SEO is crucial to build the online presence of your brand. But you’re missing out on huge opportunities if you don’t factor it in from the starting blocks when you’re considering a new website or a website rebuild.
The Very Important Whys
The Three Reasons Why You Need to Consider SEO When Building a Website
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SEO helps search engines understand and crawl your website, leading to better rankings and increased organic traffic. With the correct on-page design and usability, this should naturally increase conversions, which directly affect your bottom line.
When SEO hasn’t been implemented correctly, even the most well-designed websites can struggle to reach their intended audience.
SEO isn’t just about search engines; it’s about providing a better experience for users.
Good SEO enhances site navigation, load speed, and mobile responsiveness, contributing to user satisfaction.
By integrating SEO into the development process, you set your website up for long-term success. Trying to retrofit SEO into an established site is possible, but it’s never as easy as doing it before, during, and after a website build.
We often speak about the importance of ongoing SEO, and by having everything set up correctly from the start, this process becomes far easier and more efficient.
from the ground up
SEO Considerations from the Foundations
Step One:
Keyword Analysis
A keyword analysis is the process of researching and selecting the most relevant and effective keywords to target. It helps you understand what your audience is searching for and how to tailor your content to meet those needs, and it’s our first step when any client approaches us about a website build. If it’s an existing website, you should take the current data of what it is and isn’t ranking for and compare it against what other opportunities there are to rank, and what the website should be ranking for within your industry.
There are several factors to consider here:
- The highest volume keywords are not always the best ones to target
- Consider the search intent of phrases versus what you know your users are looking for
- The competitiveness of a keyword can sometimes be so high it’s just not simply worth targeting. Have a look at the search landscape of the keyword or phrase and see if you think what you produce has a chance to rank against the other domains.
Step Two:
Sitemap
Once you’re happy with your list of keywords, you can now map out the pages you think you’ll need on your website and apply the right keywords to those. This will help you weed out pages you don’t need. If you find there are two pages where you’d ideally use the same keywords, you should consider ensuring they are just one page.
Some pages will naturally rank for more brand-oriented keywords than others, and that’s fine. But if you’ve got service pages or category pages, these are where you want to make sure they are targeting the right ones.
Step Three:
Design / Page layout
Once you’re happy with your site structure and the keywords you’ve applied, you can now start on the design and page layout. Yes, SEO applies here too.
We recommend at this stage taking a look at the E-E-A-T concept within SEO. This describes the signals that Google looks for when considering how trustworthy a site is, and therefore how well they might rank it for a particular keyword or phrase. This will help you decide what elements you will need on each page, such as trust signals like awards, testimonials, case studies and so on.
Please, please be aware of site speed and mobile-friendliness when designing your website. Sites heavy on images, animations, and lots of code can score very poorly on all these things as well as website carbon. You don’t want to end up with a new site that impacts the user, the environment, and your bottom line!
Some tools that are useful if you’re not familiar with these things are:
- Pagespeed insights: Useful for both mobile and desktop
- Website carbon calculator
"Search engines focus on content with ‘intent’ and will recognise words out of order or synonyms."
Step Four:
Website copy
When you come to write your copy, you need to bear in mind the keywords you’ve agreed for each page and those elements you want to include on-page based off the E-E-A-T signals.
Now, long-gone are the days of keyword-stuffing, if you’ve heard that term. You shouldn’t sacrifice making great content just so that you can fit in a keyword.
Writing content with your customers in mind, which matches both the search query and the searcher’s intent, will serve you well. You don’t want to fill the page with a keyword so heavily that it’s unnatural, but you do want to ensure it’s included consistently. Take it into account when writing your copy and make sure it’s used in headers and the main body.
In regards to the way your copy is presented, the layout needs to be clear, concise and easily readable for visitors. Most importantly, you need to make sure each page is unique. Duplicate text is a no-no for SEO and all search engines will mark you down.
Small but significant differences such as adding internal links throughout the copy and via will throughout out / designed call to actions will help support user journey and SEO.
Keep it going
SEO During the Website Build
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Create clean, descriptive URLs that reflect the content of each page. Avoid using unnecessary parameters or overly long URLs that can confuse both users and search engines.
It is so important to use a staging or development site to build or test the website on before it goes live so that users are not hit with a “work in progress”. However, one of the most common issues we see is that these staging sites are left indexable by Google. This means that they can be found, and ranked, causing content duplication errors and all sorts of nasty issues. Make sure your developers use the “noindex” tag to prevent duplicate content issues.
Write relevant meta titles and descriptions for each page and ensure they are uploaded correctly before the site goes live. These elements are crucial for SEO as they provide search engines with information about the page’s content and help encourage users to click through to the site.
Generate an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines. This will help ensure that all your pages are crawled and indexed correctly and promptly.
After the Website Launch:
Essential SEO
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We’re gonna say it again. Check your site’s indexability. Check robots.txt. Check everything. Ask your developers.
Just do it.
tough love
Ongoing SEO Considerations for a New Website After Launch
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Don’t leave the content you do produce to rot on the shelf. Get it out there and build high-quality backlinks to improve your site’s authority. This is where SEO works hand-in-hand with having a PR campaign.
It’s not enough to just check your site once launched and leave it be. Regularly run an audit with an SEO tool and promptly fix any issues that arise.
By integrating SEO into the development process, you set your website up for long-term success. Trying to retrofit SEO into an established site is possible, but it’s never as easy as doing it before, during, and after a website build.
We often speak about the importance of ongoing SEO, and by having everything set up correctly from the start, this process becomes far easier and more efficient.
Every so often Google releases an algorithm update that can change how they rank your site. Stay informed about when these happen and monitor their effect on your site. Adjust your strategy accordingly if you do find yourself hit.
See The Power of Ongoing SEO
tough love
SEO for New Websites is Non-Negotiable
Teamwork makes the dream work
SEO consultants and website developers can work hand in hand to ensure the best possible outcome.
See how it works in our case study, or grab 30 mins with Nat to chat through your current state of play and see if we can help ensure your web build is not just mobile-friendly, but SEO-friendly too.
