Believe it or not, visual design, hosting platform, navigation design and content design all impact SEO …which impacts your bottom line.  Whether you are interested in selling products, building a subscriber list, promoting your brand, selling your services, or any other business model…. marketing and conversion should be your number 1 goal. This is the goal of search engine optimization, website development and design.

Touch Base with your SEO Consultant at Step 1.

A good SEO consultant understands the relationship between your other marketing efforts, PR communication channels, offline events and your website.  Due to the organic nature of non-paid search visibility, almost everything you do online or in media effects your positioning.  The sooner in your development you loop in SEO, the sooner you will be able to make impactful decisions with all the information.  It generally costs a lot more money to go back and revise or retrofit solutions than to integrate SEO from the beginning.

Choosing Your Domain Name

The very first step in site design, choosing the name of your website, has major impact on SEO.  A common mistake is to choose your domain URL solely using traditional marketing or common sense.  The URL is the top level of the entire website architecture.  It is the strongest tool that can be leveraged for visibility in search engines.

Website Architecture, Navigation and Content Design

(What Web Pages Go Where & How Do You Get to Them?)

As far as search engines are concerned, the rest of your website architecture follows the same rules as the domain name URL… but there are added levels of control and strategies for each page within your website structure.

Design of your website architecture and navigation sets up your interior linking strategy. At this point you should be thinking about what pages you want visitors to land on when entering the website.  And it should depend on what keyword they searched.  Where are they in the conversion funnel?  Decisions about navigation labels and links often dictate the ability each page has to show up in search.

Graphic Layout and Web Design

Web designers have been known to claim they build ALL their websites so they include SEO, conversion and usability.  But without direction, this generally results in launching a website with some “SEO friendly” elements, but is not effective at pulling in your audience from search engines and converting them efficiently.

To end up with a good end product, you need to start with a plan. Define conversion goals and SEO requirements. Don’t assume your web designer knows what every website should have. Your SEO consultant can help define conversion goals and provide a list of SEO requirements specific to your website, so that they are built in from the beginning.

Blend Starts With the End

BlendSEO starts with your marketing end goal to develop effective recommendations for your domain name, website content design, architecture, conversion goals and development requirements.