Web Accessibility and SEO Overlap

Web accessibility is a hot button topic as of late and indeed provides many great new opportunities for individuals and businesses. But what is the point of making content accessible if nobody finds it? Fortunately, there are many areas where web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices can overlap. Continue reading to learn how making your site more accessible could also help you meet SEO best practices.

3 Ways that Web Accessibility and SEO Can Benefit Everyone

Web accessibility and search engine optimization are not the same things, but they both involve delivering relevant content to the correct users through machine-readable technology. In some ways, modern search engines and assistive technologies are quite similar. Both rely on content structure and proper functionality to present information to users and determine a site's relevancy. There are a wide variety of ways that you can optimize for both at the same time.

Accessible Design Improves User Experience

Clean and accessible web designs make it easy for disabled people to browse your site, products, and services. Web-accessible design usually entails simple navigation, mobile compatibility, and fast load times. And fortunately, all of these practices can improve your site rankings and overall user experience (UX). In the increasingly competitive B2B online market, having a “good UX” and an accessible site might help you stand out from the competition and earn more repeat business.

Logical Navigation and Functionality for Ease-of-Use

Clear direction on your pages helps visitors identify where they are on your site and allows robots to crawl your pages efficiently. Page titles, breadcrumbs, descriptive link text, and correct heading structure all help establish content hierarchy. This hierarchy also helps users and bots determine what your content is about and where relevant information is located on each page. For instance, optimized headers help search engines like Google identify the subject matter and allows disabled users to skip ahead to the sections that are most relevant to them.

It is also important to provide clear and descriptive instructions on all form fields, such as contact us forms. Thorough instructions make it easy for all users to understand what information is needed from them and may avoid unnecessary confusion. If your navigation, form fields, and action items are all logical and easy to understand, you may see your goal conversion rate increase as fewer people drop off before completion.

Alternative Text Provides Context and Keywords

Alternative text may not show up on a webpage, but it does provide more keyword opportunities. Alt text provides more crawlable keywords that are read by Google and are read aloud by assistive technology, like screen readers.

In fact, accurate alt text is one of the most basic and vital accessibility needs. These are read aloud by screen reader technology to provide additional context to users with visual impairments. This means that alt text needs to accurately describe each image. Alternative tags and text help search engines further understand the meaning around your site. These images can even show up in Google image searches, presenting a unique opportunity to gain more users.

Don’t Make Web Accessibility an Afterthought

Web accessibility may sound complicated, but it is essential to remember accessibility while working on SEO. Fortunately, some SEO best practices and web accessibility techniques work well together because they both put the user’s experience first. Google isn’t likely to give a poorly structured page a high ranking, and disabled people are not likely to revisit hard-to-understand sites.

The bottom line is that disabled people are consumers and optimizing for accessibility should not be overlooked. Shift your thinking to view web accessibility as an opportunity to dominate your niche by serving a community that competitors may be missing. If you keep both accessibility and SEO in mind, you can optimize for both without sacrificing quality traffic.

For more information on web accessibility and SEO tactics, contact Ecreativeworks.