The Synergy Between Web Accessibility and SEO Strategies

In the dynamic digital marketing landscape, success hinges on recognising that web accessibility isn’t merely a compliance requirement; it’s a cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Website accessibility isn’t just about creating a user-friendly experience but it’s also about ensuring inclusivity for individuals with disabilities and making your digital content universally accessible. Together with SEO Sydney, we will delve into the intersection between website accessibility and search engine optimisation (SEO).

The Importance of Web Accessibility for Inclusivity

While we may have experienced the frustration of dealing with websites that don’t work well on our mobile phones or have poorly designed fonts, these issues are more than just minor inconveniences for people with disabilities. Website accessibility is about recognising the need for websites to incorporate tools and technologies with disabilities – including those with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual impairments – in perceiving, comprehending, navigating, and interacting with the site. 

However, it is important to note that website accessibility isn’t solely for those with disabilities. It also benefits individuals facing situational or environmental challenges. This includes people with limited internet connections, users on small mobile phone screens, or individuals in brightly lit rooms. Thus, website accessibility should be seen as a critical element of the overall user experience and should be integrated into the web development and design process.

Improving Web Accessibility with SEO Best Practices

SEO encompassing factors like mobile-friendly web design that enhance search engine rankings and boost website traffic. 

An accessible website streamlines navigation for all users, ensuring a seamless search for desired information. Consequently, this drives heightened user engagement, further contributing to positive brand sentiment and loyalty. 

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has introduced the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standards, outlining the standards to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It encompasses four principles for accessibility named POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

Perceivable

This principle focuses on ensuring that web visitors can easily perceive the content and information presented. To align with this principle, websites should consider the following practices. 

Provide Multimedia Alternatives to Consume Content

Non-text elements like images, videos, and audio must include alt text, benefiting non-sighted individuals and those using assistive technologies to read the text aloud to users. This also helps search engine crawlers to identify the image and display the image to the relevant topic in image search. For audio and video content, offering a full transcript, closed captions, and sign-language interpretation is essential to accommodate a diverse audience. Additionally, this practice can boost keyword rankings for search engine bots. 

Avoid Flashing Content

Steering clear of such content is recommended, as it can be triggering for individuals prone to seizures. When necessary, include warnings before displaying such content to prioritise user safety.

Optimise Page Styling 

Utilise appropriate headings (e.g., H1, H2, and H3) to structure webpages effectively such as only using one H1 heading for page titles. Ensure that all other headings are relevant to the content beneath them and avoid keyword stuffing within headings. In addition, employ ordered lists, bold text, and italics to convey information clearly and enhance readability. This helps search engine crawlers and assistive technologies to navigate a page, move to a particular section within the content, and allow users to identify the relevance of the content. 

Utilise Proper Colour Contrast 

Maintaining a suitable colour contrast ratio, as recommended by WCAG at 4.5:1, is crucial, especially for individuals with visual impairments.

SEO Visibility

At SEO Sydney, we utilise “white-hat” strategies that are conducive to Google’s algorithm and are compliant with their guidelines, ensuring that your website will be relevant and accessible to all users. Our core practices include properly labelling images, using relevant and unique page titles, including relevant links to content, and strong grammar literacy, just to name a few.

Operable

An operable website places a strong emphasis on user interface and navigation, ensuring all site functionalities are straightforward to use, regardless of the device used by web visitors. Achieving this principle involves the following practices. 

Keyboard Functionality

Prioritize full keyboard accessibility to accommodate users, especially those with mobility challenges. This involves enabling users to navigate the website solely using the “Tab” key or assistive tools like pointers.

Navigation Clarity

This involves providing clear navigation elements, including descriptive but succinct anchor text for internal links and outbound links, keyboard focus indicators, and appropriately structured headings. This helps users find the specific content they are looking for, understand the context of the destination page, and help them maintain an awareness of their location on the site. It also simultaneously aids search engine crawlers to find links to other pages on the site. Ultimately, your site should only include primary pages and other pages should be within navigation links to reduce confusion for users and search engine crawlers. 

User Interactions 

Too many physical interactions can be an issue for screen readers. Instead, it is recommended that you have a drop-down on the site to ensure that both search engine crawlers and screen readers can read content without needing to perform any user interaction. Furthermore, when users are required to complete a form, ensure they receive timely notifications about potential timeouts. Offering additional time to complete the form is considerate and beneficial for all users, particularly those who may require more time due to various factors. 

Understandable

Understandable websites will include content, including written and visual content that is digestible and easy to interpret. This principle emphasises on website readability, ensuring that all content is readable, comprehensible, and digestible to accommodate users with different levels of contextual knowledge, especially those learning your site’s native language. Thus, it is best to avoid highly technical jargon and regional slang where it isn’t necessary. 

With SEO Sydney, you will be served by our talented team of creative SEO copywriters who are highly well-versed in effective storytelling. We will not create generic blog content for you. Rest assured, our team understands how to market your brand with interesting, authentic, and strategic content. With only one-week turnaround, we ensure that our custom content for you delivers conversions while maintaining readability.

Robust

This principle encapsulates sites that are easily consumable, especially for those with assistive technologies such as screen readers. Implementing this principle can be done by writing parseable HTML for users with assistive technologies that often use a web page’s HTML file to translate its contents into a different format. This can be done by using start and end tags when required and avoiding duplicate IDs within the same HTML tag. 

Our team at SEO Sydney are keen to highlight conversion-prone web design. We know how to improve the SEO design and development of your business to improve your users’ experience and increase your search engine rankings. We focus our approach on SERP (search engine results page) exposure, ensuring that your website is user-friendly and authentic to your brand identity. 

Take Action Now With SEO Sydney

Building your website is not all about optimising your SEO. It is also about reducing the barriers to digital access and making the Internet a more inclusive place for all. 

At SEO Sydney, we offer custom optimisation services from start to finish, making us your reliable one-stop solution to optimising your SEO with effective white-hat practices and optimal SEO website design & development. We use the same practices for ourselves as we do for our clients. 

So, what are you waiting for? Book a consultation with us today and we will ensure that your website will be inclusive for all users.