Most websites, probably around 95%, are built using completely the wrong process!
The process is usually something along these lines:
1. Customer asks web developer to build the website
2. Web developer asks a few questions
a. Do you have existing branding and logos
b. Could you give me a list of all of your products and services
c. What do you want your website to contain
3. Customer then gives more detailed brief to web developer including:
a. Brand type images, including logo
b. A list of products and services
c. A list of everything they would like on their website
4. The web developer then sets about designing the look and feel of the website
a. Draft designs are then agreed… usually after far too much debate taking far too long – e.g. taking hours just to decide what colour to make certain buttons!
5. Next the web developer asks the customer for content on the products and services pages
a. At this point the customer doesn’t have time so gives the web developer a very vague brief and says will expand on it later
6. With design and content now complete the website goes live
A few months later the customer asks: “Why don’t we have any visitors to our website?”
In order to answer this question let’s consider a better process for SEO and Website Design building:
1. Customer asks web developer to build the website
2. Web developer asks customer one question
a. What you think your potential customers would type into Google to find you?
3. Customer gives web developers some ideas on keywords and search terms
4. Web developer uses these ideas to find dozens (if not hundreds) of keyword variations using tools like the Google keyword tool
5. Customer then goes through this list of, let’s say 100, keywords and
a. Gives each keyword a score between 0 and 10. Zero means the person using it is just browsing and Ten means the person is probably looking to buy the company’s product or service.
The results of this process is that the website can now be built to specifically answer the question!
This will affect how the menus are created, the categories of services and, more importantly, the content of individual pages.
As the customer has been through the process of deciding which are the best keywords that have the most likely impact on sales from the website, they are far more willing to write quality content for these pages as they see the obvious benefit!
We are not saying that you should build a website that is very ‘spammy’… i.e. only written and targeted for keywords. SEO professionals out there will be crying out over ” SEO and potential Google penalty!”
We are simply stating that website should have focus and you should put effort into finding out what people search for and making sure that your website specifically answer those questions… i.e. keyword/search terms.
