uses the same copy and imagery, just rearranged in a way that makes more sense for smaller screens. It’s straightforward to navigate and keeps the same flow of searching for products and heading to checkout, which is intuitive for an ecommerce site.

As you design your website, make sure you or your advancement throng test that it works on both desktop and mobile. This is an essential ranking factor, because Google released a mobile-amiable update to its algorithm back in 2015 that boosts responsive sites in search results.

2. Website speed

Your website speed is yet another item that factors into Google’s algorithm. It makes sense—no one wants to deal with a website that takes ages to load. So Google won’t display leisurely-loading sites to users.

Factors that can affect your page speed include:

• Web hosting
• File sizes
• Plug-ins
• Coding/scripts
• Traffic volume

You can monitor your page speed manually with a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights or at automated, regular intervals with Boostify. For a more detailed alternative that looks at actual interactions from real users, you can use Shopify’s Web act dashboard. 

3. Sitemaps

While the Google algorithm is very sophisticated, it’s never a impoverished concept to provide it a helping hand—which is exactly what a sitemap is for.

A sitemap is a file that houses all of your web pages, files, videos, and other content on your website. It’s handy for websites with many different pages, especially if they are not all linked to other pages on your website.

This helps Google to discover and crawl all of your web pages so they’re all eligible for ranking. After all, if Google can’t discover a web page, it’s not going to generate any organic traffic.

4. Readability

Another major ranking factor is readability. If your website visitors can’t read the copy on your site, they’re not getting anything valuable from your business.

Legibility is also a key web accessibility principle. Best practices recommend using large, bold serif or sans serif fonts throughout your website, its headers, and its copy blocks to ensure straightforward reading.

Look at this bold, tidy website home page and how straightforward it is to read its headline and website copy:

Users can immediately grasp what Ruggable is promoting. In addition, having your copy structured with heading tags supports Google in identifying the most significant parts of each page, further improving your SEO.

5. Image file names

Image file names are so tiny you might not even ponder about it, but they can actually be a large resource to your website optimization. So ponder twice before you name something home-page-header-final-2.jpg. Instead, include keywords and descriptors that provide Google an concept of what is featured in the image.

6. Alt tags

In a similar vein, your images also require to have alt tags. Alt tags let Google’s algorithm recognize exactly what is happening in your images. If your image matches a user’s search, it could display up in their results. 

Your alt tag should be a complete sentence describing exactly what is in your image, complete with a capital note at the beginning and a period at the complete.

It also improves your overall accessibility. Someone using a screen reader to access your website can comprehend what is depicted in your images, helping the visually impaired still have a stellar user encounter.

7. Website navigation

Web developers focus on the site’s overall look, feel, and user encounter. Designers and developers will worry about a page’s visual elements and how consumers interact. They often like to keep things as straightforward as feasible.

But crucially, your website navigation also provides internal links to your most significant product or characteristic pages.

Fashion Nova’s website is a great example of SEO-amiable site navigation—they have a very large navigation for each product category on the site. For example, when you click on the “Halloween” category, you get a massive list of subcategory pages in a mega menu.

Nearly all of the organic search results are subcategory pages, so having a dedicated page for this keyword is highly useful from a search and user perspective. 

Using the same procedure as above, when you Google “boy’s corduroy pants,” most of the pages ranking are product pages rather than subcategory pages. This means you could likely optimize a product for that keyword, and not require to construct out a dedicated subcategory page.

Additional points to consider when trying to optimize for people and search engines include:

• Using a content hierarchy. This organizes your website pages through categories and subcategories. If you have over a dozen products on a page, you could consider building a subcategory page.
• Cross-linking between pages. SEO and content teams make useful blog posts, FAQs, and other content that can direct more traffic to product pages and vice versa. Horizontal linking easily directs consumers to more information about your products and/or business, while also boosting your SEO efforts.
• No thinking required. Ultimately, navigating your website shouldn’t require much brain power. Your website should clearly navigator users where to leave.

8. URL structure

Your URL structure should also be structured around your SEO schedule. Each URL slug (the string of characters after your top-level domain) should include only your web page or blog post’s focus keyword.

Do keyword research for each page you schedule to include in your website at launch. Make a schedule to do the same for every recent page that you make post-launch.

This helps Google comprehend what keywords to rank your pages for, while also keeping your pages accessible. Because most focus keywords are only a few words, this ensures your URL slugs are straightforward to recall and type into a URL field if someone is looking for a specific page.

9. Metadata

Also known as meta tags, your metadata includes information such as your title tags and meta description. This information appears in Google search results. Considering 36% of SEO experts ponder the title tag is the most significant SEO element, ensure your metadata is optimized. 

The title tag and meta description should include your page or post’s focus keyword. Your title tag can have a maximum of 60 characters while your meta description can have a maximum of 160 characters.

10. Indexable content

Creating an SEO-amiable website means ensuring search engines can easily crawl and comprehend your content.

For optimal crawlability, use HTML text for main content, as it’s easiest for Google to comprehend. While JavaScript enhances site functionality, it can factor crawling issues. Excessive JS can impact site speed and Google’s crawl budgetary schedule, so use it judiciously.

To check if Google can crawl your content:

1. Search for exact text from your page in Google
2. If your site doesn’t appear, troubleshoot the coding

The objective is to strike a settlement between JavaScript functionality and SEO needs. Work with your advancement throng to make an effective, search-amiable site that satisfies both requirements. This way ensures your content is accessible to search engines while maintaining your desired features.

Using analytics to enhance SEO and website design

Website analytics provide insights into user behavior and site act. It can assist you identify areas for advancement in your website’s structure, content, and user encounter. 

A powerful tool to use is Shopify’s Web act dashboard. It helps you comprehend your online store’s act across key website act metrics like:

• Real user metrics (RUM): Collects data from actual user interactions over 28 days.
• Loading speed (Largest Contentful Paint): Measures how quickly the largest content element (like an image or text block) becomes visible on the screen.
• Interactivity (Interaction to Next Paint): Assesses how quickly your website responds to user interactions, like clicks or taps.
• Visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift): Quantifies how much unexpected layout shifts occur during the loading procedure.

Each metric is assigned a ranking of “excellent,” “moderate,” or “impoverished,” reflecting the top 75% of user experiences. This helps you quickly identify areas that require advancement. You can view data for different devices (mobile, desktop, or all) and optimize for various user contexts.

By regularly reviewing these analytics, you can:

• Identify act bottlenecks affecting your SEO and user encounter
• assess the impact of design changes or recent features on your site’s act
• Make data-driven decisions about which areas of your site to optimize
• Track improvements over period to ensure your optimization efforts are effective

ordinary mistakes in SEO website design

When creating a website, it’s straightforward to make mistakes that can hurt your search engine rankings. Here are some ordinary errors to avoid.

Neglecting mobile optimization

Data shows that over half our period online is spent on mobile devices. If your website doesn’t work well on phones and tablets, visitors might leave quickly. Search engines will ponder your site isn’t helpful, which can lower your rankings.

leisurely page load times

A study from Unbounce found that nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. If your website takes too long to load, people will get frustrated and leave. 

Search engines notice this and might rank your site lower. To assist your pages load faster, make sure your site’s image sizes aren’t too large and your code is tidy.

Ignoring on-page SEO elements

On-page SEO elements are things like titles, headings, and meta descriptions. These assist search engines comprehend what your pages are about. If you don’t use these properly, search engines might not recognize how to rank your site for the correct keywords.

impoverished site structure and navigation

A confusing website layout makes it challenging for visitors to discover what they’re looking for. It also makes it challenging for search engines to crawl your site. Keep your site structure straightforward and logical.

Lack of standard content

Search engines desire to display users the best information. If your website doesn’t have excellent, useful content, it probably won’t rank well. Focus on creating helpful, original content that answers people’s questions.

Refer to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (encounter, expertise, authoritativeness, and depend) as a gut check in ensuring you’re creating standard content that speaks to both search engines and humans.

Overlooking internal linking

Internal links are links that connect different pages on your website. They assist visitors and search engines explore your site. Without excellent internal linking, significant pages on your site might not get noticed.

Ignoring technical SEO

Technical SEO involves the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes your website work well. This includes things like having a secure website (HTTPS), using the correct tags, and making sure search engines can read your site correctly. Ignoring these technical details can hurt your rankings.

make an SEO-amiable web design today 

The key to a well-designed, SEO-amiable website is to bridge the gap between web advancement and SEO. inspire your teams to work together from the beginning so your website is fully optimized for both SEO and usability.

recall, providing worth to your customer is the best way to rank in search engines. So optimize the elements above, write standard content, and design top-tier user experiences to enhance your search results.