Despite the fact that Google claims accessibility is not a direct ranking factor, good accessibility is good SEO.
At Future, we have a commitment to keeping our websites accessible for the widest audiences. As part of this commitment, we have had our sites professionally audited by third-parties in order to ensure we’re not just adhering to the standards, but going above-and-beyond to assist users browsing our websites.
During these audits, there were a lot of checks that we had already passed - hooray! What surprised me at first, though, was the reason why we had put effort into some of these points before.
- Images all had alt text, and most have good captions
- Heading structure was good and consistent
- Good metadata on the page
- Markup was semantic and signposting content correctly
- Good inter-linking and navigation between pages
The reason we had worked to improve so many of these points before wasn’t directly due to accessibility, but rather search engine optimisation (SEO).
As a publisher, Future relies heavily on organic traffic coming from places like Google. In fact, we have an in-house technical SEO team who work with our developers in order to ensure we’re doing all we can to let our content be indexed properly, and this team had raised many of these points to be worked on over the previous years.
If you think about it, this makes sense for a lot of reasons, but most obviously:
- Google crawlers are bots that will read the code on the page programatically, and display it to users
- Screen readers are tools that will read the code on the page programatically, and convey it to users
It can’t be put any better than Diane Kulseth said in “In-House SEO Success”:
Google is the world’s biggest screenreader
Ergo, if you have good, semantic HTML that is easy to read and navigate, even if Google doesn’t consider it a direct ranking factor, a lot of the work still serves as an indirect SEO signal, and you’re going to have a better chance of ranking well in search engines.
