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3 April 2024
Accessibility
Analytics & Optimisation
Web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO). Two areas of expertise that, in their own way, help increase the visibility of your website’s pages. Their relationship might not seem obvious at first. Yet, improving your site’s accessibility does have a larger impact on its ranking in Google’s search results than you might expect.
The impact of web accessibility on SEO
First, let’s address the elephant in the room. Does accessibility directly affect Search Engine Optimization? Google is using a wide range of ranking factors to determine a page’s position in its search results. Today, accessibility isn’t explicitly among those ranking factors.
Google’s search advocate John Mueller stated that websites with improved accessibility don’t have a direct advantage in search rankings compared to less accessible pages. One of the main reasons being the inability to quantify accessibility.
“I think accessibility is something that is important for a website, because if you drive your users away with a website that they can’t use, then they’re not going to recommend it to other people. But it’s not something that we would pick up and use as a direct ranking factor when it comes to Search.”
John Mueller, 2022
However, this was March 2022. Both Google’s ranking algorithms and the field of accessibility have evolved since then. In June 2023, all European Member States have adopted and published the European Accessibility Act (EAA). According to this directive, newly designed products and services must be created with accessibility in mind. The requirements of the EAA must be implemented from 2025 and apply to a wide range of sectors, such as e-commerce, banking services, telephony services and transport.