SEO for Designers: Why You Should Perform SEO *Before* Designing Websites
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With the ease of use that comes with the Squarespace platform, becoming a Squarespace designer has a relatively low barrier to entry. When I think back to the first websites I designed for clients using the platform, Google searches and YouTube tutorials sufficed to answer any problem I needed to figure out or any design effect I wanted to achieve.
This is important to recognize both as a Squarespace designer and as someone who is looking to hire a Squarespace designer— most any freelancer with the most rudimentary skill set will be able to produce a decent website for you. But then what? Unless you have a large advertising budget set aside or a huge social media following, that website will most likely just get lost swimming in the abyss of the millions of other websites in existence.
And what is the point of a website if it isn’t getting noticed? If it isn’t causing your target audience to find you?
So whether you’re a web designer or someone who hires web designers, this article should provide some food for thought.
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The Importance of Doing SEO Before Designing a Website
is seo part of web design?
The short answer: it should be.
The other short answer: SEO is part of quality web design.
When a designer is interested not just in designing a site for you and getting paid, but in how well that site is going to rank, you know you have a quality web designer on your hands.
We have today a saturation of online ‘gig’ workers, freelancers who are just trying to make a buck providing low-quality online work like copywriting, web design, graphic design, and so on. Unfortunately, a lot of clients will hire these people on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr because they come with appealingly low prices.
Before I begin the actual design phase of any web design project, I spend at least a couple of days performing SEO research first. What I learn during the SEO research phase will serve to inform the framework of the website I design.
Designers, if you don’t know how to do this and do it well, here is how to learn.
what comes first- content or seo?
The same is true for content development- SEO research needs to happen first.
Before hiring a copywriter or writing the storytelling/text content for your own site, you first need to have a good grasp of your target keywords. These specific keywords will need to be incorporated into headings and paragraph text where organically possible on a site (ideally tastefully, so your site feels natural and human, not stiff and robotic).
Other forms of content for your site, such as image files, will also need to be optimized before uploading to the site, and then optimized again once uploaded to the site. You can learn exactly how to do this in my Squarespace SEO Expert course.
If your copywriter doesn’t seem to have a firm handle on this, and a portfolio to show of past content with incorporated keywords for specific sites, look for another copywriter :)
Key Takeaways
The most important thing to understand is that your target keywords need to be built in to the very bones of your website. This means SEO for the site needs to be sorted before design begins. The best and most effective way to do this is to work with a designer who is also an SEO specialist (and has the portfolio to prove it).
Can you go back and optimize an already live site? Of course you can. But in my experience, it won’t perform as well as a site that is already optimized upon launching. I think this is probably due to the Google bots getting confused if you have a certain set of keywords (or no keywords really at all) on a domain, and then suddenly you add all of these keywords— Google had already indexed, or not indexed, your site, and now has to go back through and sort it all out, and in my experience, sites that start off with clear and precise keywords being targeted, perform far better that sites that go back and attempt renovation.
I hope these have been some nutritious morsels of thought for you, and please let me know in the comments if you have any questions for me. I’m happy to help!
I’ll talk to you again soon,
x
Tiffany
Welcome!
Hey there! I’m Tiffany ~ a Squarespace Web Designer & SEO Expert. I design beautiful & professional websites that rank well on Google, & I teach courses on becoming a Squarespace SEO Expert, Monetizing Squarespace, and Starting Your Own Squarespace Design Business!
Feel free to contact me at: tiffany@tiffany-davidson.com
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