The ultimate goal of SEO is to build up a website’s engagement and online presence. While there are many routes to get there one often overlooked factor in building an SEO plan is focusing on the overall accessibility of your site and content.

Given that 15% of the world’s population experience some type of disability, you could be alienating up to 1.3 billion people from your content if there is no consideration for their specific needs. Accessibility and discoverability go hand in hand, and for as much effort that is put into positioning your site for rankability, the same steps should be taken to ensure that everyone, including people with disabilities, are able to find and utilize it.

So what does accessibility in SEO really mean, what does it look like and how do you ensure your site is accessible?

There are a number of acts and guidelines that have been created to ensure technology is accessible, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are a universal set of guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While not every website is required to conform to their web content accessibility guidelines, site owners and SEO professionals should be aware of the potential to alienate audiences and customers from their services should they choose to avoid creating accessible sites or content.

How Accessibility Helps Better the User Experience

Take a moment and imagine that you’re trying to access your online bank. The elements overlap, the text colors make it almost impossible to read, and the links you need to click to take you to other pages don’t make sense. Without designing content that is accessible, this is the actual experience that many people who use alternative modes of reading and interacting with sites will experience.

Keeping the values of accessibility at the forefront of any content or site page allows people who may previously have been unable to access your content to do so. As our world becomes increasingly digital, so too does it become even more important that people have equal access to online navigation, easy online experiences, and the ability to find the information and services they need to navigate their day to day. In her article 5 Most Annoying Website Features I Face as a Blind Person Every Single Day, Holly Tuke points out that “accessibility is the difference between being able to use a website and clicking off of it.”

By keeping these varied modes of accessing content in mind, site owners and SEO professionals can begin to anticipate what may be difficult to access as a person living with a disability. Accessible content ensures that your content creation doesn’t go to waste, and is able to be perceived in a number of different ways that keep in mind any potential roadblocks that those with disabilities may experience.

Having your content accessible allows for an increased audience and can drive loyalty and trust from those that will appreciate the extra work put in to create an easy and accessible experience for them.

There Are Legal Implications to Not Having an Accessible Website

Accessibility goes beyond the desire to create a better and more equitable user experience—depending on where you live and the kind of services and content you’re offering, there could be potential legal consequences for not having an accessible website.

In the EU, the European Accessibility Act covers tech services that are accessible to the general public and requires they be compatible with assistive technologies.

In the U.S. the ADA offers web guidance and best practices, and requires state and local government sites, as well as businesses that are open to the public to conform to these guidelines.

Nike and Dominos have both encountered lawsuits based on the inaccessibility of their websites, ranging from denial of keyboard access, incompatibility with screen readers, empty or broken links, and missing alt text to name a few of the problems encountered by people trying to access their sites and services.

What Does Accessibility Really Mean? Remember the POUR Principles

When working to make content or a site more accessible, it’s important to keep in mind the POUR principles. Is your content: perceivable, operable, understable, and robust?

Ways SEOs Can Make a Positive Impact on Site Accessibility

SEO professionals can and should contribute to the overall accessibility of the web through the following methods:

Ways to Gain Links Manually

The best practices for manual link building are constantly changing. As the future of SEO evolves, so too do the link building strategies we use.

Despite this change and Google’s constant adjusting of the SEO algorithm, some tried and true methods of manual link building remain. These are some of the best ways to secure a backlink manually for your website.

ALT-Text on Photos

Screen readers read everything on a page, including the ALT-text on photos. If you don’t provide ALT-text for your images, screen readers will simply read it as “image” or “photo,” meaning the image itself will provide no context or contribution to the article itself.

Because of this, any imagery used in an SEO piece should provide clear, descriptive alt-text that allows those who are visually impaired or blind to understand and benefit from the added context of the image.

Using Appropriate Headings

For those using assistive technology, page navigation is often done by utilizing the various elements on the page such as hyperlinks and headings. By ensuring the use of an appropriate and logical heading structure, people with disabilities are able to easily navigate a page or article to find the information they need.

Accurate Anchor Text and Concise Hyperlinking Within Articles

Many best practices that contribute to successful link building are also the same principles used to ensure that a piece of content is accessible.

Anchor text is a huge area that SEO professionals have control over. In order to be as accessible as possible, anchor text should strive to be as clear, concise, and descriptive as it can be. Beyond just being good SEO practices, clear and descriptive anchor text allows people with disabilities to make quick decisions about whether or not a link leads to information they need, cutting down on frustrating or unnecessary web navigation.

The hyperlink itself should also be short, clear, and as descriptive as possible, with any unnecessary tagging or characters removed. Many screen readers will fully read out a URL when it encounters it, making it beneficial to clean up any linking you provide in a piece of content.

Be Sure to Regularly Test Your Site’s Accessibility

The best way to learn about your content or site’s accessibility is to test, and test again! A helpful practice is to have real people, and in particular, people with disabilities, test your site and provide feedback. You can also use assistive technology yourself (such as screen readers or voice command tech) to investigate how they work with your content or site.

In addition to testing from real humans, there are a number of great tools that can help to identify any potential roadblocks that people with disabilities may encounter while accessing your site or content.

Conclusion

Digital growth shows no sign of slowing down, making it more important than ever to recognize that equitable digital access is a human right. As SEO professionals our goal remains to foster growth, build audiences, and drive traffic for our clients.  A significant step to achieving those goals is to create content and build links that are easily accessible to all, regardless of whether or not they experience living with a disability.

Digital accessibility at the forefront of site design and content planning is important and we should strive to make content clear, informative, and easy to access with assistive technologies. Simply, a website built in a way that is easy to navigate results in a better digital space for all!