Designing and developing a website that will also appear in search engine results pages can be a challenge, to say the least! There are the essentials of including your logo and branding, products/services, information about your business and a means of contacting you. Your website should instantly say who you are, what you do and present your business in a professional yet stylish manner. These tend to be the elements most web developers get right, but without harnessing the invaluable power of implementing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) correctly on your website, you could end up with a website that is all style and no substance.
Is your beautiful website not attracting anyone? Here are signs that your web developer doesn’t do SEO:
Your meta titles are the page name
Metadata may sound like a scary phrase but simply put is a micro communication between your website and search engines, and is not immediately visible on your website. Keyword research is essential to identify which keywords you should be targeting that is a) relevant to your business and b) not competing with millions of other websites. The first and arguably most important stage to implementing SEO is ensuring your metadata is rich with these keywords. One element of metadata is a meta title, which is the title that is displayed on search engine results pages and your browser tab.
When a meta title has not been edited, it will automatically pull through the web page name. This indicates your web developer doesn’t understand the importance of populating this and is the MOST obvious sign that SEO has not been considered across your website.
There’s no internal links
An internal link is exactly what it sounds like: a link appearing on one page of your website that links to another page on your website. Both users and search engines will use links to find content and enable multiple routes of navigation across your website. Contextual internal links like this one are links within your content, allowing search engines to determine what content on your website is related to and its value. The more links a page receives, the more important it will seem to Google.
This is one of the easiest and most actionable elements of SEO. If internal links have not been a key focus during your website development, you can assume whoever built it isn’t SEO savvy!
Page speed hasn’t been taken into consideration
The speed of your website is a ranking signal, meaning Google take it very seriously. If your website loads slowly and isn’t almost immediately ready to interact with, then quicker websites can rank higher.
Even the most experienced web developer may not optimise a website for speed. A website that loads fine on desktop with fibre broadband may not load as well as a mobile user not connected to WiFi. Ensure your website works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop so speed doesn’t impact your SEO.
This could also impact other marketing activities such as Facebook or Google ads. What’s the point of paying for clicks on an ad, if an inpatient user bounces straight off your website because it doesn’t load in a timely manner?
There’s no Google Analytics
If your web developer isn’t familiar with SEO, it’s likely they may miss out on the crucial step of ensuring Google Analytics is installed on your website. The most important Google Analytics report allows you to track visits to your website and see where they have come from. The ‘Organic Search’ channel grouping informs how many users have arrived from Google – if this channel is not driving much traffic, this is the clearest indicator that your website is not appearing frequently in Google and needs SEO desperately!
Of course, you want your website to look good but there’s also the technicality of developing a website that works across a range of devices, is optimised to drive your business goals AND appears in Google when potential customers are searching for what you offer.
Here at InSynch, we understand the importance of this balance when it comes to your website and SEO is at the heart of any Digital Marketing strategy. Talk to one of our experts to see what we can achieve for your website and your business overall.