Web Development Is Critical to SEO Performance
When you work with business owners who have a digital presence or who want to start a digital company, they mostly come to you with features that they wish to the website to have. Very rarely does that list contain the essential design structures that truly support SEO. Those necessities are almost always an afterthought. It is sad and frustrating because quality SEO needs quality tools that uplift it, and those tools need to be part of the initial structure of the website’s build. Adding them on later always comes at a price that we pay through the lower performance of the business’ SEO.
What is Your Website to You?
A website is a central hub through which all online marketing flows. If you run an email campaign, the internal links point to your website or landing pages, the contact to your branded email, or companies phone. Your website is the first stop on the buyer’s journey, and a place where those who want more information can find it. It is the place where visitors come to shop and then convert. Is your website able to handle all of these tasks? Is your content reaching the right buyer persona? All of this comes down to the relationship between SEO and website development. Keep reading for a closer look at what we mean.
Where Does Amazing Web Design Start?
Great web design comes from a single spot – A complete, comprehensive, strategic content marketing plan. Why? Inside of an excellent marketing content plan is all of the tools that a web developer needs to build a website that uplifts SEO. What does that involve? For starters, it identified your audience? Who will come here? What will they do? For what are they looking? How will you reach them? We are talking about buyer persona, keyword research, content development, etc. In fact, you can think about a content marketing plan as the road map by which visitors to your site will find what they need. The idea that once they find your website, your work is over leads to high bounce rates and low dwell times. Through a marketing plan, your web developer will create an experience for each visitor to your site. That creation begins with being able to attract the right people, give them the correct information, and reduce their buyer anxiety. That journey is planned out for them and not left for them to discover.
The Planning of the Buyer’s Journey
What are your goals? They should be that visitors to your site have an easy time finding what they need, enjoy reading the content, and then make a purchase. Each of those goals becomes the result of web design. It is through consistent application of code that search engine bots and website visitors find what they need. The better the visit goes; the longer they stay on your site. Here is a closer look at how that works.
What About All of Those Beautiful Pictures
An important factor in web design is optimization. Those beautiful pictures will hurt your site if they do not load quickly on all types of devices. A pain point of mobile shoppers is site load time. If your pictures take more than a few seconds to load, mobile visitors leave. You have 3-seconds to impress them, and they will not wait around for anything that is slow loading or broken. Optimization is all about web development.
You also want to make sure that site issues are not because of the site. Sometimes it is because of the connection or even the company that hosts the site. A good web developer writes not only code that supports the goals of your content marketing strategy, but also that helps and plays “nice” with hosting platforms. Beyond making sure that the site is optimized, there is not a lot you can do about a poor internet connection. One trick is to create a version of the site available for slow connections. That again is part of web development.
In short, all of those beautiful photographs do little for your site if they do not load quickly. Mobile Responsive Development is a must. It is no longer an option. There are more mobile searches each day than there are searches from a desktop.
The Down and Dirty on Web Development
Web Development comes at you from every angle of SEO and from a few other places too. Start with UI – User Interface – which means that web design is responsible for how a visitor’s visit to your website goes based on whatever device they use. UI bleeds into UX – User Experience based on the keywords they entered to find the site, and the quality of content, how easy the site was to navigate, etc. In short, the UX and UI begin with web design. Here is an example:
UX is very much part of web development. We mentioned earlier that the buyer’s journey isorchestrated and not organic. That process comes about because of web Development. Thewebsite is so user-friendly that people stay on it for a long while. Maybe they find a bunch ofblogs they want to read or content that helped them define their search issue. It might be thatthe site index is helpful or that they found outbound links that support them. The text is easy toread, the colors are lovely, and the photos load like a snap. All of those things are userexperience. Should something in that mix go wrong, it reflects in the site metrics with a higherbounce rate.
UI plays a role also in UX and SEO. The design of the interface must match the most likely devicesthat a visitor uses to reach the website – table, half tablet, small smartphone, desktop, etc. UI isalso about designing the UX through aspects of the buyer’s person – What are your bestcustomer’s traits? Maybe nobody over the age of 26 visits your site. If that is true, the sitedevelopment needs to focus on that younger audience. Maybe your goal was to attract peoplebetween 44-66 years of age. Oops, something is wrong, and you are attracting the wrongaudience who is likely, not pleased either.
Check the Results
A perfect place to begin is with your website’s metrics – the measurement of what people do on your website. You can also reach out to SERPs SEO for a more business-specific website metric review. The quality of web design shows up in the analytics of your website. We look at bounce rate, dwell time, and other features that tell us what people do when they visit the site.
In conclusion – It is a big circle
It might seem that everything is going in a circle. Web Development helps SEO, UX, UI helps UX and SEO, etc. The truth of the matter is that it all begins with website-development, and the marketing content strategy heavily influences website development. UI is a tool, and UX is a rating. Both are part of SEO and Web Development. It goes back to what we said earlier – The visitors’ experience on the site is not organic, but instead, orchestrated. That is a philosophy that begins in the marketing strategy, which outlines the goals that a web developer builds. The circle is now complete. The next question is, how does the UX stack up to your content marketing strategy?
The last tip in closing. Cookie-cutter websites are harder to rank than are sites made from scratch. It is so because the framework of the site makes it a requirement to fit SEO to the site framework rather than building the frame to meet the needs of the SEO strategy. Every step in this process is a goal that needs the right tool. Reach out to us with questions or for more information about your website’s performance.