When looking at creating a great website, there are many things that need to be taken into consideration:
- Site Architecture and navigation
- Design elements (including responsive design)
- Branding
- User Experience (UX)
- Content
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Site/Page performance
With all of this to consider it becomes an onerous task to actually get a site up and running.
It’s important to get a solid foundation from the outset. To achieve that, you need to understand what the website goals are, who the target audience is and how people in your target location are searching.
Too often people roll their eyes when they hear ‘keyword research’, but this is a critical component of any successful digital campaign.
Our approach is to always take a balanced view of User Experience and Search Engine Optimisation. If you create your content only for the search crawlers, your users are bound to suffer. However, you do not want to ignore the crawlers (or bots) as they play an enormous role in your on-line strategy. The importance of understanding of how Google crawls sites, how ‘fresh content’ is treated by the crawlers and what algorythm updates are talking place should not be overlooked.
If you’re developing a new website or even just giving an old site a facelift, make sure to get input from an SEO right from the start. Build elements of SEO into every step of your strategy and most importantly, get your content written by someone who has a good understanding of SEO. It is most definitely possible to write SEO optimised content that is natural, a good read for customers and beautifully optimised for ‘findability’.
Google’s latest algorithm update (started rolling out 25 August 22 and completed on 9 September 2022) the helpful content update, targets websites that have content that does not appear to be natural – in other words it may appear to be over-optimised. Google’s goal is to provide searchers with useful content and this update is proof of that intent.
Read more about Google’s algorithm updates.
