The web accessibility checklist digital marketers need to have

Marketers devise and implement many strategies to expand their business reach. Web accessibility is a critical aspect that marketers often overlook. This neglect can lead to the business being shut off from a large number of potential customers.

What’s web accessibility?

Web accessibility is a way to ensure that everyone can access the internet. It takes into account all disabilities in order to ensure that marketing messages reach every audience member and maximize the value of the website.

Web accessibility is as important as it seems right now. When building a websitespan styling=”font-weight 400 ;”>. It is also often overlooked.

Despite W3C’s dedicated guidelines for web content accessibility, the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C), ensuring digital inclusion remains rare.

This unfortunate fact acts as an accessibility and growth barrier.

Web accessibility is important in modern Marketing Initiatives

Adopting web accessibility is a way to improve the customer experience. It opens up new opportunities for your business, enhances marketing outcomes and increases revenue.

1. Expand your market reach

15% The disabled population of the world is a valuable segment that has high spending power and is highly valued.

Your business can interact with a wider range of people through a digitally inclusive website. Web accessibility opens up a new world of prospects that you can interact with, win customers, and increase your revenue.

2. SEO benefits

Search engines prefer websites that are accessible, secure, and useful to all users to be ranked. They also consider digitally inclusive websites to be authentic sources of information, and rank them higher in search results.

Therefore, improving web accessibility unambiguously supplements your online marketing with an optimization boost that will help you reach the top of SERPs. This opens up a new channel of web traffic that connects your target audience.

3. User experience improved

Your digital presence should be centered around user experience. It directly impacts conversions. UX optimization is based on the principle that your target audience needs are understood and delivered.

It’s obvious that differently-abled people would like a website that they can use and benefit from.

Optimizing accessibility on your website will improve its usability, which is an essential element of user experience.

Optimizing all elements of UX can increase customer satisfaction and drive prospects to convert.

4. Positive brand perception

Your brand can be seen as an advocate for digital inclusion and helps to build positive brand perception. Isn’t this a crucial outcome of modern marketing?

People today seek out the business’s values before they engage with them. A concrete position on digital inclusion reflects your values in empathy, compassion and equal opportunities for everyone. This creates a community of like-minded individuals who can then help you increase your revenue.

A five-point checklist to help you get started with web accessibility

Web accessibility is a priority and not an afterthought. It must be part of your digital and marketing strategies.

Here are some ways you can increase your digital inclusion and make a bigger impact.

1. Multilingual SEO

Web accessibility does not just aim to remove barriers that prevent people with situational, permanent or temporary disabilities from accessing the internet. Web accessibility also eliminates linguistic barriers so that people of all cultures and backgrounds have equal access.

Given the fact that only a small 4.83% population speaks English, multilingual SEO removes linguistic barriers to allow searchers from all backgrounds to access the internet.

To help you get started, here’s a guide that I wrote on multilingual SEO.

2. Voice search

With the introduction of smart assistants like Alexa, voice searching ubiquity has been a key factor in a new era web accessibility.

Voice search is a great avenue for businesses that want to be digitally inclusive. It opens up your website’s possibilities of interaction with people who are unable to search in the traditional way.

These are the best SEO practices for voice searches:

• Long tail keywords should be descriptive and specific. They should also be natural for the users’ language.
• Provide content that provides direct answers
• Optimize your Google My Business account
• Create voice search FAQ pages
• You can implement schema, which is a code you can add on your website to improve search visibility.

This voice search SEO guide provides more information about trends and best practices.

3. Text Alternate (Alt).

Alt text is helpful for visually impaired people to understand the meaning of a web image. Image optimization makes it possible for web visitors to absorb all the information on your website. This allows them to have a better user experience.

Tips for using alt text:

• It is important to be descriptive and specific. This will help you if your page loads slowly or if an audio description was needed.
• Structured data is a great way to provide more details to the search engine about your products’ colors, types, sizes, and more for ecommerce websites.

Here’s a guide to image optimization that will help you get more details.

4. Use H tags to organize hierarchically or for content

Your web content will be presented in a hierarchical format. Hierarchical organization is a critical component of web accessibility and SEO. It makes your website more accessible and understandable to users with cognitive disabilities or people with shorter attention spans. This will increase their satisfaction and improve your websites’ UX.

This guide will help you optimize meta tags.

5. Color contrast

The color contrast of the foreground web elements (for example, fonts) is used to adjust the color of the background elements against the foreground elements. This allows the foreground elements which have value to stand out and can be readable by people with visual impairment.

The Bureau of Internet Accessibility (BoIA) has determined a color contrast ratio to ensure that people with color-related visual impairments can see and read your website.

Conclusion

Web accessibility may be a necessity but it isn’t getting the same attention as other digital marketing avenues which promise greater reach, higher perception and higher revenue.

You can use this reality to your advantage if you capitalize upon the lack of accessibility on the web and adopt digital inclusion.

Web accessibility has many marketing benefits. The most important is the creation of positive brand perceptions in an age of value-driven customers.

It is admirable to have inclusive marketing strategies. These marketing initiatives are great, but they’re only as effective if you make conscious efforts to improve your business’s online accessibility. You can become a pioneer in an internet age where digital inclusion is a priority by implementing web accessibility strategies.

Atul Jindal, a web designer and marketing specialist, is interested in creating websites/apps optimized to SEO with a primary focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that spark conversations and convert web traffic into paying customers, leads, or clients.

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Search Engine Watch’s first post was entitled A must-have checklist for web accessibility.