4 Reasons to Hire an SEO Website Designer for your Small Business

 

Hiring a web designer with SEO experience is a smart move for any small business owner that wants to maximize ROI on their website investment, increase lead generation, and improve their online visibility.

 

1. Push vs Pull - In the past, say 25 years ago, pre-internet, companies advertised for business. You took out an ad in the Yellow Pages, the bigger, the better, and waited for your customers. Or you took an ad out in the newspaper. You PUSHED ads at your prospects and hope they called or came to your store.
   
   Today, consumers have learned to ignore ads, and honestly, for the last decade or so. Consumers are bombarded with thousands of ads per day (Source: Red Crown Marketing Test in 2015). If you looked at each one, that's all we would do all day long. That obviously won't work, so we ignore and tune out ads most of the time. Studies have shown that 70 to 80% of Google's Search Engine ads are ignored (Source: SMA Marketing Blog Post 11/04/2021).
   
   With the internet, consumers are now in control. They don't wait for advertisers to send them another ad. They go online and search. Think about your buying habits. When you want to purchase something other than a staple at the grocery store, you probably went online and researched it. Perhaps at your favorite online retailer (Amazon anyone?), or you went to Google and typed in what you were looking for. So now, how do we PULL in that consumer using a search engine to search for your product or service into your website or store?
   
    
2. Visibility - Visibility is the key here. When your prospective customer searches, you need to be visible on page 1 of the search results. If you are on page 2, you are not visible and your business will suffer for it.
   
    
3. Competition - If you aren't visible, who is? That's right, your competition is, and guess what, they just got the business from that consumer because they were ranked highly in the search results, and you weren't. 
   
   So what are your choices? You can buy ads, get maybe 20 to 25% of consumers to see you, or hire a SEO Website Designer to build you a new website and make you visible when your customers or clients are looking for your product or service. Which would you prefer, assuming the costs were about the same, and they often are as Google ads don't come cheap, a pool of 75% of the customers, or the remaining 25%. Small business owners aren't dumb. You know you'd rather be visible to the 75%.
   
    
4. ROI (Return on Investment) - ROI is one last reason to hire an SEO Website Designer. You already have a website. You are already paying to host the website, why not invest a little more, so the website actually makes you money, generating leads or sales, rather than sitting there waiting for someone to simply use it for validation that yes, this is a real company, they look professional (your website does make you look professional doesn't it?).
   
   Investing in SEO Services maximizes the investment you've already made in your existing website, which should be the foundation of your digital marketing tool kit.

 

An Effective SEO Web Design Process

What are the most critical elements in creating an SEO-friendly website?

Keyword Research - Knowing how your customers are searching for your product or service is, in our opinion, the single most important part of Search Engine Optimization. If you don't start here, you've already lost the battle for search visibility.


URL Structure - Next, take the information from the keyword research and apply it to the URL structure of the new website. Yes, I said new website. We've yet to find an existing website that didn't benefit significantly from a redesign as part of our SEO strategies. You will likely find some "category-defining" searches that work well for the top-level navigation/pages. For us, those are Web Design and SEO Services. You'll note those two links at the top of this page with sub-pages underneath them, as indicated by the little down arrow next to them. That should be the start of your URL structure, well-optimized pages covering your topic, using your keyword phrases that lead to other pages supporting that topic. Some call these keyword clusters as you'll group related topics underneath this top-level page. Sub-pages typically will include that top-level page as part of the URL. A great example, https://www.bangwebsitedesignphoenixaz.com/web-design-services/website-design-and-seo-services-company.cfm the /web-design-services/ part of the URL comes from that top-level page.


Great Content - A search engine's purpose is to index content on the internet. Search engines crawl and index websites and provide links to that content in response to a user's search. How do they determine who ranks at the top of the search results?  The best way to look at this is the search engine is trying to answer your question and help you find the answer. For example, "Who is the best SEO Company in Phoenix?" Google and Bing! primarily use two factors to decide who to show at the top of the results. Who has great content on that topic, and who has the most links to it (more about this later).

What types of content do search engines look for? Great content can be a comprehensive guide of 2000+ words of text, supporting images, videos, podcasts, etc., all good stuff. Remember, Google wants to send traffic to the website that best answers the user's search query. 


Page Optimization - Each website page, not just the home page, needs to be optimized for SEO. Some call this SEO optimization. Each HTML webpage has several components or tags that help site visitors, and Google determine what the site is about. For instance, the page title shows in the search results as the clickable link and in the browser's tab. While not visible to the site visitors, a meta description tag often creates the summary that shows below the title in the SERPs (search engine results page). An H1 tag typically identifies what the page is about, which is why you generally are going to use one of the results of your keyword research in your headline. H2, H3, H4 tags, etc., also help structure the page and tell Google what that paragraph of content will be about. Even bolding text helps Google understand what the page topic is.


User Experience - Providing a better user experience is now an SEO ranking factor. Google's Core Vitals Update measures website speed and mobile-friendliness and slightly impacts rankings. That's why creating a great experience for your website visitor is part of every SEO team task list. A good starting point is to use responsive website design so the site performs well on mobile phones and mobile devices like tablets.


Building Inbound Links - Link building, or backlinks as some call them, is the off-page optimization separate from the actual web design process. Link building always happens after the site is launched. This is why some people think SEO is done after the website design, but that's a recipe for search ranking disasters. Be sure to use white hat tactics with your link building. Google's best practices clearly say buying links is a bad thing. Google wants you to earn those links naturally because you have great content that other websites will link to.
 
 

FAQs about SEO Website Design

Is SEO part of web design? or Do Web designers need to know SEO? and Do web developers do SEO?

In our opinion, absolutely. Trying to add on SEO after the site is built just doesn't work. SEO should be "baked in" from the start. Keyword research first, then creating a search engine-friendly URL structure for the site based on that research, need to be the first steps that are typically part of the job of web designers or web developers.



How do I create SEO for my website?

First, SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a verb, not a noun. SEO is a process or series of tasks that are performed to increase the visibility of a website in a search engines results page (SERPS).

The basics of the SEO process are covered at the beginning of this blog post. Our Phoenix SEO Services page goes into more depth.