Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

If you are working on a new website design, make sure that you are make a strategic search engine optimization plan before getting started. This can be a tricky thing to do as there are so many routes to go.

SEO is a way to get your target prospects, the people that you most want, onto your website. These are the people that are more likely to become customers. Some SEO planning at the vert start will help to ensure that your wider strategic plan is both focused on and implemented.

Make sure that you know the technical SEO areas that your web developers need to cover. For example,

1. The makeup of your robots.txt file,
2. The site wide navigation plan,
3. The meta data mark up and optimisation for each page,
4.  The user navigation pathways,
5. The site speed testing – will you be using a cdn? Will you be rendering data via Javascript? If so what impact will that have on page load times?
6. The agreed compression standards of images loaded to your media library,
7. Are you going to launch as an HTTP or HTTPS url?
8. Are your web developers implementing canonical tags?

You want to make sure that you have everything fixed before you launch or the people that do come to your site will not come back. You also need to make sure your design, look and feel are all agreed from the start as you do not want to get toward the end of your development timeline before changing your mind.

Key Takeaways:

• It’s important to understand what terms describe your mission statement and then decide if those terms are being searched online.
• When identifying customers, it’s important to know their demographic, needs, roles, motivations and if there are likely to be more or less of them over time.
• Sussing out the competition means identifying those that outrank you on online searches as well as those who are fulfilling the needs of your customer base directly and indirectly.

“After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.”

Read more: https://moz.com/blog/strategic-seo-decisions-before-website-design-build