Start optimizing for accessibility

Amel says: "All SEO professionals need to start thinking about accessibility in 2022. It's really important to think about making the web accessible for everybody because we've seen that Google did a lot of algorithm updates about UX in 2021. Page experience, ranking factors, and Core Web Vitals are all actually related to the user experience. By not focusing on accessibility, you're actually overlooking certain users and not helping them use the web how they want to.

You need to start thinking about optimising for accessibility and making the design part of the user experience for everyone. Looking at how the Google algorithm is evolving; accessibility could become ranking signals and factors at some point in the near future."

What aspects of accessibility do you envisage becoming part of the algorithms in the future?

"Sometimes web designers only design elements on the page, and they don't think about how the contrast, or the colours they pick, affects uses. This means it can be very difficult for users with disabilities to see the design or read the text.

It's about designing in a way that makes the usability of the site easy, and in the future, Google will be able to pick up on these things. In fact, if we audit a website for Core Web Vitals, we can already see that Google is picking up some metrics for accessibility - although they are not scoring them yet. Therefore, it's clear that Google knows how to find elements that are not optimised for accessibility."

What metrics are they picking up at the moment?

"The one that comes back a lot is the contrast between the text and the colour elements - so that could be an easy thing to start with for SEOs. This is one of the beauties of SEO - we're not just doing content and technical optimisation; we're actually moving to user experience and also design. We can work much more closely with the UX teams.

When you think about it, there's one element of the current algorithm that came up with the page experience matrix, which looks at the spacing between the design elements. This is pure UX - but now it's affecting SEO."

What online resources can an SEO use to learn how their website's accessibility can be improved?

"The easiest one to use is Google PageSpeed Insights. If you audit your website, the last metrics are related to accessibility - although there is no score for them as they are currently greyed out. This is really interesting because if it's there, and Google is actually able to see them, it means at some point they may be able to add them to the algorithm itself.

You can also access these results through the DevTools. Just go to any website, click on Inspect, and you will have access to what we call the DevTools. From here, you can run the Lighthouse audit report."

What are the different ways that SEOs can articulate the value of what they're trying to do, to help other teams fully embrace the value of SEO?

"All SEOs have this struggle of showing the value of SEO to all these different teams. When it comes to accessibility, and the latest algorithm update, working closely with the UX and design teams is very important. It's our job to look at PageSpeed Insights, understand what it's telling us and learn more about UX. We need to keep evolving in our profession and understand why Google is asking us to care about UX. We need to work with other teams to optimise UX, but also educate them on algorithm changes - not only for the users but also for Google. Let's face it, if you are not ranking on page one and not getting traffic, this will affect sales.

If you share the recommendations from Google to improve the UX, the design elements on the page, and accessibility, then you can work together as a team to make improvements for your users. At the same time, Google will reward you with ranking improvements.

SEO has changed so much over the last five years, so internal education is more important than ever. For example, we knew that the user experience matrix would, at some date, become a ranking factor. Our job is to understand the main goal of the algorithm. Once we share this knowledge with the rest of the business, it's going to help us improve not only the ranking for the site but also the user experience - which is the goal of it all."

Should an SEO sit down and work with a UX team on a quarterly basis when they're looking to implement larger projects, or does this need to be done more regularly?

"The success of a website depends on SEOs working in a cross-functional way and collaborating with all teams on a regular basis. Obviously, each company is different, but most have to do ongoing releases, and you need to be part of those universal releases and the QA of the entire process.

It's your role to help other teams understand that anything that is added or removed to the website can affect SEO. That's why you need to always have an SEO at the table during the brainstorming and scoping. After implementation, you have to QA from an SEO perspective to make sure that nothing is affecting the site, such as speeds, user experience and rankings.

If the other teams have considered SEO throughout an implementation project, it's a win-win for everybody - the users, the bots, and the website. And it's the SEO's responsibility to get them thinking about these questions."

How do you measure accessibility improvements on your site?

"There are lots of tools out there that can record actual users' experience of browsing on your website. You can find users with accessibility challenges and run a test with them, or record their experience of using your site. You can watch on videos afterwards how they navigated the website and how they found the text, contrast of images with the text, and the colour contrasts."

How do you find users with accessibility challenges?

"There are companies out there who provide this service for you, such as UserTesting.com. You just tell them your criteria - for example, 100 individuals from the US that have these specific accessibility challenges. They might already have these users in their system, or they will work with you to build this segment.

They have everything set up, so you don't have to do a lot. They just need to know the tasks you want the users to do. They'll record the customer journey and the user's verbal description of the experience."

What's one thing SEOs need to be doing less of, so they can spend more time thinking about accessibility over the coming year?

"Obviously, all the things we do in SEO are important. But I think we need to start thinking about accessibility more, and optimising for it, before anything becomes a signal and then a ranking factor. One thing I would recommend doing more strategically is backlink building. We all know that everybody's doing them - but let's do them in a more strategic way that uses less resource. This will give you more time to work with the design team to think of the website's user experience and how it can be improved."

Amel Mehenaoui is a Digital Marketing Consultant, and you can find her over at LATmultilingual.com.