Dear Web Site Designer and Creative Entrepreneur:
Highly professional web site designs + logical and user-friendly layouts of pages and content are basic keys to a functional web site. This is what users and search engines expect.
Today, tons of web designers and web development companies can build fantastic looking websites and online assets (graphics, animation, videos, etc) for your brand.
However, what we’ve found after many years in the search marketing business is that the top web design firms don’t often place directed effort on search engines, traffic and conversions.
Their graphics design experience, laser-sharp focus on brand creation and beautiful designs are what they do best.
Businesses / web pages may be found in the top of search engine results… but, the keywords are not highly targeted, and there is little-to-no search requests for the them. It’s by “pure luck” that they have any visibility at all.
A proper analysis, research + ongoing SEO work is needed to improve and stay relevant. Each market is different and some more competitive than others.
Sweet Designs, But No Traffic
Existing and new customers or clients are elated about the cool designs and launch of their new website.
However, they lose their excitement when no visitors come to the website.
A highly performing website must also have a search-friendly design and be optimized for keywords, social and user engagement.
This also includes mobile readiness, now another factor for ranking success.
Some design firms have added SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) as a way to sell more design services.
Many are good, but most lack the deep insights and understanding of online marketing, search engines and advertising.
Web Analytics
Only professional web marketers understand and can translate massive amounts of data from web analytics into actionable steps to improve from baselines.
This is another important skill that design firms typically don’t have.
The web analytics alone is not enough, and now Google doesn’t allow keywords to be seen for SEO anymore. (very limited)
Only a paid search campaign will show keyword results, and you can use the Google Search Console (GSC) to learn more about keywords from organic use.
But, web analytics alone doesn’t tell the full story.
Web design firms may even get filtered for their own results due to incorrect back-link strategies or optimization tactics that they were unaware of.
That requires additional data gathering and actionable intelligence strategies.
8 Key SEO Tips To Consider:
- Code bloat – avoid creating chunky code that search engine spiders can not easily consume. A light-weight, efficient code base will help users and search engines.
- Navigation/site structure – understand the taxonomy and relationship with keywords, navigation and intra-linking. A “too perfect” site can be penalized by search engines. It’s not just about pretty URLs and keywords.
- On-Page optimization – Adding text and code (tags) for search engines to further improve the find-ability factor, including content optimization and positioning.
- Off-Page optimization – Analyzing the particular market for competitive links, and creating ongoing link building and custom outreach programs for long term rankings and traffic. This includes validating and tracking for broken links.
- Redirects – Version issues detection and duplicate content generation avoidance. This also includes migration from old to new designs and server changes. Building and updating XML and HTML sitemaps will help.
- URL issues – Fix non-friendly URLs and limit depth of pages. We prefer no more than 3 levels deep, and domain.com/page-keywords vs. domain.com/?p=12356
- Images – Overuse of heavy images, animation and scripts that serve no/little content to search engines. Understand how to leverage CSS and div tags.
- Malware – Ensuring no spam or database injection of bad code and attack on web servers, databases or code.
This is a short-list of important things to keep in mind when designing for the web. You’ll still be able to keep your creative designs front and center.
For more information, please visit our SEO agency today. We have been helping firms online since 2006.
And… don’t forget to ask for your FREE seat to our next live webinar – where we explain the inner workings of traffic, conversions and more.
Visit Chaosmap SEO Now (we’re friendly folks!)