Ensuring your website reaches as wide an audience as possible isn't just about increasing search visibility, it's also about making sure everyone can use your site, regardless of their disability.
In this post, we explore the relationship between web accessibility and SEO performance and discuss best practices to ensure your site is responsive to all users.
What is web accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites and online applications usable by all people, including people with disabilities.
The goal is to provide a seamless online user experience for people with disabilities that typically affect access to the web, including hearing, visual, cognitive, physical, and neurological conditions.
Web accessibility is governed by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
These internationally recognized guidelines provide a framework for making web content more accessible, with the goal of creating a more inclusive Internet experience for all users.
WCAG outlines four core principles essential to web accessibility (often summarized by the acronym POUR):
These principles ensure that your website:
- perceivable: Content and user interface components must be presented in a way that is recognizable to all users.
- Operation possible: All users must be able to interact with interface components and navigation elements.
- It can be understood: Users must be able to understand the information on the page
- sturdy: Various users and assistive technologies (such as screen readers and text-to-speech software) must be able to interpret the content on the page.
How does web accessibility affect SEO?
Web accessibility and SEO may seem like separate aspects of website management.
After all, one focuses on making online content accessible to people with disabilities, and the other focuses on boosting a website's search engine rankings.
However, there is important overlap between these two areas.
Improving web accessibility can positively impact SEO in a variety of ways, including:
- Provide a better user experience: Google takes user experience into account when deciding where to rank web pages in search results. Also, since web accessibility aims to improve her web user experience for all users, implementing accessibility best practices can indirectly contribute to improving search visibility.
- Improved readability and structure of content: Good website accessibility requires a clear, logical, and organized presentation of content. All of these align with SEO best practices. Structured headings (H1, H2, H3 tags), descriptive link text, and easy-to-read fonts help both human users and search engine bots navigate and better understand your site .
- Improving image visibility: Using the alt attribute to describe images not only makes your site more accessible to visually impaired users, but also helps search engines better understand and index your multimedia content. This improves image search visibility and increases traffic to your site.
5 SEO tips to make your website more accessible
Now that you understand the relationship between web accessibility and SEO, let's take a look at some best practices to improve the usability of your site.
Use semantic HTML
Semantic HTML tag (“