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Where Does SEO Belong in the Web Development Process?

Author: Tom Cottrill | Date Posted: Apr 23, 2020

When you’re creating a rough timeline for your web design project, you might feel tempted to pencil in SEO as a line item. If you find yourself doing this, drop your mouse and slowly step away from the computer, because you have SEO all wrong.

Optimizing your website to make it “search-engine friendly” is not an afterthought and it’s not a line item in a long list of to-dos. It has to be carefully integrated into every step of the development process.

What’s important to understand is that search engine optimization is not just about optimizing title tags and adding keywords to a site. It involves a whole host of technical factors and they all have to be optimized in order to give your site the visibility and quality traffic you’re expecting upon launch.

For example, site speed has a major influence on SEO. Adding specific features to a site can impact load times and usability. So, every discussion around the features of your web design project should get buy-in from the SEO team.

SEO Items That Impact Web Development.

We understand that every company operates differently. And that oftentimes means integrating SEO into the web development process can be challenging. We firmly believe that finding an SEO advocate in every department of your company will help unify your efforts and garner the best results.

Below are just a few examples of how SEO can impact the web design and development process:

• Site Architecture and Interlinking – If your site pages are organized and appropriately linked together, then Google can more easily crawl your site and help you get the SEO success you’re after.
• URL Structure – A consistent URL structure needs to be maintained in order for Google to crawl your site more effectively and efficiently.
• Schema and Rich Snippet Implementation –Ensuring a new site has the ability to add schema markup in a way that shows up in Google search results is critical in today’s competitive SEO landscape.
• Choosing the Right CMS – Making the right decision about a CMS platform is necessary to support the tools needed for successful SEO efforts.
• Mobile-Friendly Design – Any web design projects should support some form of a mobile-friendly design to capture search traffic on mobile devices.
• Security – Especially important for eCommerce sites, updating a site’s software and getting an HTTPS connection for your site could lead to improved Google rankings.

 

And while all of these pieces are important independently, SEO is only as good as your ability to track conversions, measure goals and draw conclusions. Throughout the web development process, you need to be setting up a solid foundation in Google Analytics to effectively compare data from your previous site to your new one.

So, which came first…the chicken or the egg? Who the heck knows. But what we do know, is that you can’t start web development projects without considering SEO, and you can’t improve SEO without a well-executed web development plan.