SEO and Accessibility: Creating a Sustainable Website

Last Updated on October 3, 2024

hands on a laptop keyboard. a website is sown on the screen.

How would you explain a “sustainable and accessible SEO-friendly website”?

You want a website to last, and you want everybody to be able to find it easily, so build it right and in plain sight; then you won’t have to touch it again.

Check out the entire article on the SDM podcast!

Sustainability, Accessibility, and AI – like organic and climate-friendly – are terms we see on everything from cookie packages to shoes to buildings. But I’m not using these terms for clickbait.

Sustainability, Accessibility, and Artificial Intelligence are important elements of SEO. More so than keywords or backlinks or even those domain authority scores you see when people are trying to push those backlinks.

Accessibility and sustainability are not only best practice – they are core. Core gives you stability, and system stability is crucial for business. Warren Laine-Naida

What Do We Mean by Accessible SEO?

An accessible, and I think we today need to say, an AI-friendly website, is necessary if you want your SEO to be a viable part of a sustainable marketing strategy.

Accessibility means that a website is not just usable by every person. Today, two target groups want access to our content: people and algorithms.

From search engines to social media, online shops to news and information platforms, the content we create for people, is filtered by machines in deciding who sees what.

When we talk about accessible SEO, we’re talking about an approach that combines search engine optimization – which includes AI search results – with web and content accessibility.

Digital accessibility is not simply a legal requirement. If you go beyond the bare minimum of adherence to the WCAG Guidelines, you will see a massive increase in conversion. https://annebovelett.eu/

How Can I Improve the Accessibility of My Website?

While SEO focuses on improving your site’s visibility in search engine results, accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can easily navigate and understand the content.

You can do many basic things to improve both your organic reach and the accessibility of your website. Like SEO, creating an accessible and sustainable website begins in the planning stages.

+ Clear, descriptive page titles and headings using H1, H2 …
+ Proper use of all HTML semantic elements
+ Alt text for images
+ Keyboard navigation support
+ Consistent and logical site structure
+ Descriptive link text including anchors
+ ARIA attributes for interactive elements
+ Sufficient colour contrast
+ Responsive design for mobile devices
+ Fast loading times
+ Structured data markup
+ Transcripts or captions for audio/video content
+ Regular accessibility and SEO audits

Making the web accessible benefits individuals, businesses, and society. International web standards define what is needed for accessibility. https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/

Test your own website for free right here: https://wave.webaim.org/

Why is Accessible SEO Important?

To ensure our content remains discoverable in the future, we also need to think about web design practices that our business can sustain. Accessibility is an important component of a sustainable process.

The goal of accessible SEO-friendly content is to create relevant websites that are not only findable and usable by people and machines, but also maintainable over time with minimal ongoing effort.

Accessible SEO works. Building sustainable websites works. It’s just good business.

What Do We Mean by Accessible SEO?

How Can I Improve the Accessibility of My Website?

Why is Accessible SEO Important?

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