How does SEO and website accessibility overlap?
Today, more than 53 million American adults are reported to have some physical challenge or disability. That’s the reason why website accessibility is becoming a popular trend today. Although search engine leaders such as Google promotes the SEO advantages of using to the web accessibility best practices, several websites don’t address the requirements of people with physical, visual or cognitive impairments. Today, most business owners are putting web accessibility best practices to good use to enhance their website SEO.
SEO and website accessibility in today’s IoT-era
Our times today get marked by the influx of multiple IoT devices, like iPads, iPhones, Amazon Echo, and the like. These products and devices are designing more omnichannel experiences through numerous touchpoints, contexts, and tools.
Even users carry out their research concerning Smartphone devices when they visit a store, through user-generated content or ads. They carry out more research by browsing through multiple videos and reading original articles, product demonstrations, and reviews on tablet or laptop devices. While offering an omnichannel experience can boost customer engagement, an absence of accessibility can make users with disabilities not notice some of the crucial data. It is the reason why several brands today are working to gain more consumer attention, by providing user-friendly and simple-to-navigate web pages and perceptive interfaces that allows users to come across important content easier and faster. To ensure that you are successful in making a website accessible, you can resort to an accessibility site checker.
The way SEO and website accessibility syncs in
You need to carefully observe how website accessibility relates precisely with the SEO elements. Both these practices depend on getting acquainted with the structure of semantics, content, design, website functionality, and metadata. Like most individuals that don’t have a hearing or visual impairment, the search engine giants have crawlers that can’t view the audio and video content. Instead, they crawl via the HTML to decide the rank and relevance of a website by the formatted search terms.
When you make use of the website accessibility practices, it determines the search engine’s capacity to identify and understand the content. But just in case the video or audio content doesn’t get optimized, then neither website accessibility nor SEO processes can comprehend it. It is because of this reason, both website accessibility and SEO walk hand-in-hand. When you offer an improved experience for the end-users, the bounce rate reduces. Also, there’s an increase in social media engagement, conversion, and reduction in negative feedback. You get to witness more positive comments. All such elements impact the way search engines rank a website.
Things to improve with SEO and website accessibility
Simply put, website accessibility is all about ensuring that a website is of use to people, irrespective of their disabilities. Visually impaired people need to have access to the sites through the screen readers. Also, the ones that have physically disabled must be able to navigate through a website quickly, and the website content with very less effort. You can improve the following things with web accessibility and SEO.
- The complete user experience
For a while, Google suggested that websites that offer an improved UX need to rank high as compared to the ones that provide an inferior user experience. Google has organized a PDF document of 160 pages that help to come up with high-end content and the way it can impact the total user experience. The user experience isn’t just one ranking aspect. There are many other aspects that you need to keep in mind to provide the best user experience. Google also mentions that responsive design and the website load time also play a part in SEO.
- Content structure or the header tags
The header tags are useful for defining the hierarchical structure of the website content. And a decent header structure follows a specific and logical pattern. It is also essential for every tag to correctly explain the content that comes under it, as concisely as possible.
- Title tags
Most people use title tags and title headers interchangeably! But both these terms have different meaning and aren’t visible on a webpage. However, you can find them right atop the browser as well as on the Google search results page. The title tags allow users who resort to the screen readers to differentiate between various pages at the earliest. It is usually the initial thing that the screen reader reads first.
When you are making your title tags, it is crucial to ensure that these tags highlight the page content as correctly as possible. Just in case you get to know that the title tag you are using is complicated and long-winded, it is a smart call to separate your content into different pages. It helps to keep the title tags short, easy-to-understand for the user.
- Alt text
It is yet another aspect that you can improve with website accessibility and SEO. Alt-text is the short form of alternative text. It gets used to outline all visual aspects textually. It gets read by screen readers, and it also gets applied to standard picture formats, such as .png, .jpg, and .gif. Simply put, the alt text generally represents one of the basic accessibility requirements. It also gets addressed in the initial section of the WCAG regulations. As per the WCAG guidelines, the non-text content that gets presented to audiences comes with a text alternative that caters as the equivalent objective.
These are some of the areas that you can improve when you sync in both SEO and website accessibility. The other aspects that you should also pay attention to is website aesthetics. It mostly comprises of the color scheme, the fonts, the background color, the text size and colors, the symbols used, placement of the brand name and logo, and the like. Every audience needs to see these elements clearly. Else, the website will fail to make its impact felt. And once the site gets seen in its full glory and is accessible to all, the SEO gets a boost, which enhances the website engagement as well.
