10 reasons how web accessibility can help improve SEO?
What if I told you that Accessibility and SEO can go well with each other? Let’s see 10 reasons how web accessibility can help you improve your SEO game.
Although our world is progressively connected, not everyone has access to online resources. There are people with some special abilities who might not view, navigate or understand your website as normal people do, and the same applies to the website crawlers.
Whether by chance or by design, methods that improve accessibility can also be beneficial for SEO. The reason is that for crawling and analyzing the websites, search engines depend on the text, and highly organized, and understandable text is always more SEO friendly. Factually, this type of text is more accessible to people with special abilities, too.
10 Reasons how accessibility and SEO can go hand in hand:
- Alternative Text for visual content
- Assistive Labels for CTA’s
- Transcripts for videos
- Text Organization
- Text Colour
- Clear Navigation
- Descriptive headings
- Responsive Design
- Site and page structure
- Readability
1. Alternative Text for visual content
For specially-abled people who use screen readers, alternative texts play an important role. Alternative text is a text description that describes the image visuals. It is the only way for people having visual impairments to understand what type of visual content you have used with your text. You can use an elaborative text to define what the image is all about and make their lives easier.
For Example:
2. Assistive Labels/Anchor text for CTAs
Which of the hyperlinks looks more appealing to you?
It is a simple decision that the third option is a better one, isn’t it? An Anchor is more than just the means to navigate to another page within your site. Having descriptive anchor text for CTAs can be beneficial for SEO and for accessibility reasons. You can optimize the Anchor text by using relevant keywords.
Screen readers usually go through a page and when they see a link on the page, they inform users about the Anchor text. Contextually, if it is something relevant for the user, they can hit enter.
3. Transcripts for videos
Video transcripts or captioning are really important for people suffering from hearing disabilities, visual impairments or people experiencing some other difficulties while viewing media.
Video transcript also helps the video page to rank for a wider variety of queries because text content still plays a vital role when you want to rank for Google SERPs. Google picks YouTube video descriptions to rank the page on SERPs, while also presenting the information as featured snippets and showcasing results in the “people also ask” section.
For Example:
You can see the below YouTube video Screenshot having captions.
4. Text Organization
It is always better to use large and clear titles on top of every page. This will help improve the readability of the page along with the navigation.
Use proper header titles within the body text. Also, use section breaks when needed and don’t forget to pay attention to having enough white space on the page, to make it easy for the visitors to read.
5. Text Colour
Colour Blindness is a real thing. People do find it difficult to read and see certain colour combinations. You need to make sure you use colours on your website which contrast well with all the other elements and are easy to read.
The most common issue is that text should stand out against the background. Ideally, use dark colour text on a light background and make sure the colours don’t blend into each other.
For example:
6. Clear Navigation
Clear navigation plays an important role for visitors who visit your website. Make sure that your website’s navigation is easy to find and always accessible from the top of your website, and each label is clearly written in simple words that everyone can understand.
Clear navigation is also considered essential for SEO benefits. It helps bots to easily crawl and understand your website structure.
According to https://developers.google.com/ :
“The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google’s search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.”
7. Descriptive headings
Descriptive Headings and subheadings help people with cognitive disabilities and screen reader users to understand and organize information present on your site. When the content is not organized and properly labelled, it becomes difficult for both the users and search engines to understand the content.
When screen readers read the website content, they don’t have any clues on how to navigate. They read text on the screen, and they don’t have any idea what is important and what is not. So we have to structure headings properly as per order. Ex. (H₁, H₂, H₃, etc.) The screen readers then use the built-in navigational tools to move around the page more effectively.
Correct use of headings also helps search engines to know what is important on the webpage. There are several tutorials on how to optimize headings for SEO.
For example:
In the above image you can see 3 sections, 1) one entire page 2) a page is broken into multiple sections and 3) Each section now has a heading in proper order.
8. Responsive Design
“Responsive Designs” means that the page layout automatically resizes to be accessible and readable on a mobile device. Google ranks mobile responsive designs higher. Hence, it is really important to have your website optimized for mobile screens as well.
According to Data Portal — Global Digital Overview Report, 90.9% of people use mobile devices to go online, and this is a strong reason why you should think of having a responsive website.
9. Site and page structure
The foundation of SEO and accessibility directly lies in having a clear and logical site and page structure. Having clear navigation, sitemaps and breadcrumbs are equally essential for SEO and Accessibility.
On the other hand, where page structure is concerned, having meaningful headings, subheadings, and a clickable table of contents taking you to a specific subhead is recommended for accessibility as they allow screen readers to navigate through a page. And from an SEO perspective, you can target relevant keywords in subheadings to improve visibility on search engine result pages. A table of contents generates “Jump to” links in search snippets, improving the click-through rate.
10. Readability
Finally, one more aspect that can improve both accessibility and SEO, and is the readability of your content. Readable content means:
- Simple language
- Less use of jargon
- Use simple short words
- Use short sentences
- Use bullets points
If the content is simple and easy to understand, it engages the audience. This engagement sends a positive signal to the search engines that the users are engaging with the content, which definitely means that you have meaningful and useful content on your website. This increases your chance to be in the search results and in voice search too.
Also, when the content is easy to read and understand, it becomes easy for the specially-abled people who use screen readers to understand your site’s content.
Final Thoughts
According to the WHO (World Health Organization) disability report, 15% of the world’s population suffers from some kind of disability. It is difficult to make your website content accessible, but it’s worth trying to cater to a wider audience and boost your website’s SEO as well.
Assistive technologies and search engine crawlers access information on websites on similar terms. Optimizing your website’s accessibility will also improve your SEO. Google also encourages Web Content Accessibility to increase SEO. Its Webmaster Guidelines Page states best practices that are very similar to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards.
Please read my article, Guide to Boost SEO using FAQ Schema Markup
