SEO and Web Design: Why Your Digital Marketing Efforts Should Combine Both

Part of every company's marketing strategy is to strengthen its digital identity. And your website is responsible for the vast bulk of your online customers and presence.

All too often, businesses focus too much either on optimization or design, leaving behind one or the other under the false assumption that it’s not as important. Still, if you want more traffic, you need to focus on leveraging both to maximize your reach. 

Combined, search engine optimization (SEO) and web design can boost your digital marketing efforts by bringing you more leads and happy customers.

What is an SEO-friendly website?

To optimize a website is to design it in a way that allows search engines to crawl and read through its content. By doing so, your page can appear and rank higher in search results, resulting in more clicks and visitors.

Building an SEO-friendly website can be quite a challenge. It calls for planning and creating a well-crafted strategy with a solid marketing plan, even for small business web designs.

An SEO-friendly website has some of these characteristics: Some characteristics that make an SEO-friendly website are:

1. Domains

Your website’s domain should relate to your company or your services. Ideally, it should also include the location you’re operating in, such as xyzcompany.co.us.

2. Hosting

A slow site does nothing good for your marketing. Choosing a hosting service is one of the top priorities for creating an SEO-friendly website. 

3. Content Management System (CMS)

There are a ton of CMS platforms available, and each one can influence the success of your marketing strategy. When choosing a platform, assess the best fit for your industry and website design needs.

The features explained above can seem overwhelming to someone who isn’t too familiar with SEO strategies. A growing trend today is outsourcing – most companies prefer to contract third-party SEO website design services to save time, effort, and cost.

Linking SEO to your web design process

SEO is a critical component of a brand's custom web design process from a proposal to launch. 

The planning stage

It helps always to consider optimization during every step of the planning stage. Little tweaks can make a massive difference if you want your page to be SEO-friendly.

These tasks include reviewing all assets to ensure they're of high quality and fit the right dimensions for the page. Other digital marketers get a helping hand from writers to ensure that copies are of optimal length, with actionable CTAs and target keywords; additionally, you'll need to touch on the concepts of HTML, internal links, meta tags, and alt tags during this stage.

The Design and Development stage

Incorporating SEO practices during the design stage can be tedious, but all the more worth it is once the website launches. On the technical side, among the many things you should consider are installing SSL certificates, enabling caching, setting up an XML sitemap, and connecting a Google Analytics Account.

For design and on-page SEO, you’ll need to map out your information architecture, test all links and buttons, add one unique keyword per page, create your meta titles and descriptions, add internal links, and more.

Of course, the SEO process doesn't end there. The steps above are only part of a more significant optimization process. With the right amount of effort, you can expect better numbers from Google and your visitors.

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