How Accessible Design Can Improve SEO
With millions of businesses establishing an online presence, ensuring visibility online can be extremely competitive. It can be difficult to attain a position on the front page of search engine sites like Google, Bing, or Edge, especially when not making the most of your website's design features.
In order to improve search engine rankings and drive more traffic to websites, there are a number of strategies to consider in order to establish a consistent audience and ensure your content is found. Despite often being overlooked, one of these is accessible design. Not only does accessible design create an inclusive digital experience for users with disabilities, but it also aligns with many of the best practices for search engine optimisation (SEO).
In this blog, we’ll explore how implementing these best practices can enhance your website’s SEO, boost visibility, and ultimately improve your online presence.
What is Accessible Design?
Accessible design refers to creating digital content that can be easily navigated and understood by all users, regardless of their abilities. This includes people with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments. Ensuring your website meets accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), makes your site inclusive and user-friendly.
While accessibility is primarily focused on improving the experience for people with disabilities, many accessibility features also improve overall usability. This overlap between accessibility and user experience benefits everyone, including search engines.
How Does Accessible Design Benefit SEO?
Search engines like Google aim to provide the best results for users by prioritising websites that offer a positive user experience. Many accessibility best practices align directly with the principles of SEO, meaning that optimising your website for accessibility can improve your search rankings. Let’s explore how:
Alt Text for Images
One of the most well-known accessibility features is the use of alternative text (alt text) for images. Alt text provides a written description of an image, allowing screen readers to convey the image’s content to visually impaired users. From an SEO perspective, alt text also helps search engines understand what the image is about, making it easier for your site to appear in image search results.
Including descriptive, keyword-rich alt text for all images not only improves accessibility but also increases the chances of your images being indexed and ranked by search engines, enhancing your overall visibility.
Improved Site Structure and Navigation
A clear and logical site structure is essential for both accessibility and SEO. For users with disabilities, a well-organised website with intuitive navigation and clear headings makes it easier to browse content and find information quickly. Similarly, search engines rely on a well-structured site to crawl and index pages efficiently.
By using proper HTML headings (H1, H2, H3) and ensuring that your site’s content is organised in a logical hierarchy, you help search engines understand the relationships between different pieces of content. This improves how your pages are indexed and can lead to higher rankings.
Mobile Accessibility and SEO
Mobile optimisation is crucial for both accessibility and SEO. Mobile-friendly websites are easier for users with disabilities to access, especially those using assistive technologies like screen readers or voice-activated tools. Search engines also prioritise mobile-friendly websites in their rankings, mainly due to how many people opt to browse on their phones as opposed to desktops.
Ensuring your site is responsive and accessible on mobile devices will improve users' experiences and boost your chances of ranking higher in mobile search results.
Faster Load Times
Page speed is a ranking factor for SEO, and it also impacts accessibility. Slow load times can be particularly frustrating for users with disabilities, as assistive technologies often struggle with websites that take too long to load. By optimising your site for speed —through tactics such as compressing images, minimising code, and enabling browser caching — you can enhance both accessibility and SEO.
A fast-loading site creates a smoother experience for all users and reduces bounce rates, which can positively impact your rankings. However, certain fonts and website designs can hinder the loading time, making it difficult to prioritise what's best for SEO and a website in general.
Video Transcripts and Closed Captions
Videos are an increasingly popular form of content, but they must be made accessible to all users. Providing transcripts and closed captions for video content not only benefits users with hearing impairments but also contributes to SEO. Search engines can’t "watch" videos, but they can index the text in transcripts and captions, which helps them understand the content of the video.
By including these elements, you improve the accessibility of your videos while giving search engines more context to index and rank your content appropriately.
Descriptive Link Text
Descriptive link text is another best practice for both accessibility and SEO. Instead of using vague terms like "click here" or "read more," descriptive link text clearly explains what the user can expect when they follow the link. This helps users with screen readers understand the context of the link and also provides search engines with better insight into the content of the linked page.
Optimising your links with relevant keywords can further enhance your SEO by helping search engines understand the relationship between different pages on your site.
Why Google Values Accessibility
Google and other search engines prioritise websites that provide a positive user experience, and accessible design plays a key role in that. Websites that follow accessibility best practices tend to offer a cleaner, more user-friendly experience for everyone. These sites are often easier to navigate, faster to load, and better organised — all factors that search engines reward.
Additionally, search engines have begun to place more emphasis on Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience aspects like loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Accessible websites often excel in these areas, further boosting their chances of ranking higher in search results.
Legal Compliance and SEO Benefits
Beyond improving user experience and search rankings, accessible design can also help businesses comply with legal requirements such as the Equality Act 2010 in the UK. By ensuring your site meets accessibility standards, you not only avoid legal risks but also improve your website’s overall quality, which search engines are likely to reward.
Actionable Steps to Improve Accessibility and SEO
Here are some practical steps to start integrating accessibility and SEO:
Add alt text to all images to describe their content clearly and include relevant keywords.
Optimise your site’s structure using proper heading tags and clear navigation.
Make your site mobile-friendly to ensure accessibility on all devices and improve mobile search rankings.
Speed up your website by optimising images, enabling caching, and minimising code.
Provide transcripts and closed captions for all video content to enhance accessibility and boost video SEO.
Use descriptive link text to improve user experience and provide better context for search engines.
Conclusion
Accessible design isn’t just about making your website usable for individuals with disabilities — it’s also a smart strategy for improving your site’s SEO. By incorporating accessibility best practices, you can create a better user experience, improve your search engine rankings, and make your site more visible to a broader audience.
