You’re a small business owner. You know you need a website and you know just enough about SEO to know you need it but not how to do it. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that all web designers know SEO or that if you pay a lot of money for a website, you’ll get a quality website that will show up great in search results. Even many experienced web designers don’t do SEO. Some people will say that it’s not part of a web designer’s job, while others say who better than the web designer to do SEO. Most web designers will say that a website comes with SEO, but that could mean the most basic SEO with no ongoing SEO services. However, there are some warning signs that you can look for to determine if the web designer building your website knows SEO.
Here are 10 Signs a Web Designer Doesn’t Know SEO:
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- Platform Choice: They build websites on platforms designed to be used by people who don’t know what they’re doing, such as WIX, Squarespace, Canva, GoDaddy website builder, and other website builders. These platforms have limited SEO options, scalability, functionality, and ability to customize. Self-hosted WordPress tends to be the platform of choice for experienced web designers and SEO experts due to its full ability to be customized and better SEO options.
- No Proactive SEO Discussion: They fail to bring up SEO during the planning stage of building your website, such as keyword research, competitor analysis, or SEO-optimized content.
- Very Basic On-Page Optimization: If they neglect basic on-page SEO elements such as meta titles and descriptions, and heading tags. Although this one is usually found out after the website has already been built and you’re wondering why it isn’t ranking for anything. On the other hand, many web designers are great about including these, but the most basic SEO is all they do. Question what “Comes with SEO” or “SEO included” means. if this is all they do to optimize your website, it’s not likely to get you good results.
- No After Discussion on SEO: They should make sure that you’re aware that for best results SEO should continue even after the website is built. Google Analytics and Google Search Console should be part of that discussion. Most web designers offer to set this up and connect it to your website. But that’s not all, a website should never truly be considered finished. For best results and to truly dominate the search engines and rank above your competitors in search results, you need to demonstrate EAT or EEAT or Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is gained by valuable content being regularly added, working to improve website performance, and more. It also includes off-page SEO (I think a better name for it would be off-website SEO), which are things done off of the website to improve rankings, such as building a natural backlinks profile.
- Poor Site Structure: A website with confusing navigation or poorly organized content can negatively impact search engine crawling and ranking.
- Mobile-Responsiveness: A site that is fully responsive on all devices is a big deal for SEO. For best SEO, there should be minimal differences between mobile and desktop. Gone are the days when there were two versions of a website or even worse, only having the desktop version. If you include something on desktop, it should resize to also work on mobile.
- 5-Page Websites: If they try to sell you a 1-page, 5-page website, or similar sized website, as all you need, run. Almost all businesses need more than the 5-page websites that are so popular with many web designers. There’s nothing wrong with a 5-Page website, as long as it’s intended to be a starter website and not a one-and-done deal. Most 5-Page websites include Home, About, Services, Contact. The 5th page is usually testimonials, FAQ, rates, or something else. The problem with this is that it usually doesn’t include blogs and it doesn’t include individual service pages.
- Service Pages: Without individual service pages, your website is unlikely to rank for your services. If your web designer tells you that all you need is one Services page with no plan to add individual service pages later, they aren’t familiar with ranking a service-based business. Even if you truly only have one service, such as massage, it can usually be broken down to rank better, such as by different types of massage.
- Blogs: If a web designer does not insist on a blog, they don’t know SEO. Some SEO specialists will not even work with a potential client if they insist on not doing blogs. Even in 2024, blogs are incredibly important in adding new content to a website that can rank in search engines for important keywords.
- SEO can be done later: And finally, if they tell you SEO can be done later, run. While SEO can be done later, it’s so much better to build a website with SEO in mind from the very start. For one thing, SEO takes time. It takes about 6-12 months before a new website is established in search results. Not doing SEO from the start will only make it harder to rank in the long run, making it harder to get found by potential new clients, and may end up costing you more to fix issues.
We hope this helps you determine if your web designer truly knows SEO. It’s important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy. While initial SEO done on a new site, For a new website to start consistently ranking well on search engines like Google and gain significant organic traffic, it typically takes consistent SEO efforts, including building backlinks, creating quality content, and optimizing website structure, to see substantial improvement in search rankings and visibilityAn experienced SEO specialist will also explain this. To quote Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” or something like that, does not apply to a website. For a website to show up in search results, especially at the top for competitive searches, requires EAT or EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust).
All website built by Delphinium are built with SEO in mind.