Websites are powerful marketing tools. They provide valuable 24/7 online advertising, allow for customer interaction, establish credibility, help you remain relevant and competitive and can even grow your business. No matter what kind a website you are planning to build, whether it’s one for a brand-new startup or a redesign of an existing site, whether it’s an ecommerce site, a booking site or a standard marketing website, chances are one of your goals is to attract new customers. Implementing search engine optimization into your website during the building process is one way you can help make sure new customers find your website.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is more of a process than any one thing. It refers to all the little things that can be done to help get your website show up in Google’s or Bing’s organic (not paid) results when someone does a search for something related to your business. It helps to increase your website’s visibility. It helps new users find your website. And it helps attract more visitors to your site.
How Should SEO Factor into Your New Website?
If it’s important to you that new customers be able to find your website by doing a Google search, then it’s important to include search engine optimization in your website. We like to start by having our clients fill out an SEO questionnaire. This aids our team as they begin the process of search engine optimizing your site.
You can expect them to focus on the following basic areas as they work to ensure your website is properly optimized to give it the best chance of being displayed on the search engine results page (SERP).
Keyword Research
One of the most important factors in SEO is making sure your site is optimized for the right search terms, the ones new customers are actually using to find products or services like the ones you offer. To make sure we use the right terms, we begin with keyword research. We use online tools that allow us to see the search volume and competition for each keyword. These tools also offer up other related terms to give us new ideas on other terms users may be using. Then we determine which keywords we want to focus on and use them for the onsite SEO.
Metadata
Metadata refers the text that shows up in the search engine results page – the title and a short description. The title tag tells the search engine what the page is about and, while the description may not directly influence search rankings, it can be extremely important in getting clicks. Title tags and descriptions should be unique to each page and focus on a few keywords. Duplicate metadata as well as ones crammed with too many keywords tend to look spammy and will end up hurting your rankings. Picking just one or two keywords that are relevant to the copy on the page will give you the best chance of ranking well for those terms.
On-Page Optimization
Typically, every web page will have some words on it, often referred to as content. In addition to the metadata, search engines use these words to help determine what a web page is about. There are a few things that can be done to the content on a page to help it rank better in the search results. These things include high word count, internal linking and placing keywords in the copy. But search engines have gotten smarter and long gone are the days of keyword stuffing. First and foremost, you need to offer high-quality content that’s useful and informative. Keywords need to flow naturally as part of the copy, making keyword selection all the more important.
Crawlability & Indexability
Sure, content is king, but only if search engines can find it. A key component of any SEO strategy should be making sure your website can be indexed and easily crawled by search engines. Setting up a robots.txt file is a great way to let Google know what pages it should and shouldn’t index. You’ll also want to review your website architecture and linking structure. A simple, well thought-out website and linking structure from the start will increase the search engine’s ability to craw and index your site, helping to boost your rankings and prevent the need for changes, redirects and the possibility of dead links in the future.
Redirects
Nothing kills a good user experience like a dead link. If you are launching a new site and made some changes to the structure or page URLs, it’s important that you don’t leave any old, dead links behind. Not only could they cause a potential customer to bounce, but they could crash your search engine rankings as well. The last thing you want your new website to do is hurt your rankings. Using the proper redirects, you can help search engines understand the changes you have made to your site to improve your SEO score and your rankings.
Tracking & Analytics
Technology, the internet, and Google’s search ranking algorithm are always changing. Which unfortunately means that when it comes to your website’s SEO you can’t just set it and forget it. If you want to get to the top of the SERPs and stay there, you have to track, analyze and adjust your SEO strategy. Fortunately, there are lots of tools and experts that can help you do that. A few we always recommend are Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Search Console is a free portal that can provide you with a lot of information on how a new site is being viewed and indexed by Google. You can monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot any warnings or issues regarding your websites performance in Google’s search results. Google Analytics can give you valuable insight into your customers’ online behavior by helping you track trends and identify patterns in how they engage with your site.
Boost Traffic to Your New Website with SEO
We partner with a local search agency and team of SEO experts, copywriters and developers so that the websites we build are optimized for search right out of the gate. By combining these search engine optimization strategies with our website design, we make attractive websites that your customers can find. If you are interested in learning more about our website design and add-on SEO services, give us a call at (414) 232-7862 or send us a message online. We’d love to talk through your specific web project to help you find the right solution for your business.
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