What is a SEO-Driven Website Plan? Why is it important to the success of making a new website?
Despite the numerous benefits a SEO-driven website plan is bringing to preparing and making a new website, it is yet not a very common practice among most of the projects we’ve delivered. It is essentially the most overlooked corner in a many-sided website planning. Priorities are always given to the fun part like page design and interactivity. Or the management is merely more interested in what brand tagline is to be put on the home page. But the fact is without doing a thorough SEO analysis during the planning stage, businesses may be missing out some big opportunities. Or worse they are creating a website that does not serve its purpose.
None of the above scenarios should happen. Follow us in this article we’ll walk you through the 5 steps on how to create and implement a SEO-driven website plan. And at the same time understand how critical a SEO-driven website plan is to the future success of your website. The plan is universal. It applies to all types websites including DIY, WordPress and custom web projects.
What is the difference between a SEO-driven website plan and a typical website plan?
Simply speaking the only difference to a typical website plan a SEO-driven one is to create a new website with SEO in mind. Specifically we are preparing to boost the Google ranking of new website before it is launched. To accomplish this mission, we’ll start the SEO works before laying out the sitemap and writing contents.
A SEO-driven plan will give your website a higher ROI
There is a basic principle about marketing your website. If you don’t promote it, no visitor will come. Getting organic traffic to promote your website is one of the most effective ways to do it. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the optimization process that enables a website to be found and shown in the best possible position by search engines for some target search queries. The goal is to make sure that your target audience can find your website on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo. It will improve both the quality and quantity of your website traffic.
Some people may argue that SEO is to market a live website. It is too early and perhaps pointless to do SEO before a website is live. Do it during the planning phase will certainly add some extra workloads and costs. The commissioning cycle will take longer and hence delay the launch of the new website. This is partly true. But what you don’t pay now may end up paying more later.
A solid SEO analysis will give you a full understanding of your competitive landscape and user search intent. You’ll be able to verify and map out a keywords list and subsequent contents release to better target your audience. With a well organized website structure, search engines will understand what the website is about easily. When it is live, the website is ready to reel in traffics. The ground works that we’ve done will make it easier to outrank your competitors in a shorter period of time. However, if you didn’t do and get it right in the first place, you website may not be able to drive traffic and perform as you wish. You may have to shuffle and redo what you’ve done. That’s not just time-consuming, but could be distressing too.
The 5 steps to create and implement a SEO-driven website plan
A website is an important digital asset of your company. We’ve seen a good SEO-driven plan plays a crucial role in laying the foundations for its success. Let’s take a look into how we do it.
1. Setting your website goals and objectives
From brand promotion, online sales to customer support, establish what you want your website to achieve. Once we have a clear purpose, we can set goals to keep things on track and measure the website’s performance. It is no difference to a typical plan, setting website’s objectives and goals is the first step in any website design/ redesign project.
More about website goals and objectives is covered in another article of ours. Please click here to read ‘Why your website is not getting traffic? Follow these 4 steps to fix it’.
2. Study your competition, user search intent and create your target keyword map
You can’t complete a proper keyword search without taking your competition into account. Just google some search terms you would like to rank for and see what results show up. You also need to find out what your target audience’s search intents are about. Then you’ll be able to identify the right keywords for your website’s objectives and goals. For example, if you want to sell more products, then you need to optimize your website for transactional keywords. If you prioritize traffic growth on your site, then focus on informational keywords instead.
3. Build and optimize your website
After identifying the right keywords, it’s time to build and optimize title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and contents on each page of your website with the target keywords. This will make sure people find what they are looking for when searching for the information that relates to your product or services.
4. Launch your website, SEO files check and set up webmaster tools
Once you have built out all pages on your site and optimized them for SEO, test the website for compatibility across different devices and browsers. Check your webforms, 404 error pages and do a final proof-read on your contents. Also make sure media files are in the correct place and format. The site is secure. Then perform a site crawl to audit the technical SEO implementation and eliminate any potential errors. Broken sitemap and robots.txt files are disastrous. It makes search engines difficult to understand your website’s structure. Finally set up analytics so that you can measure the SEO performance as well as how users interact with your website.
5. Ongoing optimization and content creation, promote your website
For getting other websites to link to yours, you need something of value and worth to share. This is called backlink. Without backlinks, your website’s search engine visibility will not improve. The website is not likely to rank. Besides, good link building can also help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your circle.
And link building is not the only reason you have to update your website with new contents. Continuous content creation expands your potential reach. So creating a sound content plan/ calendar is a crucial step in shaping the long-term success of your website. It is important for keeping your website’s freshness and attracting new customers.
Wrapping It Up
There are thousands of websites online, but only a very small percentage of them actually achieve their goal. In order to make your new website perform shortly after its launch, having a SEO plan before building it is the best practice.
Other related topics that you may be interested in:
- Learn more about our Website Design and Development Service
- Learn more about our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Service
- Let’s talk about Image SEO
- How to pick the best domain name for your new website?
- SEO 101: Behind the SEO Scene
- How to optimize a WordPress website for Google ranking?
- SEO FAQs: The Top 10 SEO Questions New Clients Ask
- Why are Internal Links Important for SEO?
- What do you need to know about Local SEO?
- Google My Business for Local SEO
- Winning International SEO Strategy & Best Practices
- How to do SEO for WooCommerce?
What sets us apart from the mediocre web developing companies is our clients don’t need to ask. It is a part of our standard service to walk our clients through, help them to devise and implement a SEO-driven plan for their website project.
Do you have a new website idea!? Or want to improve your current website’s Google ranking? Drop us a line!
Email: [email protected]
WhatsApp: +852 6099 4407
