SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial for ensuring your site complies with the Google algorithm. This algorithm focuses on several factors like keyword density, page loading speeds, correct tagging, and even whether your site is optimised for mobile.

At each stage of the build process we work to add another layer of SEO to your project. This has multiple benefits, including higher search engine result ranking, increased online visibility, and a stronger overall performance.

At its most basic level, SEO optimisation involves keywords, metadata, title tags, and headings. When we develop your website, these elements of code are crucial for ensuring search engines pick up relevant information from your site.

For example, if you’re a dental surgery looking to reach potential customers in your local area of Hampstead, North London, you may wish to use ‘Dental Surgery in Hampstead, North London’ as one of your key phrases. This information would be embedded in normal text, and – to improve SEO ranking – in headers and title tags, as well as metadata.

This means when a potential client searches “Dental Surgery Hampstead North London”, the search engine will scan your site for information relating to the search term. If your site has positive SEO, it’ll be more likely to appear towards the top of the search results.

We’re well versed in the art of ensuring SEO standards are met, without compromising the quality of your written text. Your website needs to read naturally and still include enough keyword content to appear in search results. 

How do we ensure positive SEO?

Web design and SEO are intrinsically linked, but if you’re a larger company, sometimes your writing, marketing and design departments fail to work effectively together on your website build. This leads to inconsistent SEO and clunky designs, which we want to avoid.

We’re are a digital agency capable of providing both web design and SEO services, meaning your website is written in one voice, and designed for content discoverability.

If you’re an e-commerce company looking to improve brand visibility, SEO is crucial for ensuring potential customers can find your products. Sometimes, it’s as simple as designing a horizontal menu listing your services, with metadata informing the search engine that each label leads to further information on the subject.

This makes navigating your site intuitive and simple and increases the number of potential customers by appearing high in the search results.

SEO in a mobile generation

In an age of digital portability, it’s not enough to design a website that’s only compatible with desktop computers. In 2017, nearly 60% of all web users accessed the internet using their smartphone, a figure which is only expected to continue rising as the global smartphone penetration rate increases.

When we design your smartphone and tablet compatible website, we consider the following points to ensure positive mobile SEO:

Page Loading Speed

Your website will be loading on a smartphone, meaning the user may be using mobile data to access the internet. Mobile data speeds are getting faster year by year, but they’re still slower than those achieved by Wi-Fi. We aim to reduce the page loading speed by minimising code, leveraging browser caching, and reducing redirects. This will encourage a larger pool of users to really interact with your site as loading pages on their smartphones will be quick and easy.

Titles and Meta-Descriptions

On mobile, the space search engines give you to include meta-data is even smaller than the space given on a desktop or wide-screen display. Users need to be able to see the most relevant and important information on your page in the space that Google provides. Because of this, we’re as concise as possible when writing your titles, URLs, and meta-data.

Responsive Web Design

To ensure your site is user-friendly on all devices, we use responsive design techniques to allow your site to adapt to whichever device it’s being viewed on. Because this will decrease bounce rate and amplify user experience, your SEO rankings will improve.This is especially important as bounce rates on mobile are 40% higher than on desktops – people simply refuse to stay on a slow, badly designed page that isn’t optimised for their device.

The WordPress Effect

WordPress sites traditionally perform better in search results than sites hosted on other third-party or independent CMS platforms. Here’s why:

HTML Markup

WordPress sites are written primarily in PHP, but the platform automatically creates pages written in HTML (and more recently, HTML5) – this language communicates easily with search engines, meaning each element of your site can be easily categorised and recognised. This increases search engine rankings, meaning users are more likely to click on your website instead of a competitor’s.

Permalinks

WordPress offers SEO-friendly “pretty permalinks”, which allow links and pages to include keywords explaining their content. Again, this makes your site more appealing to the Google algorithm, and increases online visibility.

Title Tags/Headings

Title tags and headings are surrounded by the ever-important H1 tag in order to help search engines find the most important information on a page. WordPress offers a function which lets you set this up without having to manually input HTML tags.

Optimised Image Content

When uploading images onto your WordPress site, the platform allows for search engine optimisation with the inclusion of ALT tags and descriptions, so even your image and video elements are recognisable by Google. Because search engines don’t “see” images or videos, it’s crucial to embed each element with as much relevant coded data as possible, so your page can experience overall SEO positivity.

SEO Plugins

To further increase your positive SEO, plugins such as Yoast – available on WordPress – are crucial in giving you relevant tips and tricks which help you comb through each page to increase your content’s discoverability.If out-of-the-box plugins don’t work the way you want them to, we can modify them to meet your needs. We’re also capable of designing SEO plugins from scratch which will focus on the areas you’ve chosen to improve.

Additionally, you’ll be able to use external tools in conjunction with your site such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics – this gives you a more comprehensive overview of how your site’s SEO is performing and helps you integrate your content.

Get in touch

Looking for a web design company that understands your brief and knows how to implement it? Call us today on 01702 567957 or drop us an email using our contact form.