You can have the best product in the market, but if Google can't read your site, nobody buys it.
Many business owners treat design and search engine ranking as two different projects. They hire a designer to make it "pretty" and an SEO agency to "add keywords" later. This is a mistake.
Design and SEO are the same job. If your code is messy or your layout confuses the search bots, your rankings drop, and your sales flatline.
Here is how specific design choices directly affect your revenue.
1. Speed Is a Feature, Not a Bonus
If your site takes three seconds to load, roughly half your visitors leave before seeing the first headline.
Google knows this. They penalize slow sites. A "beautiful" site with massive, uncompressed images is a bad site. It might look good to you on a fiber connection, but it fails for a customer on 4G.
What to do:
- Compress every image before you upload it.
- Remove animations that don't help the user buy the product.
- Use a host that serves files quickly.
2. Mobile Layout Determines Your Rank
Google uses "mobile-first indexing." This means they look at your mobile site to decide where you rank, even for desktop users.
If your desktop site looks great but the mobile version has tiny buttons or text that runs off the screen, Google considers your entire site broken. If users have to pinch-and-zoom to find the "Add to Cart" button, they will close the tab.
The fix:
- Check your site on an actual phone, not just the resizing tool on your laptop.
- Make buttons large enough to tap with a thumb.
3. Text Must Be Text (Not Images)
Designers often want specific fonts or layouts, so they save headers or descriptions as images (JPGs or PNGs).
To a search engine, an image containing the words "Best leather boots" is just a blank square. It cannot read the text inside the image. If your main sales pitch is locked inside a picture, you are invisible to search results.
The rule:
Always use HTML text for headlines and descriptions. Use web fonts to style them, but keep the data readable.
4. Navigation Paths
If a user needs to click four times to find your product page, the search bot does too. Deeply buried pages rarely get crawled, which means they don't appear in search results.
A flat site structure—where every page is within two or three clicks of the homepage—helps search engines map your site. It also helps customers find what they want without getting frustrated.
Summary
Don't design for art; design for utility. A fast, readable, and structured site makes Google happy. When Google is happy, you get more traffic. And when real humans can navigate that traffic easily, you get more sales.
Ready to turn traffic into sales? Click here to book your free Website Structure Review and find out exactly how to make Google and your customers happy.
