The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers. This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’: Wider strategic areas Technical areas to be discussed with developers. Design areas to be discussed with designers. These are the questions that are a starting point in your research: How large is our market? This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors: You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture? If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have.
The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.
Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:
“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or
“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even
“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”
This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.
This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:
- Wider strategic areas
- Technical areas to be discussed with developers.
- Design areas to be discussed with designers.
Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.
Wider strategic questions that should be answered:
1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?
After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.
Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).
How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.
2. Do we understand our customer segments?
These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:
- How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)
- What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)
- How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)
This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.
3. Who are our digital competitors?
Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:
- You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.
- Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.
- Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.
After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take…
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