When Should You Start SEO?

seo timing

It is really never too late to start SEO for your site. While SEO efforts should never really stop, SEO is perhaps the only internet marketing channel that continues to give you traffic and inquiries long after you stop putting in efforts. However, many website owners decide to start SEO efforts after their website is designed and taken live.
Most website owners think of design, layout, links in the navigation, content, flash, animation, images, and more while planning the design of their website, but few think of building an “SEO compliant” website. SEO is rarely one of the first things website owners consider while planning the website design work.
While design and content are important, if no one can find you in search engines, your website cannot achieve its potential. You cannot afford to ignore SEO compliance when starting working on your website design and development.  So, when should you ideally start your SEO work? Here are the various stages in a website’s design and development when SEO can play a crucial role.

SEO and the website planning phase

Usually, a website’s development starts with planning. Various things like what’s the purpose of the site, who is the ideal visitor to the site, what does the ideal visitor to your website search for? Ask yourself these questions:

• Why should a potential visitor like your site as compared to perhaps a few thousand competitors?
• Why should Google choose to rank your website when someone searches for terms relevant to you?

This is an area where SEO can make a difference if it is integrated into your website development planning. Answers to the above questions and provide invaluable inputs that can help you plan your website better

SEO and your website’s information architecture

The next stage in a website’s development lifecycle usually is the definition of its information architecture and flow. At this stage too, SEO can provide inputs that will help you create a website that aligns with the way your audience searches for information. This in turn can help your web developers create a navigation and flow that would align with the search intent of your target audience. If a website is more likely to meet the audience’s needs, it is also more likely to rank better in search results. Finally, an SEO review of the site’s navigation can help you make sure that your website’s navigation is SEO compliant.

SEO and website development phase

Not all designs, layouts and technologies are SEO compliant. If your website is developed in such a way that it impedes the crawling or indexing by search engines, then it will not be able to rank in search results. Involving SEO during the development of your website, getting your wireframes, designs and planned technologies reviewed for SEO compliance will give your website the best chance of being developed in an SEO compliant way. Continued SEO involvement during the website development phase will make sure things like code to text ratio, page load time, broken links, custom 404 error pages, HTML sitemaps, XML sitemaps, meta tagging, content structure and other aspects of technical SEO compliance are optimized during the development of your website.

SEO after the website is released

If you start SEO early in the website development phase, your website would have been built SEO compliant. In a competitive business environment, that alone may not be enough for your website to rank on page 1 of search engines. This is the time to start the content optimization and link building aspects of your SEO. These will ensure that your website continues to grow from the SEO point of view and builds equity with search engines.

A case for continued SEO

Even if you manage to rank at the top of search results for your top keyword, is it enough? Is that the only keyword that your target audience could be searching for? Usually, a number of keywords would be relevant to your website. Depending on the size of your website, it may be the most relevant result for 10, 100 or 100s of thousands of keywords. You need to make sure that your website ranks for as many of these keywords as possible in order to maximize the site’s potential.
Your competitors would also be making SEO efforts and if you stop your SEO efforts, you could very soon lose ground to your competitors. Also, search engine algorithms change frequently and if your website doesn’t change with the changing algorithms, it can quickly slip in search engine ranks.

Online Marketing Services from Flying Cow Design

As a web design firm, we were among the first to identify that website design without SEO compliance is incomplete. We have both encouraged our clients to start SEO early in the website development phase and have worked with them closely to build websites that rank well in search results and deliver visitors and results to our clients. When you need a website that will improve your online presence, talk to us about our internet marketing services.