

Many have asked the question: Does web accessibility positively impact SEO?
To date, there have been no conclusive answers.
So, to see what impact (if any) accessibility has on SEO, we created an independent study.
We discovered some intriguing answers along the way.
And now, we’re sharing our results.
If you’re short on time and don’t wish to go through the entire study, here’s the main findings:
Our analysis revealed a 12% average increase in overall traffic across the domains examined.
Search engines seek the best results for their guests. They’re like internet concierges.
So if accessible websites are the easiest to understand and use, the claim that search engines should recommend accessible pages over inaccessible ones isn’t a big stretch.
Many believe that web accessibility and SEO go hand in hand. This isn’t news.
But there’s no hard evidence.
And even though we don’t really need empirical proof to point out all the ways making your website more accessible is a must-do, backing it up with hard numbers can help you gain the executive buy-in you might need to make it happen.
SEO is a way for your website to become visible to millions of users.
A website can have top-notch content, but most web users won’t see it if Google doesn’t pick it up.
That’s why web providers do everything possible to help their domain rank higher in Google’s search engine.
We know accessibility can make a difference for the disabled community. However, does it have value for SEO and Google ranking?
The invitation to follow web accessibility guidelines often arrives as a lawsuit. Not fun.
Maybe it’s harder to imagine the accessibility challenges of a digital environment.
Or rather, how little effort it takes to accommodate differently-abled users.
Either way, we can do better to put ourselves in others’ shoes.
We already do it for our marketing campaigns—as we seek to understand our audience and use that knowledge to create compelling copy.
But even the best marketing comes across as hopelessly ignorant if visitors can’t actually get to it.
That’s not all.
Rumour has it that responsible, kind, considerate websites win more traffic.
Go figure! (And figure we did.)
Because, in a data-driven culture, numbers influence decisions.
These findings should nudge website owners to adopt accessibility practices without hesitation.
In partnership with Semrush and Builtwith, we decided to bridge that numerical gap by conducting an independent study.
We analyzed the organic traffic of 847 web domains before and after plugging into accessibility software.
What did we find?
Website accessibility provides equal access to those with disabilities, improves the overall user experience for everyone, and helps businesses comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
We need to test the impact of accessibility software on a large sample of websites.
BuiltWith is a website that allows you to determine which technology a website uses. It’s a handy tool for developers who want to learn new frameworks or libraries to build on.
For example, the website BuiltWith.com tells you that Facebook uses Django, PHP, CSS, JQuery, and Apache, among other technologies.
We exported from BuiltWith a list of 800+ domains using website accessibility remediation technologies and the date on which the technology was first identified on each domain.
The list of website accessibility remediation technologies we checked for includes some of the leading house names in the industry:
Semrush is a leading online visibility management SaaS platform that enables businesses globally to run search engine optimization, pay-per-click, content, social media and competitive research campaigns and get measurable results from online marketing.
We took that list of domains from BuiltWith and their accessibility remediation date (when they launched accessibility software) and exported the organic traffic from Semrush’s API developer hub.
Semrush gave us the organic traffic three months before the accessibility remediation date (referred to as “Pre”) and the organic traffic three months after the accessibility remediation date (referred to as “Post”).
For each domain, Jacek calculated an average change in data from the values, or more precisely by comparing the averages of the PRE and POST values for each domain.
Relative to AvgD,T =AvgD,T/AvgD
Once the average change in organic traffic was ready, Jacek used an R model to make sure that the distribution of change across the 847 domains makes sense – meaning that there isn’t a few domains with huge changes in organic traffic between Pre and Post, which are drastically affecting the entire “average” change.
Simply put: Jacek analyzed the data to see whether there was an increase in organic traffic after a website becomes accessible and compliant.
Spoiler alert: there was an increase.
We measured the data using two methods to give the most accurate results.
One way was to take a sum of the pre-accessibility and post-accessibility months.
Then, to double-check our data, we also took an average of the months before accessibility and after.
Here’s what we found.
Here’s a breakdown of the changes in organic traffic for the web domains we analyzed
Here’s a breakdown of the average increase in organic traffic following the installation of an accessibility solution broken down by different accessibility solutions.
*It’s almost impossible to be 100% certain of the results.
**Many factors can affect the results of a study, including the sample size, the method of data collection, and the way the data is analyzed.
***Even if a study is well-designed and well-executed, there is always the possibility that the results could be more accurate. For example, larger sample sizes and studies conducted over years instead of months.
Disclaimer: This research is an independent research. We did not communicate or shared this study with any of the accessibility remediation companies.
Each one of the domains we checked installed the accessibility solution at a different time of year. Therefore, each domain’s PRE and POST periods differ.
Some periods tend to get more organic traffic than others due to seasonality. There was a different pre and post-test period because of the seasonality of each domain.
To make the research 100% significant, we would have had to analyze millions of websites. We could not do it.
We ran into issues getting the same amount of domains per provider, which might affect the consistency of the difference in the results when broken down per provider.
But it shouldn’t affect the overall change, which is a 12% increase.
There may be natural growth in organic traffic over time that affects pre & post-organic change. To try and eliminate that risk, we checked the month-over-month growth within the pre & post-periods.
We checked the organic traffic of Month2 over Month1, Month3 over Month2 for the pre-period, Month5 over Month4, and Month6 over Month5 for the post-period.
We found that, on average, the websites in our sample group decreased by 3% Month over Month, which means that on average there wasn’t any natural growth within these months, and the 12% increase is more likely to be attributed to the change in the website layout following the accessibility remediation.
The domains we researched were exported randomly from BuiltWith and were not chosen specifically. From Semrush, we received API credits to export organic search traffic data that were sufficient to examine 847 domains, and thus the number of domains.
We’ve seen how laws, ethics, and economics highlight the importance of making websites accessible to all users. Also, our study shows how websites can increase traffic and ranking by accessibility remediation.
Some simple changes to your website may result in more traffic for you and a better experience for millions of consumers.
Is your website accessible?
When you make your site accessible, you make it easier for everyone to use. This includes people with disabilities, people with slow internet connections, and people using mobile devices.
Making your site accessible can help you rank higher in search engine results. It can also help you get more traffic from social media and other sources.
In the primitive days before this study, we had no data to back up these claims regarding organic traffic. But after examining the impact accessibility solutions have on 800+ websites, we now do.
We hope this study spreads awareness about website accessibility. Not just for the benefit of website owners increasing their traffic but for the vast population of users alienated from the internet by design.
We recommend the following steps:
#1 – Educate yourself on web accessibility. We recommend beginning with the beginner guide to web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) and the definitive guide to ADA Compliance.
#2 – Check the color contrast of your website’s code using our free color contrast web app.
#3 – Learn where your business is vulnerable and what you need to change to make your website accessible using our free accessibility checker. Just type the URL you want to check below.
#4 – Awareness is always the first step in any big change. Help us spread the word by sharing this study.
Scan your website for accessibility related issues for free
Thank you for reading the summary of our study!
We think the biggest takeaway was that over 66.1% of all the websites in our study got up to a 50% boost in their monthly organic traffic after adding an accessibility solution to their sites. That’s astounding!
Overall, the findings of our study gave us a positive answer to our big question. Our research shows a strong correlation between web accessibility and overall organic web traffic increase.
We encourage you to start your digital accessibility journey on our website with our beginner guides and free tools or anywhere else. It’s genuinely the right thing to do.
Thank you.
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