Website development is a very critical and unavoidable part of life in the digital age where businesses create websites with the goal of generating more revenue, increasing brand awareness, gaining a competitive advantage, generating leads, or selling their products online etc.
However, what most businesses exclude from the marketing strategy is having a robust SEO roadmap in place for their website that is implemented during development to help scale their organic traffic and take their online presence to a new level.
9 reasons why SEO & web development should go hand in hand
In this blog, we will look at 9 reasons why you should have an SEO strategy in place when building a new website or revamping your existing one:
1. Staging site technical audit
A staging site tech audit needs to be performed to see if there are any issues before going live with your new site. Issues can arise from slow page loading speeds, broken forms, or non mobile friendly designs etc. Such issues can be taken care of at an early stage with the integration of an SEO technical audit.
2. Website speed audit
The time it takes a website to load directly correlates with user experience. A fast loading webpage gives users a positive experience while a slow loading page delivers a negative experience. Users tend to bounce less and convert better for websites that load quickly on both desktops and mobile devices. With Google making page experience a ranking factor with its Core Web Vitals update, it is very important to address any issues that slows down your website such as having large sized images, render blocking resources, etc.
3. URL Structure recommendations
A well organized website URL structure provides search engine spiders and your users with an idea on what the content on the page will be about. A well defined URL structure will benefit your website by improving user experience, rankings, and can act as anchor text itself while being linked from various websites. Changing existing URL structures after websites are taken live is a very common mistake we see everyday. Implementing an SEO plan during website development will ensure that the website is launched properly and that the disruption to traffic and rankings is kept to a minimum.
4. Complete Meta Tag recommendations
Meta tags are snippets of text that tells what each page on your website is about. Many newly built websites tend to not have keyword optimised meta tags which inhibit them from ranking. Similarly while migrating or revamping a website, the developers tend to miss out on migrating the existing meta tags and this inevitably results in drop in rankings and traffic. Having SEO experts audit your website during development ensures all pages will launch with optimised meta tags.
5. Schema mark-ups
Schema markup code is added to the content of your webpages to help search engines understand your site better and provide rich results on SERPs that will help your website stand out from that of competition. Rich results are carousels, images, or other non-textual elements that appear on the search engine results page.
6. Content Audit
The saying content is king is quite popular in the SEO industry. High quality content that is relevant, helpful, and that answers users’ search intent is very important for a website to start climbing up the rankings. A content audit will help identify the gaps in content, lack of keyword usage & content structuring, along with opportunities for internal linking among others.
7. Website Structure Recommendations
The way that your website is structured is a vital aspect of all SEO strategies and should be implemented while developing a website. An SEO optimised website structure will help keep the users on your site for a longer period of time by allowing them to easily navigate to a greater number of pages. It also helps search engines understand the relationship between various pages and contribute to better user experience (UX).
8. Keyword and competitor research
Keyword research gives us actual insight and data on the keywords and the keyphrases that people are actually searching for, rather than just trying to guess.
Keyword and competitor research helps us make informed decisions with regards to the keywords that should be integrated into your website to help your website scale. It can tell where you rank for keywords, which keywords are easy and difficult to rank for and what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
9. Analytics & Goals set up
Tracking all organic and paid traffic that visits a website helps website owners understand how their users are interacting with their website; what content they are viewing, how long they are spending on the site, and how they are navigating through it.. Many websites do not have proper tracking set up, unaware of how the data can help improve their SEO strategies.
Get professional help from SEO experts in Dubai
We understand that as a business owner, your main goal will be growing your business and that’s exactly why you should partner with Incubeta MENA, an SEO Agency in Dubai that can help your business grow online and achieve your business goals.
