Ensuring your website reaches as broad an audience as possible isn’t just about amplifying your search visibility – it’s also about making sure your site can be used by everyone, irrespective of their disabilities.
In this post, we’ll explore the relationship between web accessibility and SEO performance and explain some best practices for ensuring your site can accommodate all users.
What Is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites and online applications usable for everyone, including people with disabilities.
The goal is to provide a seamless online user experience for people with impairments that would typically affect access to the web, such as auditory, visual, cognitive, physical, and neurological conditions.
Web accessibility is guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
These internationally recognized guidelines provide a framework for making web content more accessible, with the aim of creating a more inclusive internet experience for all users.
The WCAG outlines four core principles essential for web accessibility (often summarized by the acronym POUR).
These principles ensure that websites are:
- Perceivable: Content and user interface components should be presented in a way any user can perceive.
- Operable: All users should be able to interact with interface components and navigational elements.
- Understandable: Users must be able to understand the information on the page
- Robust: A variety of users and assistive technologies (like screen readers and text-to-speech software) should be able to interpret the content on the page.
How Does Web Accessibility Impact SEO?
Web accessibility and SEO may seem like distinct aspects of website management.
After all, one focuses on making online content usable for people with disabilities, while the other focuses on boosting a website’s search engine rankings.
However, these two areas have a significant overlap.
Improvements in web accessibility can have a positive impact on SEO in several ways, including:
- Providing a better user experience: Google considers user experience when deciding where to rank web pages in its search results. And since web accessibility aims to improve the web user experience for everyone, implementing accessibility best practices can indirectly contribute to better search visibility.
- Enhancing content readability and structure: Good website accessibility calls for the clear, logical, and organized presentation of content – all of which correspond to 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 understand your site better.
- Improving image visibility: Using alt attributes to describe images not only makes your site more accessible to visually impaired users but also allows search engines to better understand and index your multimedia content. This, in turn, can enhance your visibility for image searches, drawing more traffic to your site.
5 SEO Tips To Make Your Website More Accessible
Now that you understand the link between web accessibility and SEO, let’s look at some best practices to boost your site’s usability.
Use Semantic HTML
Implementing semantic HTML tags (like “
