How Your SEO Experience Helps Accessibility
Your SEO experience can directly help you on your accessibility journey. It is not a coincidence that both Accessible Web’s founders and even yours truly are all former search engine optimizers. Optimizing a website for search engines and users with disabilities is a similar pursuit.
SEO makes a website accessible to search engine technology while creating engaging content that human users can easily consume. Web accessibility is about making a website that assistive technology can easily consume and creating accessible content for human users.
Both:
- Apply standards and best practices to a website to improve its user experience
- Enhance how websites perform to fulfill key business objectives
- Are best considered at the beginning of a web project instead of the end
- Get a website in front of new audiences.
- Are great business opportunities.
A key difference, though, is that web accessibility is still emerging. Like with the early days of SEO, opportunities abound for those willing to evolve their skills and stay ahead of the pack.
Communicating to technology and users with the same code
Web accessibility practitioners use a blend of automated tools, manual auditing against standards and best practices, and user testing to improve websites. Which, if you’re an SEO, is a very familiar sounding process. If you’re good at these things, you’ll be good at web accessibility.
These SEO best practices are also good for web accessibility:
- Headings
- Alt text
- Breadcrumbs
- Operable site navigation
- Descriptive anchor text
- On-site sitemaps
- Descriptive page titles
Search engines see these as important ranking factors, partly because they want to ensure users with disabilities aren’t disappointed by the results.
Instant gratification
The hardest part about SEO was proving that I did my job correctly. How could I prove that my change in March led to an increase in rankings in August? Was what I was doing even considered by search engines? The answer changed daily and was actively being kept a secret. I performed minor miracles for my clients, but what hard evidence could I possibly have to show for it?
In this way, web accessibility work is extremely refreshing. You can instantly validate your work against publicly available criteria. No educated guesses or chasing trends. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are publicly available. Tools like the logging feature in our RAMP platform make it easy to keep a comprehensive log of your efforts. You can even automatically syndicate that log to your website to demonstrate publicly your efforts to make your site accessible.
If you’re an agency and wonder why you aren’t landing bigger clients..
Mid to enterprise-sized companies already know that web accessibility is just as much an opportunity as SEO. The difference is obvious when talking to a company that is big enough to do market research. The evidence points to an accessible website being just as important as having an accessible brick-and-mortar location. Smaller businesses have been slower to catch on, and people showing up on their websites are leaving upset. Just as upset if they couldn’t access a physical location, smaller businesses just don’t know it’s happening. (Until a demand letter from an attorney shows up.)
Larger clients know that cleaning up your work is much more expensive than hiring a firm that knows how to do it right first. This is exactly what happened with SEO about ten years ago. Even if you work with smaller clients, this understanding will inevitably trickle down to smaller organizations soon.
If you’re an agency and want to learn more about offering accessibility to clients, check out our page for agencies and free webinar series.
