Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about maximizing your chances of landing on the front page when folks search for your product or service.
In the past, this meant you could take an aggressive approach to keyword marketing to rise through the ranks.
While keywords haven’t gone away, SERP algorithms like Google have become more complex and ask more from marketers. Today, that means you must take an inclusive, accessible approach to connect with a diverse audience and boost your SEO ranking.
Understanding the Algorithm
If you’re new to the world of SEO and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by terms like crawling, click depth, and anchor text. Fortunately, popular SERPs, like Google, are striving to make it easier for users to find high-quality content that matches their needs.
This means you need to focus your efforts on properly creating and organizing the kind of content that users actually want to see. From there, SERPs like Google use three methods to find and evaluate your content, these include:
- Crawling: Google finds a page and sends “Googlebots” to find out what exists on a page.
- Indexing: Once crawled, Google finds out what the content is actually about.
- Serving search results: This is when Google decides if your content is high quality and relevant to the user’s query.
Maximizing your SEO strategy can become complicated quickly. That’s why many businesses turn to professionals to address technical SEO issues like 301 errors and page speed problems.
However, you can inherently boost your on-page SEO and improve your ranking by making changes to improve accessibility on your site. Many of these changes will help Google’s efforts to index your site and inherently improve the quality of the content you share with users.
Source: Shutterstock
Accessible UX
Web accessibility and SEO go hand in hand. Sites that are easy to navigate, user-friendly, contain alt-text, and use headings are better for users and SERPs alike. That’s because SERPs look for things like subheadings and accessible alt-text. They also need to be able to easily navigate your web pages to crawl and index them.
Similarly, users with screen readers, magnifiers, and reading pens do best when your content is well-organized and easy to navigate. This means you’ll need to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.01 (WCAG) to appeal to folks who benefit from assistive tech. Current WCAG guidelines explain that all web-based content should be:
- Perceivable: For example, images without alt-text are essentially “invisible” to screen readers. Remedy this by ensuring that all users can perceive your content.
- Operable: Users should be able to navigate your page easily and without the use of a mouse and keyboard.
- Understandable: Needlessly complex navigation menus and content undermine the user experience.
- Robust: Your content should be reliably usable to folks who use a range of assistive technology.
These WCAG guidelines are great for your SEO strategy, too. Taking the time to link properly to other pages helps folks navigate your website and ensures that every page gets indexed. Similarly, revising your menu to improve navigation may help crawlers find a page that had otherwise been buried.
Creating an accessible user experience (UX) can be confusing if you’re new to website design. However, there are plenty of programs online to help you learn UX design principles. This is crucial if you want to understand how user needs can align with content across multiple devices. A good UX program will teach you how to understand and assess the user experience, too. This can empower you to make key changes to your site that foreground inclusivity and ensure that all users are able to navigate your web-based content.
Improving your UX with accessibility in mind will improve key SEO metrics. For example, if you use plenty of headers and accurate anchor text, folks are more likely to stay on your page for longer. This inherently reduces your bounce rate, improves dwell time, and shows SERPs like Google that your content is high-quality and worth ranking highly.
Importance of Inclusivity
Inclusive and accessible web design can directly improve your on-page SEO and boost your efforts to rank highly. However, taking proactive, inclusive marketing can indirectly improve your appeal and help you rise through the ranks on SERPs like Google.
That’s because folks are far more likely to value your content and stay on your website if you produce the kind of content they connect with. For example, if you run a blog, readers are more likely to finish articles and share your content with others if they agree with the points you make and share your opinions.
Today, that means you need to take an inclusive, intentionally diverse approach to content creation. Inclusive content shows that you care about building your appeal amongst a diverse audience and understand the interests of modern readers.
Get the ball rolling by educating yourself. Before you can claim to be an inclusive, diverse marketer, you need to understand the common challenges that communities face and their interests.
For example, if you want to build appeal amongst folks who use screen readers, you should learn more about the causes of low vision. Many people who have lost their sight or live with low vision were born with the condition. As such, you should learn more about common genetic mutations that cause inherited retinal degeneration and the 260 gene variations that may cause low sight and blindness.
You can use these insights to talk with authority and create the kind of content that actually helps folks with low vision or blindness. This is crucial if you want folks to share your page and generate more traffic for your website.
Video Content
Video is the perfect medium for folks who come to your site looking for a user-friendly, inclusive experience. Oftentimes, video content is easier to digest, more entertaining, and includes captions that improve usability for folks with auditory disabilities.
Publishing plenty of video content can improve your search visibility, too. Providing SERPs like Google with a mixture of text, images, and video content shows that your site is rich with quality content that users will enjoy. Just remember to organize your page so that SERPs can identify your videos and understand their content. This usually means you’ll want to provide information in the sitemap and structured data that tells Google exactly what the video contains.
You’ll also need to provide a transcript for your video for folks who cannot read captions but want to engage with your video content. A detailed transcript will keep folks on your web pages for longer and naturally improve your dwell time, too.
As you gain more experience producing video content, try embedding more interactive video content onto your site. Interactive video content—like clickable links, quizzes, and polls—draws folks in and increases the average time on each page. Engaging content can also drive folks to other elements of your website. This is key if you want to use accessible video content to drive users to your website’s sales funnel.
Infographics and Images
Much like videos, infographics and images improve your SEO by showing SERPs that your site provides high-quality content for users. Additionally, infographics and images hold the user’s interest and can improve your digital marketing key performance indicators.
However, before you start publishing images on all your blog pages, you need to ensure they are user-friendly and accessible. This means you need to embed appropriate alt-text for anyone who navigates your website using screen readers.
Google’s John Mueller explains that optimizing your alt-text will improve your ranking, too. Mueller describes alt-text is used to help Google find relevant image-based results for users. As such, you don’t necessarily have to describe the image exactly. Rather, you want to focus your efforts on describing what the content means for your page. Adding context in this way boosts your ranking, improves the user experience, and ensures that folks who use screen readers understand the full context of your images.
You can apply these same principles to infographics, too. Infographics are an excellent choice to display confusing content in a simple format. This can be crucial if you’re attempting to sell a product or service that addresses a complex issue in user’s lives. Just be sure to select colours that contrast each other, as colour-blind users may struggle to identify the difference between similar colours. Similarly, you still need to create alt-text that provides context clues for SERPs and helps screen-reader users make use of the content.
Source: Shutterstock
Conclusion
Inclusive marketing is a great way to naturally boost your on-page SEO and drive traffic to your site. Taking an inclusive, accessible approach to digital marketing can also help you connect with diverse audiences. Put simply, folks are far more likely to enjoy and engage with your content if it aligns with their needs and follows WCAG principles. Get started with small steps, like including alt-text on images and headings in blog posts, and track your SEO KPIs to assess the effectiveness of your changes.
If you want to optimize your SEO strategy, you have come to the right place! At TechWyse Internet Marketing, we provide superior SEO services, along with a long line of other top-grade services. From Social Media Management and Content Marketing to Web Design and Paid Media. To get started, call 866-288-6046 or contact us here.
