What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about making your website ADA compliant?
Most webmasters and SEO experts think of accessible web design as a hindrance to their efforts. Chances are you’re already imagining obscure modifications that’ll render your website unattractive and difficult to navigate.
What you aren’t realizing is that the fundamentals of ADA compliance are the same as those for on-site SEO.
The techniques that make your website search engine friendly are also the ones that make it accessible to different types of users.
ADA Compliance and On-Site SEO: Understanding the Connection
According to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s mandatory for businesses to ensure that their websites are accessible to people with disabilities.
The goal of accessible web design is to ensure that people with visual, auditory, sensory, or motor impairments can use your website.
If you design an awesome-looking website that isn’t accessible, you’ll be alienating a section of your target audience.
That, in turn, will take a toll on your website’s engagement rates and ultimately, push it down in search engine results.
It’s because search engines, such as Google and Bing, are always on a quest to deliver the best user experience. They develop an affinity for websites that retain visitors with responsive design, user-friendly navigation, and high-quality content.
That’s the reason why on-page SEO and ADA compliance must go hand in hand.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss a few tactics to make your website ADA compliant. Also, we’ll understand how these tactics impact on-page SEO. Let’s jump right in.
Add Title Tags
Users with visual impairments rely on screen readers to make sense of web content. A meaningful and descriptive title tag goes a long way to help them understand what a web page is about.
The title tag appears on top of the browser tab whenever you open a web page. It’s the first element that screen readers read aloud.
That helps users with visual impairments distinguish among different pages. Also, it lets them decide whether they want to continue browsing a particular page.
Make sure the title tag gives an accurate idea of the page’s content. If you’re publishing a blog post on ‘influencer marketing’, don’t use a vague title tag, like ‘The Only Marketing Tactic You Need’.
Instead, use a descriptive title tag, such as:
Your Guide to Influencer Marketing in 2022
5 Tips to Build a Winning Influencer Marketing Strategy
On-Page SEO Benefits
Apart from screen readers, search engine spiders use the title tag to understand the content of a web page. Also, they use it to generate search engine listings.
A meaningful and optimized title tag helps search engines assess whether the content is relevant to a particular search query. Also, it compels users to click on the listing and visit your website.
Find a way to organically include the target keyword in the title tag.
Outline a Heading Structure
Short, snappy, and engaging headings are used by bloggers and webmasters to improve the appearance of their content. A well-defined heading structure prevents your content from appearing like an endless wall of text.
Also, it comes to the rescue of people with sensory or cognitive impairments. These users can scroll down a web page and scan the headings to determine what’s worth reading.
Similarly, screen readers can read out the headings to help users decide whether they want to skip specific sections.
That makes a clear heading structure indispensable to ADA compliance.
Each heading should:
Follow a logical hierarchy of H1, H2, H3, H4, and so on
Give a fair idea of the corresponding section
Include variations of the target keyword (wherever possible in an organic way)
On-Page SEO Benefits
Descriptive headings help search engines scan a web page and understand its content. Organic placement of target keywords in the headings also improves the topical relevance of your content.
Also, headings are often used by Google to generate featured snippets for search queries.
So, adding clear and meaningful headings increases your odds of bypassing organic search listings and making it to the featured snippets.
Improve the User Experience
User experience (UX) plays a key role in ensuring ADA compliance. An accessible website is one that:
Is easy to navigate
Doesn’t take too long to load
Is responsive across all devices
Maintains a high text to background ratio
The idea is to ensure that people using screen readers, keyboards, and other assistive devices can use your website with ease.
On-Page SEO Benefits
Building a fast, responsive, and easily accessible website is on-page SEO 101. The better the user experience, the higher your chances of grabbing prime search engine real estate.
Improving the page layout, design, and navigation helps your website retain visitors for longer. That, in turn, tells search engines your website is engaging visitors and helping them find relevant information.
It’s become even more important in light of Google’s Page Experience algorithm update.
Include Alt Text for Images
An alt text or alt tag is a textual alternative to visual elements, such as pictures, graphics, and animation, on a website.
It’s read out by screen readers to help users understand the content of an image. That makes your website accessible to people with visual impairments.
Make sure the alt text gives a clear and vivid description of the image. Avoid using abbreviations and redundant phrases.
On-Page SEO Benefits
The alt text is your website’s not-so-secret weapon to ranking in Google Images search results. All you need to do is organically include the target keyword in the alt text.
Also, it increases your website’s chances of appearing in rich results and the knowledge graph.
Add Transcripts and Closed Captions
As with the alt text, transcripts are read aloud by screen readers to help users understand what’s going on in a video. That, in turn, makes your website accessible to people with visual impairments.
Similarly, people with auditory impairments can read transcripts and closed captions to better understand a video.
That’s why it is imperative to include transcripts and closed captions with all your videos. You can directly add transcripts to the web page displaying the video.
Or you can let users download the transcript from the web page. Use ‘.txt’ files for transcripts to make it easier for screen readers to open the file.
On-Page SEO Benefits
Search engine spiders aren’t equipped to decipher and understand videos. Instead, they use transcripts to understand the content of a video and determine its relevance to a search query.
Leverage Schema Markup
Schema markup tags are used by screen readers to identify different elements of a web page, such as text boxes, buttons, forms, etc. That, in turn, improves the user experience for people with disabilities.
On-Page SEO Benefits
Adding the right schema markup tags helps your website make it to the featured snippets of relevant search engine results. Also, you can use them to enhance a web page’s search engine listing, and improve the click-through rate (CTR).
Final Takeaways
Making your website accessible to users with disabilities involves the same tactics that help search engines better understand your website. From alt text and transcripts to title tags and schema markup – a comprehensive on-site SEO checklist will also help you achieve ADA compliance.
