Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. When a potential customer searches their question or problem online, you want your product or service to be the solution they find.
Search engine optimization encompasses a variety of factors such as:
- Domain Factors: Age, registration length, domain history, keyword placement within the domain name, the country TLD extension, etc.
- Page-Level Factors: Title and meta tag optimization, content length, keyword density, image optimization, page loading speed, recency of content updates, outbound link quality and quantity, readability, URL length and path, user friendliness, mobile friendliness, etc.
- Site-Level Factors: Domain trust score, number of pages, the website uptime, SSL certificates, mobile optimized, site usability, use of google analytics and google webmaster tools, user reviews and site reputation, user interaction (bounce rate, amount of repeat traffic, time spent on website), etc.
- Backlink Factors: Number of linking domains, number of linking pages, social shares, contextual links, linking domain relevancy, backlink age, user generated content links, structured data implementation, number of outbound links, etc.
Many of these search engine optimization factors are directly related to decisions made during a website redesign process.
- Where will the website reside? The domain name directly relates to the domain factors.
- Where will the website be hosted? The website page loading speed will be influenced by the server response time and serve-side optimization, which vary between hosting providers.
- What is the site structure? The priority of the page in the sitemap may influence the search engine ranking. The site structure directly influences the URL structure, length, and incorporated keywords.
- What type of content is included? The type of content will influence the user interaction, especially the time on the website. Duplicate content should always be avoided.
- What functionality is incorporated into the website? Google loves recent, quality content. When you redesign your website, you want to incorporate a section that can easily be updated on a regular basis (i.e. project portfolio, case study analysis, a blog, etc).
- Where does the content link to? Both outbound and internal links contribute to your search engine optimization.
- Is the website designed to be responsive and mobile friendly? Some content management systems and themes are designed to be more mobile-friendly and responsive that others. Google is now enabling “mobile-first indexing” for qualifying websites
Why do you want to bundle SEO with your website redesign?
When you launch your new website, do you want your prospects and customers to easily find your website? Yes! You want to ensure that the website design and development is just as much of a priority as search engine optimization. Bundling SEO with your website redesign enables your customers to discover your beautiful new website and it will be more cost-effective in the long-run.
- Enable Your Customers and Prospects to Find Your Website Online: Once you launch your new website, you want your customers and prospects to find your website when they search relevant phrases on Google. Far too often, business owners do not realize the importance of search engine optimization until their customers complain that they can’t find the website and simply call for information. Instead of being an after-thought, search engine optimization should be an integral part of the website design process from deciding what content management system to use to creating the content for the pages.
- Be Effective the First Time Around and Save Money in the Long Run: All too often a company pays one provider for a website design and another provider for search engine optimization. When search engine optimization is implemented after the website redesign, there is a lot of duplicate work. The search engine optimization specialist may need to rewrite content and headings to incorporate the appropriate keyword phrase or they may need to create additional content to meet the minimum recommended requirements. Why pay one person to design the page and then later pay another to rewrite the page for search engine optimization?
At Kreative Solutions, all website packages come with basic search engine optimization and Google Analytics tracking. The basic search engine optimization services focuses on key on-page and site-wide factors. All web pages are designed with the optimization of title tags, meta descriptions, headings, text, and images. All websites have structured data markup, are responsive across devices, mobile friendly, submitted to the Google Search Console, and tracked by Google Analytics. More advanced and elaborate search engine optimization services are available upon request.