Why and how the appearance of a site can impact its ranking?

by | Jul 6, 2021

Many websites look for ways to improve their SEO rankings, but they often overlook the website’s appearance. It is a fact that the website’s appearance may impact search visibility or boost traffic if they meet at least a few of the user’s expectations in terms of quality and presentation.

Google’s John Mueller has suggested the same in the Google SEO office-hours hangout recording from June 25, 2021. He states that the presentation of the website can impact its ranking in search results. He advises looking into different site elements that may affect the user’s insight. Suppose there is a gradual reduction in traffic that is not due to an algorithm update, then it may be the quality of the website that could be affecting the search visibility.

Website rankings in SEO refer to a site’s position on the search engine results page. Various ranking factors impact a website’s rankings to appear higher on the SERPs. You might be aware that Google uses over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm to rank the websites. Here are a few of the factors that are considered crucial:

  • Backlinks
  • Sitemap
  • Content length
  • Duplicate content
  • Rankbrain
  • Content updates
  • Canonical tags
  • Links
  • Domain authority
  • Load speed
  • URL structure
  • Relevant content
  • Site quality

Let us get deeper into how site quality and presentation play an important role in search results.

A website with significant UI usability is an essential part of SEO to boost traffic, ranking, and a high click-through rate. How quickly and effectively can a user complete a task when they land on your website? is one of the important factors that contribute to good user usability and improve website traffic.

Quality and Presentation Improve SEO Ranking

Some good features of a website in terms of quality and presentation that increase the site’s usability and improve SEO ranking are :

  • A well-produced valuable, relevant content, free from spellings or stylistic concerns, is considered good.
  • Easy to read, comprehend and effortless navigation through a site makes a user spend more time reading your content. Thus, it improves the user’s engagement.
  • Rapid load time improves a user’s experience, which could affect your SEO ranking.
  • Considering that more users read content on mobile devices, mobile responsive design and content promote a better user experience for readers, leading to more time spent on the site and a higher search ranking.
  • Site with proper formatting and a user-friendly layout; free from broken links improves usability.
  • Introducing social sharing buttons on the website makes it easy for users to share the content, thereby improving user experience, which also helps the site rank higher in search results.

It’s also essential to understand that any changes made to improve the quality of a site would take time to reflect before they could get better rankings in the search engine result pages.

FINAL THOUGHT

Optimizing your website can draw more visitors and improve traffic and revenue. However, if the site is poorly designed and not helpful, the website becomes ineffective and will also lose users. Therefore, by improving the website’s usability and user experience, we can make users spend more time on the website and interact with the content, boosting the website’s ranking and traffic.

To watch the latest Google SEO Office Hours, please check out the video below:

Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

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