In today’s digital world, website accessibility is not just a matter of legal compliance—it’s also a crucial part of ensuring a great user experience for all visitors. But did you know that accessibility also impacts your website’s SEO? Search engines like Google aim to provide the best search results to users, and accessibility plays a significant role in determining what websites are considered user-friendly. In this blog, we’ll explore how accessibility affects SEO and why it could be a factor in Google’s ranking system.
Why website accessibility matters
Website accessibility is about ensuring that all users, including those with disabilities, can navigate and interact with your site. This includes making your site compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers, ensuring keyboard navigation is functional, providing appropriate alt text for images, and more.
When a website is accessible, it improves the user experience for everyone—not just people with disabilities. For example, improving accessibility can help people who use mobile devices or have slow internet connections. The better the user experience, the more likely people are to stay on your site, engage with your content, and convert. These are all important factors that search engines consider when ranking websites.
Google’s approach to accessibility
Google’s official stance on accessibility is clear: while it’s not currently a direct ranking factor, accessibility is deeply intertwined with SEO. Google has stated that its algorithms are designed to prioritise content that provides the best user experience, and accessibility contributes to that.
In fact, many accessibility practices, like ensuring your site is mobile-friendly or improving page load speed, directly align with Google’s ranking criteria. According to Google, “a website that is usable by all users, including those with disabilities, is more likely to have a better user experience and be indexed and ranked more favourably.”
Additionally, Google has its own Google Lighthouse tool, an open-source, automated auditing tool that provides insights into the accessibility of your website. This tool checks your site for common accessibility issues, among other factors, and offers recommendations for improvement. By using this tool, you can ensure that your site is both accessible and adheres to best practices, making it more likely to rank well in Google’s search results.
Accessibility and SEO: The overlap
Whilst accessibility isn’t yet a direct ranking factor, there’s clear overlap between SEO best practices and accessibility guidelines. Here’s how they intersect:
- Mobile Friendliness: Google considers mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. Accessible websites often need to be mobile-friendly to ensure that users can access all content easily on smaller screens, which also aligns with Google’s mobile-first indexing.
- Page Speed: Accessible websites, particularly those that follow accessibility guidelines, tend to be leaner, faster, and more efficient. Google uses page load speed as a ranking factor, and a faster website equals better rankings.
- User Engagement: Websites that are easy to use tend to have lower bounce rates, longer sessions, and higher engagement, all of which signal to Google that the site offers valuable content. Accessible websites are designed with the user experience in mind, increasing the likelihood of higher engagement.
- Alt Text for Images: Alt text isn’t just helpful for screen reader users; it also helps search engines understand the content of an image. Alt text, as part of your accessibility efforts, also improves your image SEO by making images more discoverable.
- Clear Content and Structure: Ensuring that your website is logically structured with clear headings, lists, and content flow not only makes it more accessible to users but also easier for search engine bots to crawl and index.
Will accessibility aver be a direct ranking factor?
Whilst accessibility is not yet a direct ranking factor, this may change in the future. Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, and the search engine has indicated that accessibility could eventually become a more important ranking signal.
John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, responded to the question of whether accessibility provides a direct ranking advantage with the following statement:
“No, not really. So I think accessibility is something that is important for a website because, if you drive your users away with a website that they can’t use, then they’re not going to recommend it to other people.
But it’s not something that we would pick up and use as a direct ranking factor when it comes to search. Maybe that will change over time.”
Google has acknowledged that accessibility may play a larger role in search rankings in the future. As search algorithms evolve and accessibility becomes a greater focus in digital regulations, it’s highly likely that Google will integrate accessibility more deeply into its ranking criteria.
This means that businesses should be proactive and begin improving their website’s accessibility now. Websites that have implemented accessibility best practices will not only rank better today but will also be better prepared for any changes that Google might make in the future.
How to make your website more accessible
To improve both accessibility and SEO, you should focus on the following practices:
- Ensure Mobile Compatibility: Make sure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. Google uses mobile-first indexing, so it’s essential that your site works well on all devices.
- Keyboard Navigation: Ensure that your website can be fully navigated with a keyboard. This is essential for people with motor disabilities and improves overall usability.
- Ensure Screen Reader Compatibility: Make sure your website is compatible with screen readers by using semantic HTML, proper heading structure, and ARIA attributes. This ensures that blind or visually impaired users can effectively navigate your site.
- Use Descriptive Alt Text: Provide meaningful alternative text for all images. This helps search engines understand the content of the images and makes your site more accessible to screen reader users.
- Improve Page Load Speed: Optimise your website’s performance to ensure that it loads quickly. Faster sites are favoured by both users and search engines.
- Use Clear, Structured Content: Break up your content with appropriate headings, bullet points, and lists. This makes it easier for users and search engines to navigate your site.
- Add Closed Captions to Videos: Adding captions to your videos not only makes them accessible to users with hearing impairments but also allows search engines to index the content of your videos.
Conclusion
Making your website accessible isn’t just about compliance—it’s a smart SEO strategy. Google prioritises websites that offer a great user experience, and accessibility plays a significant role in that. Whilst Google has stated that accessibility is not currently a direct ranking factor, it has also acknowledged that this may change over time. As search algorithms evolve and accessibility becomes a greater focus in digital regulations, it’s highly likely that Google will integrate accessibility more deeply into its ranking criteria.
By ensuring your site is accessible now, you future-proof your SEO, improve your rankings, reach a wider audience, and enhance overall usability. If your website isn’t accessible, you’re not only alienating potential customers—you’re also risking lower search rankings both now and in the future. Businesses should take a proactive approach and start implementing accessibility best practices today to stay ahead of upcoming changes.
