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While many businesses care about accessibility in principle, they may find it difficult to implement it in a concrete way that benefits both their customers and their company. Online presence, in particular, is an area where accessibility is often overlooked: one study found that 95% of websites do not comply with accessibility standards required by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The downsides of not being fully accessible are obvious – legal action, damaged brand image, failure to engage with and support people with disabilities, etc. While accessibility is obviously a good thing in itself, and may even be legally required in some places, it also impacts your website's SEO.
Related: How Website Accessibility Impacts Your Brand's Reputation and Success
Accessibility and SEO
Many businesses don't realize that if they don't prioritize accessibility, their SEO efforts are wasted. The level of accessibility your website offers can greatly impact your conversion rates, rankings, and organic traffic. One study found that prioritizing accessibility solutions “increased an average of 12% increase in overall traffic.”
Technically, accessibility is an aspect of user experience that Google heavily influences rankings, and since an SEO campaign involves a complete overhaul of your website and improving the user experience, this is one of the best opportunities to implement an accessibility strategy and effectively achieve multiple brand goals.
To minimize accessibility errors on your site while improving your SEO, it's important to understand the principles of accessibility and some of the key starting points for creating an inclusive, search-friendly website.
The four principles of accessibility
Accessibility principles come from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and while the act applies to more than just websites, the principles provide useful guidelines for developing an SEO campaign that prioritizes accessibility.
- Perceivable: All users must be able to access and understand the content of your website, and this requires taking into account users with different speech, hearing, and cognitive abilities.
- Operation possible: Your website should be easy for users with disabilities to navigate and operate.
- It can be understood: Both the content and structure of your website should be easy to understand.
- Brawny: A robust website should function quickly and smoothly without glitches in accessibility tools like alt text and captions, and it should be easy to adapt as accessibility guidelines and tools evolve.
Related: 4 Resources to Make Your Website More Accessible
7 Ways to Improve Website Accessibility
Although the principles of accessibility are very general, there are some very specific steps you can use to get started creating an accessible website.
- Make sure your website is compatible with assistive technology. Many people, especially those with visual impairments, access websites using assistive technologies. Modifying HTML elements to make your website compatible with the technology is essential to meet accessibility requirements. Many businesses rely on SEO experts and accessibility widgets to help them meet these standards.
- Implement transcripts and captions for video accessibility. Transcriptions and captions allow people who are hearing impaired to participate in your content, and including captions also helps search engines understand and index your content more easily.
- Enter alternative text: If your website relies heavily on images and does not have alt text, your content will be inaccessible to many users and will be harder for search engines to index. To avoid this mistake, provide clear alt text for your visual content.
- Rate the readability: One of the most common accessibility errors is not providing adequate color contrast. You can use a color contrast testing tool to ensure that your site's contrast isn't too low or too high.
- Reorganize your navigation: Reorganizing your website's structure and navigation will improve user experience and indexability. Elements such as title tags, page titles, header structure, and breadcrumb navigation should all be optimized to improve click-through rates and accessibility.
- Find out the guidelines to follow: Before you get started, it's important to know which guidelines apply to you. These guidelines can help you set specific accessibility goals. Many websites must comply with the WCAG 2 Level AA guidelines, as well as other national guidelines such as the ADA. These regulations and guidelines are constantly changing, so you need to stay up to date to stay compliant.
- Use the Accessibility Auditor tool: Identifying and eliminating accessibility errors on your own can be difficult, so consider using an accessibility audit tool or hiring an SEO company that has a thorough understanding of current accessibility practices.
Related: To achieve greater digital accessibility, we must start from within
Accessibility is a worthwhile investment for your business from many perspectives. An accessible website is easier to navigate for all users and search engines alike, which increases user engagement, reduces bounce rates, and increases organic traffic. Prioritizing accessibility as part of your SEO efforts ensures your business complies with accessibility guidelines and increases engagement with internet users of all abilities.
