The Importance of Accessibility in Web Content and SEO

A brief summary:

• Your SEO is about more than just pleasing Google.
• More people with disabilities are using the internet than ever before.
• Making your web content accessible not only promotes inclusivity, it also improves your SEO and online reachability.
• Changes like headings, clearer language, better link anchor texts, and alt tags for images help in a big way.

I'd wager a lot of people assume that SEO is about one goal: optimising webpages to tickle Google's fancy. It's a big part of it, of course, but there's a lot more going on than just satisfying algorithms.

With more people than ever relying on accessible websites, optimising your content is vital to ensure as many users as possible get the most out of your web pages.

You may already be familiar with the use of H1-H6 headers, good anchor texts that link to relevant sources, alt tags for images, and short sentence structures that are easy to scan. But it's doing more than just making your homepage and blog posts look neat and crawlable for search engines.

It's giving people who utilise assistive tools the ability to read your content, click on the links they're after, know what images are in front of them, etc.

There's a lot of crossover between SEO tactics that get you noticed online and ensuring your business is being as inclusive as possible. Optimised websites are great for visibility on Google, but they also show that people with disabilities matter to you.

Let's look at that in a bit more detail:

In 2024, a study reported by Eurostat showed that over 80% of disabled people in the EU had "used the internet in the past 12 months." In addition to this, research conducted by Samsung UK and OnePoll around a similar time revealed that 68% of the 1,000 adults surveyed felt "excluded from products or services due to accessibility issues."

To take it one step further, as of late-2025, 48% of 1,200 UK public sector websites showed there was a need for accessibility improvements. Of these, travel and tourism is said to be the biggest offender.

This suggests a worrying disparity between those with accessibility requirements and websites not catering to such needs.

The fact that so many people with disabilities are feeling let down by websites that don't take accessibility into account is a problem we should all be addressing.

But why is it such a big deal? Why is it so important for anyone, let alone people with disabilities, to have access to the internet and/or the web?

Well, according to Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to "freedom of opinion and expression." This includes "freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Note the phrase 'any media.'  This clearly includes the internet and the ability to read and take part in discussions on the World Wide Web. It's basically a human right to be able to do so, if that's not being too dramatic.

When you don't optimise your web content in a way that's accessible to more people, you simply limit access. In short: there's no reason not to be more mindful of how SEO is both useful marketing and supports inclusivity on the internet.

If you take care of your own content and SEO – or you work with people like me – you're probably already aware of the benefits of a well-optimised website. It helps ensure your business has a wider reach online by allowing people to find you easily on search engines.

But the tactics employed are not just random. When you write and upload content (such as a blog post or About Me page), the way you structure it via the use of headings, good links, clear images with descriptions, and clear language marries search engine optimisation with accessibility.

If people are finding your business website through their search queries, you've already done good work.

However, if you've carried that forward and made your site and your landing pages accessible for, say, people with screen readers, then you've taken that extra step, and it works.

A Semrush study from 2025 shows that SEO and accessibility work well together to improve overall performance. In their analysis of 10,000 websites, 23% that made accessibility improvements saw a 23% increase in traffic, while 27% had more keyword rankings

Okay, so what can you do to make sure your website is as compliant as possible while also ticking SEO boxes?

You're now onboard with making sure your content is as accessible as it can be. But where do you start? Well, the industry standard is best understand via the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (also known as WCAG).

It's currently in version 2.2, with WCAG 3 in the works. In a nutshell: the document is internationally recognised as the benchmark for websites that are striving for improved accessibility.

To be honest, I don't believe it's necessary to have intimate knowledge of every criterion. It's a pretty lengthy document, I'm sure you'll agree.

However, what is important from an SEO perspective is how you treat your web content. When it comes to websites, there are several standards that go to great lengths to showcase compliance, so people with disabilities can access your pages.

Before I go into it, I want to show you something.

Have a look at the video below, which comes from the University of California, San Francisco. On the off-chance the embed doesn't work, you can access the video on YouTube instead.

The video itself is fairly old, but it demonstrates with clarity how web accessibility benefits people with disabilities. In this case, Marc Sutton, a blind IT worker at the university, shows how screen readers allow those with visual impairments to read and browse web pages.

The screen reader outputs the text as synthetic speech or braille so Sutton can understand what the page is about.

We can see how he navigates the UCSF website, with the screen reader telling him what links are there and what the anchor text says, as well as allowing him to jump to headings for a quick scan.

It's this scanning of the headers that most fascinated me. I'm very familiar with H1, H2, H3, etc. tags when it comes to good optimisation. However, until I saw this video, it never occurred to me that someone would use a device to move around different headings, allowing them to find what they want.

Sutton then shows how web browsing fails to take his blindness into account when there is little to not accessibility.

He also shows how having alt tags to describe images allows him to understand what a photo uploaded to a web article contains. Images that have no (or poor) descriptions don't benefit people using screen readers.

This also goes for tables, links, and other aspects. When design, coding, and structure standards aren't met, it's easy to see how people with disabilities can feel excluded from participating in the web.

It's important to state that what's laid out in the WCAG document is not a law. It's simply a guideline. While it can feel overwhelming to see all the ways websites can improve accessibility, just being aware that there are ways to improve is a good start.

There's a lot in the document that discusses more technical aspects of accessibility, which lean heavily into web design and coding; things that I'm not qualified or experienced enough in to give advice on.

These could be things like making sure pages can be navigated via the arrow keys on a keyboard, allowing users to change the text size in real-time, etc.

For web content, the following are some ways you can ensure good accessibility and SEO practices:

• Headings: H1-H6 tags do more than just neatly structure blog posts. They also enable content to be navigable and scannable.
• Links: I've been guilty of this myself. It's not enough to simply have a link that says "click here." They need to be descriptive, so people with sight issues know what they're clicking on.
• Alt texts: this is another tried-and-true optimisation. As mentioned above, when you don't have descriptive alt tags for images, you neglect to take into account people who can't see said images. They don't need to be scrawling marquees of text, but they do need to tell people what's there.
• Language: Not everyone wants (or needs) walls of text that contains complex language. I'm not saying you need to dumb it down, but it needs to be clear, preferably with shorter sentences and paragraphs to appeal to a wider audience and to make it easier to scan-read.

Given this, there's an argument to be made that if you optimise your content for search engines, you're almost certainly going to be optimising for accessibility as well.

If you would like some assistance with optimising your content for SEO and accessibility purposes, feel free to get in touch.

I'm also eager to learn more about web accessibility, so if anyone has any comments they'd like to make about my own compliance, I'm happy to receive feedback.