The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was developed in 1990 and is meant to ensure that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as anyone else. This means that your website needs to be accessible to people who have disabilities that affect their hearing, vision or in any physical capacity.
The Federal Government has mandated that anything considered a “place of public accommodation” are required to be accessible to anyone with disabilities from accessing the business’ goods or services.
There are 3 main reasons we wanted to look at in this blog as to why you need to make sure your site is ADA compliant.
1) ADA Compliance Improves Your SEO
One topic that we have talked about at length in our blog is that ADA compliance helps your SEO. There are many reasons for this, but the easiest thing to remember is that search engines review the same type of code that makes your site ADA compliant when making their search engine rankings.
2) ADA Compliance Can Increase Your Audience
If your website is not already ADA compliant, you’re missing out on a lot of people who can’t access your site due to disabilities. There are actually millions of people who face challenges that fall under ADA protections. If someone conducts a search for your industry and finds your site in a list of other competitor sites on Google they’ll visit your competitors’ sites instead of yours. If you advertise or have any SEO efforts on your site at all, that will all be wasted if at the last minute someone decides to go to your competitor’s site because yours isn’t usable.
3) Reputation Management
The fact that an ADA compliant website can increase your target audience is just one reason to make your site more accessible. Another benefit is that not only will you get more customers, but those customers will also know how valuable they are to your business. After all, they might have gone to a few other websites that were not ADA compliant, disappointed each time that they couldn’t access the content, until they got to your website. Being known as a site that puts real work into ADA compliance can go a long way in the public eye.
Conclusion
If you’re unsure if your site is ADA compliant, it probably isn’t. It takes a real strategy and concerted effort to become compliant. Our firm specializes in ADA compliance and SEO, let us help you get there today. Contact us below and read more about our ADA strategy in our blog or on our services pages. Thank you for reading.