How & Why Accessibility Matters for SEO

We all know that SEO is a vital part of any website's success. It helps to boost traffic and build brand awareness with users, but there is one crucial element often overlooked when designing or redeveloping a website: accessibility. Ensuring your site is fully accessible for all is not only important from an ethical standpoint, but can also have huge potential benefits in terms of improved search engine rankings. In this blog post, we'll discuss the importance of taking accessibility into account to ensure you get maximum visibility on the web and maximize your reach and return on investment through SEO practices.

Benefits of Website Accessibility 

A website with a cleaner interface and accessible navigational features is known to improve user engagement. Most importantly, it is helpful for people with disabilities to access your website. When users can easily access your site, they spend more time. As a result, it decreases your site's bounce rate and increases your chances of ranking in search results.

For example, adding closed captions and video transcripts, alt tags and descriptions in images, etc., can boost your site to be discovered and indexed by Google. This is because search engines like google are primarily text-based. This means they can't search your site through voice or video files.

Web accessibility and SEO are interlinked. However, web accessibility has a series of excellent benefits that you may not have heard of.

It helps avoid discrimination and legal complaints

Web accessibility is a civil right for every person, including people with disabilities. 

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), every person has the right to enjoy equal access to public services and places of public accommodation. Although ADA doesn't explicitly mention web accessibility, it can also extend to digital platforms. 

Consequently, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that lack of accessibility to a website might count as a violation of the ADA.

It helps you reach a broader audience

Improving accessibility is excellent for any business. A few logical and intelligent modification can make your website goes a long way. This includes adding features such as support for mobile devices, clear site architecture, transcripts, closed captions, etc.

It is best for PR

Consumers support businesses that share similar ideals, values, and beliefs as theirs. According to a survey by Accenture Strategy, 62% of consumers prefer buying from brands that stand on issues. 

Web accessibility is a crucial cause for people with disabilities and those who advocate for them. It helps you build a good foundation and a positive image for your brand.

Role of Web Accessibility in SEO

Web accessibility aims to make your website accessible to everyone. 

The WCAG stand requires websites to be built to use them with a keyboard and without a mouse. 

There are several ways you can improve the accessibility of your website. Each feature is linked to SEO that can help you rank higher on search engine results pages.

Build a high-quality web UX for user engagement

A good quality accessible design allows users to navigate the site like butter. As a web designer, you should put your user first. Use legible text, a simple navigational structure for cognitively impaired individuals navigating your site with keyboards.

Google loves sites that offer a better experience to users. With an impressive UX, you are likely to rank higher in SERP.

Add Title tags to help people understand the topic

Title tags are like giving names to each page of your website. 

They are not visible on the page. However, they are visible in the two most important locations. First, the top of the web browser. Second, the results page in Google and other search engines.

Title tags represent the content on the webpage. Your title tags determine how the title will display in the search results. This means visitors are going to read it. This is a great deciding factor for users whether they should click your site link or not. 

Develop a good header structure to streamline contents

Header tags are like the hierarchical structure of your site's content. It makes it easier for people with visual disabilities and limited reading comprehension to find content. They can refer to headers to decide which contents to read and which to skip.

Content that reflects the user's intent remains a critical element for SEO. Headers help break your content into logical chunks, and Google loves it.

It also helps you get into the featured snippets in Google. For example, you wrote an article about "steps to buy a good smartphone." Instead of writing a big paragraph, you displayed the answer in h2 headers.

 Add alt text to make images readable by Google

Alt text helps you add textual meaning to visual elements on your webpage. This applies to images in your content, excluding logos, trademarks, and other site designs.

Please don't confuse it with captions. Captions are visible to visitors, while alt text remains integrated inside an image. It is only accessible through screen readers. It is also accessible when the image fails to load. This way, users can read the intent behind the image.

When search engine crawlers crawl inside your site, they look for alt text on images and controls. Google states that they consider alt text along with their vision algorithms and contents of the page to comprehend the subject of an image.

Alt text provides additional information to search engines about the contents. This is why adding alt tags to the image would be a good SEO strategy.

Add anchor text to improve indexing

Link anchor text is the clickable text in your site that appears in blue hyperlinks with an underline. It helps to add relevance and accuracy to your content. It tells the user what they are going to find by clicking the link.

If your page has an anchor link pointing to a page, google will crawl to that link. This is because google wants to know if the link is relevant to the page it came from. If Google finds it's justified, it will index all that page. This is extremely helpful for content within your site. That's why internal linking is an excellent strategy for indexing.

 Use schema markup to help google find rich media contents

Schema markup helps promote rich media content in Google and other search engines. Schema.org is a programming vocabulary that defines the content and elements of a webpage since it is developed with the help of Google, Microsoft, Yandex, and Yahoo. 

 This is why search engine prefers it to understand your site's content.

Screen readers use schema markup codes to read the contents as displayed on the site perfectly. Most websites run perfectly using standard semantic HTML tags such as title and h1. However, sites that have advanced content require advanced markup like schema.

It is unknown whether schema markup has a direct effect on the ranking. However, it is well-known that it can improve your page's click-through rates.