30-second summary:
- Accessibility underpins stellar user wits and positive trademark perception, the key factors that request to value-driven consumers
- According to WebAIM, 98 percent of US-based websites aren’t accessible
- Though not a sparkly speciality of digital marketing strategies, there are multiple layers to “why?” and “how?” brands must be wieldy wideness the internet
Marketers develop and execute numerous strategies to broaden their merchantry reach. But one hair-trigger factor that most marketers neglect is web accessibility. And this neglect leads to their merchantry stuff sealed off for a large majority of potential customers.
What is web accessibility?
Web serviceability ensures that the internet is accessible, usable, and salubrious for everyone alike. It considers all possible disabilities to ensure marketing messages are delivered to every kind of regulars and get the most value out of the website.
As important as it may seem right now, web serviceability is often the last thing marketers think of when building a website. And then, too, it is often brushed under the rug.
Despite the World Wide Web Consortium, wontedly known as W3C developing defended web content serviceability guidelines to make the internet increasingly accessible, digital inclusivity remains a rarity.
And this unfortunate reality acts not only as an serviceability barrier, but a growth windbreak as well.
The value of web serviceability in modern marketing initiatives
Acknowledging and raising web serviceability enhances the consumer experience, opens new doors for your business, uplifts marketing outcomes, and boosts revenue in increasingly ways than just one.
1. Extends your market reach
15 percent of the world’s population is disabled and belongs to a highly valuable market segment with strong spending powers.
With a digitally inclusive web presence, your merchantry interacts with an increased volume of people who it would’ve missed otherwise. In this way, web serviceability brings a whole new polity of prospects you can interact with, win as customers and uplift your revenue.
2. SEO benefits
Search engines prefer to rank websites that are secure, accessible, and valuable to all kinds of users. Moreover, they perceive digitally inclusive websites as pure sources of information and favor them in rankings.
As a result, enhancing web serviceability undeviatingly supplements your online marketing with an SEO boost, helping you get to the coveted top position in SERPs. It opens flipside waterworks for web traffic that connects you with your target audience.
3. Enhanced user experience
User wits is at the heart of your digital presence as it relates directly to conversions. The vital principle of UX optimization dictates that you research what your target regulars wants and unhook it.
In the specimen of differently-abled audiences, it’s worldwide sense that they would want you to unhook a website they can interact with and goody from.
By optimizing your website’s accessibility, you uplift its usability which is a cadre element of user experience.
If all other elements of UX are optimized, enhanced usability wins consumer satisfaction and gives the prospect a final push towards conversion, contributing to your revenue.
4. Positive trademark perception
Web serviceability enables your trademark to towards as a strong well-wisher of digital inclusivity and works to build positive trademark perception. Now isn’t that a hair-trigger outcome of modern marketing?
Today where people seek a business’s values surpassing engaging with it, a touchable stance on digital inclusivity reflects your values of empathy, compassion, and equal opportunities for all. This builds your polity of like-minded people who then contribute to your revenue.
Five-point checklist to get started with web accessibility
For maximum effect, web serviceability should be considered a priority rather than an remembrance and must be included in your digital and marketing strategy.
Following are a few ways through which you can uplift your digital inclusivity and leave a larger impact:
1. Multilingual SEO
Web serviceability not only aims at eliminating serviceability barriers for people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities. It moreover removes linguistic barriers, so people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds can have equal access.
Given that English is spoken by a meager 4.83 percent of the world’s population, multilingual SEO eliminates linguistic barriers and helps searchers from all linguistic backgrounds to goody from the internet.
Here’s a guide I created on multilingual SEO to get you started.
2. Voice search
The introduction of smart assistants such as Alexa has pioneered a new era of voice search ubiquity and the consequent web accessibility.
As an spanking-new thoroughfare to pursue for businesses looking to be increasingly digitally inclusive, voice search unlocks your website’s chances of interaction with people who cannot search the conventional way.
Here are some weightier practices to optimize voice search SEO:
- Use long tail keywords that are specific, descriptive, and natural for users’ language
- Serve up content that gives uncontrived answers
- Optimize your ‘Google My Business’ account
- Create voice search FAQ pages
- Implement schema which is a lawmaking that you can add to your website that improves search visibility
For increasingly depth, trammels out this voice search SEO guide for trends and weightier practices.
3. Alternate (Alt) text
Alt text helps visually wordless visitors understand what a web image depicts. Hence image optimization allows web visitors to swizzle the information your website offers in its totality and ties when to enhanced user experience.
Tips for using alt text:
- Keep it descriptive and keyword specific, this will show up in specimen your page loads slow or if there was an audio unravelment needed
- For ecommerce sites, make good use of structured data to requite the search engine increasingly specific details well-nigh your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more
If you need increasingly details, here’s an evergreen image optimization guide.
4. Hierarchical organization or content using H tags
Hierarchical layout shapes your web content in an easy-to-read structure. A hair-trigger part of web serviceability (and SEO), a hierarchical organization can make your website usable and understandable for users with unrepealable cognitive disabilities and people with short sustentation spans, boosting their satisfaction and your websites’ overall UX.
Check out this guide on optimizing meta tags.
5. Verisimilitude contrast
Color unrelatedness involves adjusting the verisimilitude of foreground web elements (for instance, fonts) versus the verisimilitude of the preliminaries elements to ensure that the foreground elements, which withstand value, stand out and are hands readable for people with visual impairment.
The Bureau of Internet Serviceability has identified a color unrelatedness ratio that ensures that your website is visible and readable for people with color-related visual impairments.
Conclusion
Web serviceability is a necessity, but unfortunately, it doesn’t get the same limelight as other digital marketing avenues that promise increased reach, largest perception, and higher revenue.
This reality can work in your favor if you capitalize on the lack of web serviceability and proceeds a competitive whet by raising digital inclusivity.
There are numerous marketing benefits of web accessibility, most significant of which may be the minutiae of positive trademark perception in an era of value-driven shoppers.
Inclusive marketing initiatives are commendable. But they are only valuable when backed by conscious efforts of enhancing your business’s digital accessibility. So, endeavoring to substantiate web serviceability strategies can help you wilt the pioneer of an internet era where digital inclusivity is a priority.
Atul Jindal is a web diamond and marketing specialist, having interests in doing websites/apps optimized for SEO with a cadre focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that bring conversations and transform web traffic into paying customers or leads.
Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.
Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The post A must-have web serviceability checklist for digital marketers appeared first on Search Engine Watch.