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While many businesses value accessibility in principle, implementing it in specific ways that benefit both your customers and your business can feel daunting. Online presence, in particular, is an area where accessibility is often overlooked. One study found that 95% of websites fail to conform to accessibility standards required by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Some of the downsides of not being fully accessible are obvious, including legal consequences, a negative brand image and a failure to engage with and support people with disabilities. While accessibility is clearly a good thing on its own and may be legally required depending on your location, it also impacts your website's SEO.
Related: How Website Accessibility Affects Your Brand's Reputation and Success
Accessibility and SEO
Many businesses do not realize that they are wasting their SEO efforts if they are not prioritizing accessibility. The level of accessibility your website provides significantly affects conversion rates, rankings and organic traffic. One study found that prioritizing accessibility solutions led to a "12% average increase in overall traffic."
Technically, accessibility is an aspect of user experience, something Google factors heavily into rankings. Since SEO campaigns involve overhauling your website and improving user experience, they provide one of the best opportunities to implement accessibility strategies and accomplish multiple brand goals effectively.
To minimize accessibility errors on your site while improving SEO, it's important to understand the principles of accessibility and some of the key starting points for an inclusive, search-friendly website.
4 principles of accessibility
The principles of accessibility come from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). While this act applies to more than just websites, its principles are helpful guidelines for developing an SEO campaign that prioritizes accessibility.
- Perceivable: All users should be able to access and understand the content on your website. This requires you to take into account users with a range of speech, hearing or cognitive abilities.
- Operable: Your website needs to be easy for users with disabilities to navigate and engage with.
- Understandable: Both the content and structure of your website should be easy to understand.
- Robust: A robust website functions quickly and smoothly without glitches in accessibility tools such as alt text or captions. It also needs to be easy for you to adapt as accessibility guidelines and tools advance.
Related: 4 Resources To Make Your Website More Accessible
7 ways to start improving your website's accessibility
While the principles of accessibility are quite 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 technologies: Many people use assistive technology to access websites, particularly if they have visual impairments. Modifying HTML elements to ensure your website is compatible with technologies is crucial for meeting accessibility requirements. Many companies rely on SEO experts or accessibility widgets to meet these standards.
- Implement transcripts and captions for video accessibility: Transcripts and captions allow people with hearing disabilities to engage with your content. Additionally, search engines will understand and index your content more easily if you have included captions.
- Provide alt text: If your website relies too heavily on images, with no alt text, your content will be inaccessible to many users and more difficult for search engines to index. Provide clear alt text for visual content to eliminate this mistake.
- Evaluate readability: One of the most common accessibility errors is not providing proper color contrast. You can use a color contrast testing tool to make sure that the contrast on your site is not too low or too high.
- Reorganize navigation: Reorganizing your website's structure and navigation improves 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 guidelines to follow: Before you begin, it's important that you know which guidelines apply to you. These guidelines can help you develop specific accessibility goals. Many websites are required to meet WCAG 2 Level AA guidelines, as well as other national guidelines such as the ADA. To stay compliant, make sure to stay up to date, as these regulations and guidelines change constantly.
- Use accessibility auditing tools: It can be difficult to identify and eliminate accessibility errors on your own. Consider using accessibility auditing tools or hiring an SEO company that has a thorough understanding of current accessibility practices.
Related: To Further Digital Accessibility, We Have to Start from Within
Accessibility is a worthwhile investment for your business from a variety of perspectives. An accessible website will be easier for all your users, as well as search engines, to navigate. This increases user engagement, lowers bounce rates and increases organic traffic. Keep your business compliant with accessibility guidelines and increase your engagement with internet users of all abilities by prioritizing accessibility as part of your SEO efforts.
