Save Time and Money by Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency CT for Web Design

Would you invest thousands of dollars in branding and merchandising without putting up a sign if you were opening a storefront? Put your heart and soul into a store, but don’t help people find it. It makes no sense, but new website owners are still hiring web designers to build entire sites with images and non-optimized content. When they realize their site isn’t performing well, they hire a full-service Digital Marketing Agency CT to do SEO.

A website designer who understands SEO can help you avoid the problem. You will be able to launch your new website with the SEO foundation already in place.

What You Need To Know About Website Design and SEO

When people hear the word “design,” they often think of color palettes, graphics, fonts, and layouts. The assumption is that SEO should be left to the content writers and developers after the design work has been completed. SEO-savvy designers of a Digital Marketing Agency CT are often overlooked but are crucial to the success of a website.

There are many factors that affect a site’s performance, including search engine rankings. An increase of 30% in click-through rates (CTRs) can be achieved by moving up in search results. According to the same study, the number one position performs 10 times better than the number ten position.

You can get there with SEO, but it must be an integral part of the site. Besides making sure your website’s layout is user-friendly, a thoughtful designer should also consider SEO aspects. You might end up reworking what you’ve invested so much time and money into if your design team doesn’t incorporate SEO.

Creating a Website That is SEO-Friendly

Your site is the face of your business. Design is important, but people need to be able to find it. Here’s how a Digital Marketing Agency CT SEO-friendly website designer can help.

Developing a Keyword Strategy and Analyzing Competitors

You will appear for your target audience if you choose the right keywords. You can get more clicks if you use those keywords correctly.

Every page on your website should have a primary keyword target. Keywords should be unique on each page along with secondary and tertiary keywords.

Make sure you know which pages you want to use to house those keywords before you build your site. Everything you put on your website will be affected by your keywords, including:

• • Headers
  • Image descriptions
  • Metadata or the text that describes your site on search results pages
  • On-page content

Developing and implementing a keyword strategy is necessary for integrating keywords in this way. Identifying your competitors’ keywords is the first step. As a result, your team or the Digital Marketing Agency CT that you hire, can determine which pages should target those keywords and how they should appear.

Design Problems That Affect SEO on a Website

SEO isn’t incorporated into website design, which results in a lower ranking. Here are some common mistakes to avoid.

Not Enough Words on the Page

In addition to videos and images, you must have robust and optimized content to rank well.  Each page has to include enough text for Google to consider it valuable to the reader.

This problem is best solved by a full-service Digital Marketing Agency CT. A professional agency knows how to balance clear design with rich content.

Keyword Cannibalization

The same keyword is too often targeted across multiple pages by site owners. You seem to be covering all your bases, but Google’s crawlers get confused. It’s hard for them to tell which page should rank higher, and often they guess incorrectly. A less relevant page gets buried under your target page.

Once again, a Digital Marketing Agency CT can eliminate this catch-22. A professional agency knows how to structure a site and choose the right keywords to make sure each page ranks well.

Unoptimized images

Images must do more than look good to rank well on a page. They need to be:

• • Compressed to protect bandwidth
  • Described with alt text and file names that are unique
  • In the most appropriate format (PNG, JPEG, or WebP)

SEO-savvy designers optimize images and keep the whole page looking great.

Site Structure and Navigation

It is easy for humans and crawlers to navigate top-ranking websites. In addition to categories, there are subcategories if necessary. From a user journey standpoint, the site’s structure must make sense. Sites are ranked based on their usability and relevance by Google.

The process goes beyond a well-designed navigation bar. Throughout your website, call to actions should direct visitors to what their next step should be.

You might have separate pages for grooming, training, and pet-sitting if you run a pet services business. There might be subpages for dogs and cats on each of those pages. Each sub-page would be listed under the appropriate parent page, and each page would have buttons and navigation aids. There should be a clear call to action leading users to either a “Contact Us” or a “Book Appointment” page.

Designing such a layout requires an SEO expert from a Digital Marketing Agency CT – so users and bots will have a great experience.

Design That is Mobile-Friendly

A mobile version of your site is crawled first by Google to determine your site’s ranking. Known as mobile-first indexing, it makes it more important than ever to design for handheld devices.

In order to rank highly, designers must:

• • Check image format, size, and quality
  • Ensure content is consistent across devices
  • Use the right video format

There is no exception to mobile-first SEO best practices. Hire an up-to-date designer to optimize your ranking.

High Point’s SEO-Informed Web Design

High-ranking websites require a lot of work. Don’t take risks – hire an SEO-friendly web designer from a full-service Digital Marketing Agency in CT. Whether you need a web design service for your business or a complete web development project, High Point SEO & Marketing can help. Get in touch with us today.

 

Hayley Canfield, Owner of High Point SEO & Marketing in CT