How an ADA-compliant website can improve your SEO
A large number of people around the world live with some form of physical or visual disability, and most are regular internet users. Which means that some of your target audience may find it difficult accessing your website.
While the goal of SEO is to drive traffic and ensure that your target audience can easily find your website, the desired result cannot be attained if your website is not accessible. Web accessibility is inclusive of disabled users.
Ensuring that your website is ADA compliant allows you to serve a larger audience while improving your SEO simultaneously. The majority of the components that make your website ADA compliant work hand-in-hand with SEO practices. If you want to know how to make your website ADA compliant and improve your SEO, here are a few ways
Accessible and responsive website design to improve user experience
The majority of the practices for creating ADA-compliant website designs also improve a website's user experience. A responsive design extends beyond your website's ability to adapt to various screen sizes.
It is about how legible your text is, which makes it easy for users to read, how easy your site is to navigate, and how fast it loads. All of these factors influence SEO because websites that provide a better user experience are ranked higher. According to Google, a site that takes less than three seconds to load will rank higher.
Use Specific Title tags
Title or page tags are essential for SEO because they appear on a search engine's results page with a direct link to your website.
Using a title tag that reflects what your website is about is a great way to get found and is essential for visually impaired users to understand what a webpage is about because the title tag is the first thing a screen reader will read.
Well-structured Header and Sub-headings for Easy Navigation
Headings (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>) are responsible for defining a contents hierarchy. They do not only make a page’s content visually appealing and organized but they assist people with visual impairments in navigating through a page's information easily.
When the header structure is clear, cognitively impaired users can decide which sections to read and which to skip.
In terms of SEO, headers can assist you in breaking down your webpage into logical sections, allowing you to create relevant content for your target audience.
Descriptive Alt text
To ensure web accessibility, descriptive alt text should be used on webpage images to give visually impaired users context to images when the screen readers read the alt text aloud.
It also assists search engines in understanding the subject matter of an image, which improves your site's SEO and ranking.
Having an ADA-compliant website for SEO
The internet is filled with websites that are not ADA compliant which either have low rankings or face heavy lawsuits.
Despite the misconception, ADA compliance and SEO work together because the more user-friendly your website is, the better it will serve search engines. If you need help setting this up, ADA Web Accessibility can make your website ADA compliant within 48 hours.