Building a brand new website using an SEO foundation requires an understanding of how search engines work and how to utilize data regarding website visitor behavior.
Ranking takes time, especially with a new domain, but if you employ an SEO strategy to target specific keywords, make your site responsive and monitor its activity, you can increase search results faster.
When hiring a professional web developer, you will have the most excellent chance of success if you choose one with SEO experience and a passion for helping business owners drive traffic to their sites and grow their brands.
Website Design SEO Foundation
You can pay to have a fantastic website built, make it mobile-friendly and fill it with gorgeous, high-quality images but still have little to no traffic. Without properly optimizing your site for search engines like Google or failing to use SEO-friendly content, your site will remain invisible. Does this mean you wasted money on having a website built? No, but the reality is that you chose the wrong web developers.
Why is an SEO-Friendly Website Important?
According to Search Engine Land, organic traffic is generated directly from SEO and easily makes up 50% – 75% of the overall traffic any website receives. This is what makes Search Engine Optimization so crucial to the success of your website. A good web developer knows this and builds the framework from that standpoint.
The success of your website relies on how well search engines can interpret your content and effectively index it. This strategy allows Google and other search engines to crawl your site quickly and efficiently. The more SEO strategies the web developer incorporates into the design process, the higher your chance of ending up in the page one search results.
Begin by Identifying Your Target SEO Audience
Decide who you are selling your brand, product or service to, then design the website and content around them. Narrowing your focus will allow for a more effective SEO campaign. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are a few things to consider when honing in on your niche:
- Who is this website/business for?
- Age bracket and gender?
- What are their hobbies, income level and type of work?
- Where do they live?
- How do they use the internet?
- Are they active on social media and rely heavily on it for information, or do they prefer receiving personalized emails?
- What keywords are they using?
- Are they following other businesses and brands?
Once you’ve created your potential customer profile, focusing on that audience is a more successful tactic than trying to appeal to every person from every walk of life. Attempting that strategy will dilute efforts to drive traffic to your site organically or through social media channels.
How To Build a SEO Website
Responsive Website Design
Google actively serves mobile users mobile-friendly web content. Optimizing your site and its content for digital device users is an absolute must. Responsive web design offers visitors a streamlined experience, and your content will display correctly on any device, not just cell phones. This is a more cost-effective option than developing an app to run your site or brand through. With the number of people using devices other than a PC, you’re likely to increase your conversion rate and not lose customers because your site can’t be viewed correctly.
Website Performance
With Google serving responsive websites to searchers, your website must be fast. In our world of instant gratification, users won’t wait around even a few extra seconds for a slow website to load. If not, your bounce rates steadily increase as potential customers become frustrated and are lost to competitors with speedy, responsive sites.
You can find free website speed tests online. Some sites even give a few tips to improve the speed, such as using a web browser cache and compressing all images and graphics.
Create SEO Content Strategy
Many business owners and web developers overlook the importance of a good content strategy when building a new site. Whether it’s a blog or updating your site, having a long-term content plan requires organization so you can be confident that top-quality, relevant content is being published. Like finding your niche or target audience, your content needs to be focused on promoting your brand, product or service. Veering from your page topic is more detrimental than having no content.
Optimize On-Page SEO
If your website is freshly built or has never been optimized, looking at your on-page SEO is a good place to start. Utilizing keywords and long-tail phrases to optimize the page content and the META will increase traffic to your site. Adding or improving your meta descriptions and titles will help improve your site’s position in the search ranking.
Take a look at your URL structure as well. These can also be optimized to improve search results. Google prefers shorter URLs, including a target keyword; 3-5 words is ideal. Here’s an example of how you can easily improve your URLs:
Existing URL:
www.yourwebsite.com/tips-about-how-to-improve-your-on-page-SEO-on-website
Revised SEO-Friendly URL:
www.yourwebsite.com/how-to-improve-on-page-SEO
Use Google Analytics – It’s Free!
Google offers a free tool that you should familiarize yourself with to grow your website. Setting up your Google Analytics account tracks and records visitors’ behavior once on your site. The data collected allows you to see what page or pages are viewed, how long they stay on your site and what keywords brought them there. Understanding what your customers are doing helps you, the business owner, to deliver better results. Google Analytics is actively collecting data without your input. It’s simple to look at that data, as you can choose the displayed metrics.
This tool is also vital to determine why customers may visit your site but not find what they want. That is referred to as the bounce rate, and it’s an important metric to help you diagnose why visitors are leaving. It can also reveal invaluable data such as the age, gender, interests, device used and location of your audience. Demographic data is used for honing your content and keywords and deciding which social media platforms will be the most effective for your brand.
When Is It Time To Hire A Professional SEO Specialist?
You should hire an experienced web developer who understands SEO and is passionate about helping you develop your company’s voice, mission and goals. A website should be more than just a virtual business card; it is the primary connection between customers and your brand. Or better yet, hire a professional SEO specialist who has a proven track record.
If you are unsure of how to execute any of the things we mention in this article effectively, it is time to consider hiring a professional. The same sentiment applies if you don’t have the skill to build websites or the time to monitor them or actively create SEO-friendly content. If you want a website that increases your credibility, competitiveness and organic traffic, a professional web development company like SoFloWeb, can handle all your SEO, content and web design needs.