Picture this; your business spends thousands on cutting-edge modern design, a sci-fi platform with all the bells, whistles and widgets and your management team are excited about the modern masterpiece that is your new company website. It’s light years ahead of the competition in terms of technology and at the pinnacle of modern website design and the expectations of the website are clear; to dominate the industry and be the “go-to” company for your products or services.
Launch day comes and goes and that excitement has turned into concern. Sales or enquiries have remained the same or even worse, declined. Confused, you question the geek squad that built your modern day marvel but all you get is shrugged shoulders with finger pointing at the designer, who then points the finger at the programmer, who then points the finger at you for signing off on the design!
You then check your rankings on Google and find that you are nowhere near the first page for your core products or services. Cue: sinking feeling.
Desperate to kick-start this project to fruition you bring in an external SEO agency with years of experience and they turn your beautifully designed website on its head. They recommend a wrath of changes that will make your website look like Frankenstein’s monster. This may bring a resurgence but not the game changer you were hoping for.
Welcome to a familiar “worst nightmare” that is often encountered often at SEM Consultants.
So, what is the best way to avoid the mid-table mediocrity that has cost an arm and a leg?
You should commission an agency with proven SEO skills that also design and build websites to do the job correctly. The design may not be cutting edge, but it will be functional and built for two core audiences; your model customer and search engines (Google being the most popular).
Here are the top 8 reasons why you should use an experienced SEO company to design, build and market your company website.
Site Structure – An SEO company will think about the structure of your website. Internal linking, navigation, keyword density, keyword semantics etc. to build the best possible structure that will be appealing to your target audience and make it easy for Google to spider (This ease of crawl-ability will no doubt help your SEO).
Research – The execution of a perfect SEO plan comes with detailed preparation, an SEO agency will carry out keyword research to recommend the keyword targets for your website. Armed with this knowledge, a company like SEM will collaborate with you to ensure these keywords are being used in the content, structure, linking etc. Boosting the overall theme of your website. This important task is often overlooked by web design agencies and worryingly some *cough* “competent” SEO agencies.
SEO Optimised Web Copy – You know your product or service better than us, that is a given. However, giving your content a few sprinkles of SEO dust can increase the relevancy of your content whilst keeping it easy to read. Top tip: Make sure that you listen to the content writers about how to write the best content about your subject geared for SEO.
Mobile – There’s that “M” word again! Yes, all web gurus will preach the fact that catering to mobile traffic is key and that your website needs to be “responsive”. A true statement, but an agency that is at the forefront of SEO will be looking to design & build your website with mobile indexing in mind. With a “mobile first” approach to the design and user experience, expect to sign off on a mobile layout before desktop/tablet versions are shown to you.
Speed – With the Google mobile index and recommendations on mobile first design and build, expect a website that is built to load ultra fast. Don’t expect heavy images, hi-res videos & external scripts. There is a little trade-off here between design & user experience but you should be thinking with your head, not your heart! A stunning website that loads super quick can be achieved with a little know-how and page speed trickery!
Technical SEO – The bread & butter of SEO; Title tags, content optimization, URL structure, 301 redirects are a handful of technical requirements for any new website. When you have an SEO company in charge of your website build, it will never go live unless the techies are happy with it. Period. Far too many times we have witnessed Google rankings collapse due to rushing through a website launch. The damage this does to your rankings can take months to recover.
Conversions – Getting your website to the first page of Google is one thing, but making sure that your visitors buy or enquire is another ball game entirely. Consulting user experience professionals and conversion specialists, making sure your website is “sticky” is an often overlooked task. An SEO company with search engine marketing skills is an absolute must in this day and age.
Updates – With an “all under one roof” approach to website design and marketing, your SEO agency will be super quick to make changes to the website if required to boost rankings or conversions. Gone will be the days of waiting for a half-baked response from a developer who incidentally took 3 days to respond to you! In the end, it could take you a week to do something that should only take the best part of an hour.
All the above points lead to a website build & marketing project that has less confusion and miscommunication between all parties involved. Nothing is lost in long email trails from an SEO company, design agency, UX expert, programmers. As good communication is key to a project that is successful and runs on time, (and within budget) meetings are a whole lot easier to set up and manage. In one meeting you can liaise with all relevant areas of expertise. Ongoing meetings are just as easy & productive.
Ultimately everyone on your project is working towards one goal – producing a website that is beautiful, functional and delivers with a high Google ranking, which in turn transforms your website visitors into customers. With this one goal in mind, it seems logical to hire a company that is able to deliver on Design, Build, SEO & Marketing all under one roof.