Join co-hosts Natalie Garza and digital accessibility expert Natalie MacLees for episode 34 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This episode delves into the overlap between accessibility and SEO, highlighting how both can benefit from keyword targeting, content readability, page titles, link purposes, headings, and adaptable content.
The hosts discuss various Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) criteria that also enhance SEO and provide practical tips for making your website more accessible and search-engine-friendly.
Intro: Accessibility Meets SEO
Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 34. I’m one of the co-hosts, Natalie Garza, and with me today is,
Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host.
Natalie Garza: And she is a digital accessibility expert here to walk us through today’s topic, which is the overlap, the handshake between accessibility and SEO.
Intro: Accessibility Meets SEO
So let’s give the viewers a little refresher. What does SEO even stand for to begin with?
Natalie MacLees: Search engine optimization. And it’s just some things that you can do on your website to make sure that search engines are more likely to find it, especially when they’re searching for particular keywords.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, and we’re not gonna get into all SEO basics. We just wanna show you guys how much overlap there is between accessibility topics and fixes for your website and SEO improvements.
Alt Text and Non-Text Content
So, starting off with the concept of keyword targeting. Basically, creating content based on what people search for. So what is the first WCAG success criterion that we’re gonna talk about that overlaps with this?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so 1.1.1, which is called Non-text Content, but this is basically the WCAG rule that says our images need alt text. It says some other things as well, but that’s the main thing that most people take away from that one.
So you do wanna make sure that if you have non-decorative images, images that are conveying information of some kind, that they have alternative text.
So for somebody who can’t see the image, for whatever reason, they can still get information about what is contained in that image. Search engines can’t see your images, so they also benefit from having alt text.
Where you wanna be careful is that your alt text is for people first. So don’t just use your alt text for keyword stuffing for SEO. Make sure it works for people first.
Natalie Garza: Exactly. Yeah. Would you be embarrassed if this gets shown to a person, or will this be actually helpful? So alt text is a great way to incorporate keywords.
Keep It Simple: Reading Level
What’s the next way to incorporate keyword targeting that also overlaps with accessibility?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so your content itself, so we have 3.1.5 Reading Level, we wanna keep things to about an eighth grade reading level. So if you’re not in the US that’s around like junior high, like where you are when you’re 12 or 13 years old. Very friendly, straightforward language, that is going to be helpful for the search engines to ingest that and figure out what your page is about.
But it’s also helpful for the people who come to the site. They’re busy, they’re distracted, they don’t have time to read a dissertation, right? They just want the information in plain language as quickly as they can get it.
Page Titles Matter
Natalie Garza: What’s the next success criterion?
Natalie MacLees: Your page titles! So this is, it doesn’t actually appear anywhere on your page, but it appears on the tab in the browser, and it’s the title of each of your pages. It does also show up in search engines, and this is WCAG 2.4.2 called Page Titled. So every page of your website should have a unique and descriptive name, so every page of your website can’t just say “best services ever”.
Because nobody will know what the individual pages are about. So it has to say, “home – best services ever”, “about us – best services ever”, et cetera. And you need to make sure each page is unique so you can tell them apart.
And each page is descriptive so that when someone lands there and they hear that title read out to them, they understand what the page is all about.
Doing that also helps search engines understand what your page is all about and what the difference between all of your pages are. So there’s a lot of overlap here between SEO and accessibility.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because when you’re looking through the search results. Google wants to show people actually relevant pages, and if your page is titled accordingly, they’re more likely to show it.
Natalie MacLees: Exactly.
Descriptive Links
Natalie Garza: All right, what about 2.4.4 Link Purpose?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so you don’t wanna use link text like “read more” or “click here” because that’s generic. What am I learning more about? What am I clicking? Where am I going?
The actual text that’s linked should give a hint about where it’s going. That helps to reinforce keywords for that page. So if I have my about page and I link “about – super services”, then search engines are going to have that keyword now for the about page, they’re gonna understand this is the about page for super services.
So we wanna make sure that there’s extra context in there. “Read more about this topic”, “learn more about this topic”, and then instead of “click here”, you would want the name of where you’re going, right? “Download this document”, or “visit our contact us page”, or whatever it happens to be.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because on a website with a hundred pages, click here could go anywhere.Or even outside the website, taking a whole millions of millions of websites.
Headings and Labels
All right, so next on the list, 2.4.6 Headings and Labels. So similar.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so another similar one, but this is if we have a long page of content. We wanna break that up into section, and each section should start with a header that is actually marked up in the HTML as a header.
So that’s really helpful for accessibility because it helps to pull an outline of our content out for assistive technology users and helps them navigate around the document and find the relevant sections they wanna read.
But it also helps us to tell search engines what kind of content is on this page and how is it arranged, and how is it organized so that when it’s indexing it for returning search results for keywords, it can tell more easily if your content is relevant.
Text Alternatives for Media
Natalie Garza: And last one, 1.2 Time-based Media, which I think ties back to the images.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so that’s a guideline instead of a success criterion, but there’s a whole bunch of success criteria under here that deal with audio and video files.
So essentially, a search engine can’t access your audio file or your video file to figure out what’s going on in it. So the way that you would address that is to provide a text alternative, which could be captions, transcripts, et cetera.
Those also happen to be really helpful for people with disabilities. So people who can’t hear the video, people who can’t see the video, we have different ways that we wanna provide that information to them. Or also just people who are trying to watch a video on a train, right? And they can’t have the volume on.
Because if you have a podcast, you have, you know, every episode is this rich content that’s talking about a certain topic, and you definitely want that indexed in search engines so that if people are looking for a topic you’ve discussed on a podcast, they can find it.
And the only way that’s gonna happen is if you have that text transcript of your podcast and/or captions on a video that there’s text in some way that that search engine can grab onto to figure out what that video or audio file is all about.
Search Engines vs. Assistive Tech
Natalie Garza: Could you say that search engines are maybe equivalent level as people who are blind?
Natalie MacLees: So I think I would compare a search engine or a search engine crawler more to assistive technology, where in both cases we have just a simple machine that is trying to ingest and understand content, and they both have very similar capabilities, so they’re not able to you know, see or interact with anything on the page.
They’re not able to get information presented as videos or images, and they’re not able to get text that’s presented in images. So all of the same kind of limitations apply to both a search engine and assistive technology.
The whole process of making something search engine optimized is about making it readable and ingestible by a search engine, and the whole process of making something accessible is about making it readable and searchable by assistive technology so that the assistive technology can then present that to a user.
So the end goal is different. Because when I’m doing search engine optimization, my goal is to make sure search engines know what my page is about so they can send more traffic to me. When I’m making my page accessible, that’s about ensuring that anybody who comes to my page can get my content. So the means by which I accomplish those two goals are very similar.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s why we wanted to make this episode, ’cause it’s just undeniable, there’s so much overlap!
Multiple Ways to Navigate
All right. So this next part, a lot of search engine optimization relies on site health. So you wanna go into the first one, 2.4.5 Multiple Ways.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so this just means that you have to have multiple ways of getting to the different bits of your content. So you might have a main navigation, you might have breadcrumbs, you might have a site map, you might have a bunch of links down in your footer.
So, just all different ways that people can get to your content, and that is helpful for accessibility because it gives people multiple ways of getting to the same thing.
They don’t have to try to memorize this one perfect path to getting to something that they want.
And it’s helpful for search engines because it helps them understand the structure of your website and how your content relates to each other, like how one page relates to the other pages on your site and how those are arranged.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, like when we say crawl, like the search engine is literally crawling every single link and going through every single page on your website.
Breadcrumbs and Location
All right, next, 2.4.8 Location.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so this is when, I’m sure we’ve all seen it at the top of a webpage, there will be little breadcrumbs that let you know you were on the “homepage” and then you went to “services”, and now you’re on “web design services”.
So it’s really easy to see at a glance, like, “oh, this page is part of services, which is a section of this website”.
So that it’s really helpful for people with cognitive disabilities and memory issues and helpful for a lot of different cases for accessibility. But again, it’s another mechanism to help a search engine understand how your content is structured and what the hierarchy is, and what the relation between pages are.
Semantic HTML
Natalie Garza: Next, we have another whole entire guideline, 1.3 Adaptable, which is all about semantic HTML, you’re favorite.
Natalie MacLees: All about semantic HTML, one of my favorite topics, so HTML, those, all those little tags, all those little <p> tags and <H1> tags, they all communicate what type of content is included inside that tag.
That helps search engines to understand what the different bits of content on the page are, and it helps assistive technology understand the same thing so that a user can understand, “oh, that piece of content is more important because it’s an H1.”
So that tells me that’s a top level heading for that page compared to a paragraph tag that’s maybe just a piece of content and maybe there’s 50 of them on the page.
Natalie Garza: Exactly. So that’s a whole guideline. We recommend going to check each one out individually.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Mobile-Friendly Design and Reflow
Natalie Garza: And then the last one on the list we have is 1.4.10 Reflow.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Search engines love mobile design. We are seeing, of course, there’s been a trend, especially since smart devices have come onto the market, that more and more web traffic comes from mobile devices.
So, we’re over 50% of web traffic is coming from mobile devices. So when search engines are looking at sites, they are looking at sites that work well on mobile devices.
So having a page that is responsive works really well on a phone. Everybody can get to all of the content. That’s gonna be a priority for search engine optimization, but it’s also a priority for accessibility, number one, because people will be using all different types of devices to access your site, and you wanna make sure it works on all of them.
But then number two, because people with different disabilities might use zooming and panning and screen magnifiers. And different ways of getting to content that maybe they would otherwise have a hard time seeing or perceiving.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because generally if your website works well on mobile it means somebody on desktop zooming in 200% is probably gonna have a good time getting to all the content.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it should work really well for them. Of course, you wanna test it to make sure, but that’s a really good way of doing it.
Shareable, Accessible Content
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. All right. And then the last SEO concept we wanted to talk about is earning links and mentions, which generally is not too big of an accessibility topic.
However, if you have well-structured, easy-to-read content and you follow many accessibility guidelines when building your website, it is more shareable and more likely to get mentioned.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, people will wanna interact with it more, so you’ll get benefits from that, and more people will be able to interact with it, and more people will be able to share it online and tell their friends about it. So it definitely helps.
Improving Accessibility to Boost SEO
Natalie Garza: Yes. So with that, where can people go to improve their accessibility and SEO?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so we don’t have any SEO specific tools, but we’ve already talked about improving your accessibility is gonna improve the SEO of your site. So come on over to AAArdvarkAccessibility.com. You can test your homepage for free. We’ll show you all of the automatic issues that we found on there and tell you how you can fix them.
Natalie Garza: Yes. So with that, thank you guys for watching. That was episode 34 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. We will talk to y’all next time.
