You’ve launched a new business — congrats! — and now need to build your first website (or optimize your first one). A quality website is important on several levels, including credibility and professional reputation for your business, as well as getting found by potential new customers you wouldn’t connect with individually.
That second part, how you get found online, is generally referred to as SEO.
SKIP AHEAD:
The Approach | Phase 1: Research | Phase 2: Site Build | Phase 3: Ongoing SEO Marketing
Understanding Three Stages of Building a Successful SEO-Optimized Website
Building a Discoverable Website: the Hidden Magic of SEO
There are a number of factors that go into successful SEO when building any website. Some of them are tied to how you structure your site (written content, page infrastructure and links, etc). Others can be added to optimize your site further (site speed, alt text on images, meta descriptions, and more).
When building you want to think about:
- keywords in written content and headlines
- UX (aka user experience) to help visitors find information they want
- site speed
- alt text on images
- meta descriptions
- optimized links (also called “hrefs”)
Ongoing Keyword Marketing: Content Marketing, SEO, and SEM
And then there’s your ongoing SEO/SEM to drive traffic to your site (quick tip: SEO is organic keyword marketing, and SEM is paid). This is where the real magic happens, but it doesn’t work if your web foundation isn’t sound.
Ongoing keyword marketing (we’ll use “SEO” for short in this article, though it also includes SEM) should consider:
- content such as blogs and articles (I recommend hub and spoke marketing)
- how your network online (build backlinks from credible sites)
- ads and campaigns that drive traffic and/or help rank for specific keywords
Start With a Solid Foundation
But before you even start to build the site or plan keyword campaigns, you need to start with a quality foundation.
There are two prongs you will need to consider during the initial build of your site and through iterations of both the site and marketing efforts.
- customer data
- keyword and search data
Today we’ll look at both facets across three stages of optimizing your website: foundations and research, site build, and ongoing marketing.
| Research | Site Build | Ongoing Marketing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Data | – who is your target (person) – what do they want? (product) – why do they care about this need? (motivation) – why are you different (differentiators) |
– how to tell your story – determine, write, and link key pages |
– user surveys (including potential and paying customers) |
| Keyword Data | – competitors – search volume |
– headers and content – links and hrefs – image alt text – metadata descriptions |
– blogs (or videos with transcripts) – backlinks – paid campaigns |
Phase 1: Building for Success with Research and Educated Insights
Customer Data Foundations
Goal: create a foundation for how you reach potential customers.
When you first launch a business, you’re likely starting with hypothetical or best-guess customer profiles. In marketing we sometimes refer to these as a customer avatar, buyer persona, or ideal customer. These help you understand who your customer is and what pain points they’re trying to solve, as well as their tangential concerns and where they show up in the world.
Over time you’ll take these best-guess customer profiles and hone them with real customer data. This research could be as simple as talking one-on-one with people who show interest at a market or trade show, or as complex as structured research in product tests or focus groups.
The key here is that you have to start somewhere and then work your way forward. Over time you will constantly iterate based on customer feedback, which will reflect in how you maintain your website and structure your marketing strategy.
Keyword and Search Data Foundations
Goal: understand how people are currently searching for solutions to the problem(s) you solve.
The keywords you want to optimize for depend on your ideal customer, competitors, and product(s). You can do a lot of research early on to create solid foundations, but you also need to iterate the strategy as you learn more about your ideal customer, and as search data landscapes shift.
There are a number of tools you can use to both research new and track efforts for ongoing keyword campaigns. A couple common ones include Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs.com, and Screaming Frog.
Phase 2: How to Build Your Website for Effective SEO
Earlier we highlighted several elements you should consider when building a website for SEO, including written content, user experience, site speed, alt text, meta descriptions, and hrefs. Lets take a look at how elements from Phase 1 (research) influence how you build with these considerations in Phase 2.
Attract Ideal Customers with a Compelling Story
Goal: minimize bounce rates, extend session duration, and drive up page views by clicking between pages of interest
Written Content that Delivers a Relatable Narrative
There are two very important elements to crafting SEO-friendly content: how visitors experience the content, and how search engines and web crawlers assess it. Google and other search engines have developed to prioritize user experience, meaning you should always write for the user, not the bots. Keyword stuffing, a strategy from early SEO days, actively harms your site with current search engine standards.
So write for your audience. Consider how they speak, what’s important to them, and how you can connect emotionally to their needs, both immediate and secondary. And get to the point quickly — one major cause for quick bounce rates (visitors leaving your site in under 3-7 seconds) is not finding relevant or relatable content right away.
Your goal is to tell a story customers want to read, keeping them on your site longer and optimizing session duration.
User Experience to Extend the Customer Journey
In addition to literal time spent on your site, the number of clicks within your site (page views) tells search engines like Google how valuable your content overall is. The more users navigate around your site, especially if they spend time on each page, the more credible web crawlers consider your website and the higher it will appear in search results.
A seamless user journey has the added benefit of helping close sales, as well, ensuring buyers make it all the way from curiosity to purchase.
Integrating Keywords for Powerful SEO Results
Goal: let search engines know your site is relevant
So we want to write for the human customer, but how do we make sure the bots are attracted to the site, too? There are a few key places search engine crawlers prioritize looking for keywords:
- headers (page title and content headers like h2s and h3s)
- alt text on images
- hrefs and anchor text
- meta descriptions
Headers
It’s important to structure content logically for both users and crawlers. Having a clear header structure helps users scan and find content quickly (also important for accessibility and screen readers). It also helps crawlers understand what you consider important content on the page.
In code, you will literally apply h2 tags like you’d apply paragraph tags. If you’re using a text editor, there will be a drop-down to select various header and content formats. For users, this actually displays your content differently based on the format type — higher headers are usually larger, and color or contrast may change through the hierarchy, as well.
HOW TO USE IT
Think of headers like nested bullet points, with paragraph content contained underneath each. Keep headers short and digestible, but leverage them to contain your keywords. A good rule of thumb is 5-10 words, or consider how it visually appears on the page while reading so that it’s no more than 1-2 lines (though modern trends are more accepting of longer headlines).
Your h1 is Like a Book Title — Only Use Once Per Page
- H2s are Like a Book’s Chapters and Introduce Important Topics
- H3s nest under h2s like sections in a chapter. This would be a paragraph of content under your h3 section. Paragraphs contain more information than headers and are structured as sentences. But keep in mind that paragraphs on a screen should be shorter than what you’d read in a book. Generally use 1-3 sentences per paragraph of web text. And keep sentences short.
- H3s are relevant to the h2 topic, but break content down further.
- When Introducing a New Topic, Use a New H2
- Then nest additional h3s underneath. You can use many levels of h-tags, but I recommend to stick with h2 and h3, maybe adding an h4. Don’t get too complex or it can be exhausting to follow.
Alt Text on Images
Alt text (text entered on the back end of building pages that describes the contents of an image) serves a couple purposes. The most important user-centered purpose is for screen readers and accessibility. Folks with vision impairments use screen readers to convey the content of a web page. Alt text should include a description of your image so these viewers don’t miss out on content or the overall experience of visiting your page.
Alt text is invisible to sighted users, unless image is unable to load. This is perhaps the least important use of alt text unless your image contains literal text (this is not best practice, but if you do it you MUST include the same information in your alt text).
Crawlers also scan for alt text for two reasons. First, it’s an easy place to find relevant content, before reading every paragraph on a page. If it was important enough to call out, it’s important enough to index. Second, search engines prioritize user-friendly content, including sites built for accessibility. See above regarding screen readers for the visually impaired.
HOW TO USE IT
When inserting an image on a page, there will be a section in your builder to add alt text. Be very descriptive about the exact content of that image, especially why it’s relevant to your page. Remember: alt text helps users who can’t see images and rely on screen readers to convey content. Include keywords to describe how and why it’s relevant, but be sure the alt text makes sense to users who hear about the image instead of seeing it.
Note: you do NOT need to include alt text on background or “flourish” images. This can clutter screen readers and actually degrade the purpose of alt text. Only use alt text to help communicate the content of images relevant to the story you’re telling.
Hrefs and Anchor Text
Crawlers also prioritize how you set up links on your page. Hrefs are the literal link you include (ie http://grapeseeddesigns.com). Anchor text is the text that a viewer sees as highlighted or called out to indicate a link. For example, telling someone they’ll learn more about hrefs is more valuable that just telling them to click this link to learn more.
Meta Descriptions
One often-overlooked part of building web pages is the meta descriptions. These are paragraphs are used to describe pages specifically for search engines — it is the content that displays in search result pages themselves. You can control both the headline and body of that introduction.
If you do not set meta descriptions for your page, engines it will automatically pull the page title and the first few lines of text from the page. This may or may not be optimized to draw users in, so you can improve this by placing keywords and a short and sweet description optimized to display in search results.
Yoast’s free WordPress plugin is a great tool to help control metadata on each page of your site.
Phase 3: How to Leverage SEO to Keep Your Site at the Top of Google (ongoing marketing)
A lot of folks launching their first site want to “build a site with great SEO,” move on to the next business task to tackle. Unfortunately, high-powered SEO is a long game with no quick fix. To become and remain competitive, startups need to develop an ongoing strategy that iterates as the industry and competitive landscape changes.
Continue to Know Your Customer
Goal: stay relevant by keeping communication open and staying curious about customers’ needs.
While you likely created detailed customer avatars when getting started, it’s essential to keep fine-tuning these profiles over time. Sometimes the industry changes, sometimes you just understand your customer better, and sometimes you find out a different customer is actually more ideal than your first instinct.
There are a number of ways to continually gather customer feedback, with varying levels of complexity and cost.
“In the Wild” Feedback
If you’re meeting potential customers IRL, whether at markets, in a store, or at conventions and events, be sure to talk to them! Data doesn’t have to be formally aggregated on a digital platform to be “real” (but be sure to record discoveries when you get the chance).
Ask customers what interested them about your product, what their problems are, what they think and feel while interacting with your product, and why they may or may not choose to buy your product. Remember that these are not paying customers, they’re potential customers. It’s also a great way to find out why interested parties may fall out of your funnel before buying, and helps fix product issues along the way.
Customer Reviews
Encourage paid customer reviews, not just for social proof to potential new customers, but to help tailor products and messaging moving forward. What do they like? What do they not like? What would they change? Why did they choose your product over a competitor? Why did they almost choose a competitor instead?
These reviews can be obtained through formal surveys or more casual interviews, depending on where you connect with past and present customers.
Focus Groups
While this can be the most complex and expensive to execute, focus group feedback gives more data faster than any one-on-one tactics. Remember, to make statistically significant decisions, you need a minimum of 100 data points (ie distinct answers to a single question). The more data you have, the more you can rely on the patterns you observe.
Applying What You Find
Most founders know to iterate products and features based on customer feedback, but be sure to leverage this information in your marketing and web presence, too! You may find an entirely new branch of keyword topics to optimize, or you may find you’re putting a lot of effort into one with very low returns.
The important part is that you can pivot easily when new trends emerge. Be sure your site (and strategies) are agile enough to iterate with new information. This should always be a key consideration when starting your site, so put real thought into what lives on your home page, as well as cornerstone pages that branch out into keyword campaigns.
Keyword Content Strategies that Work
Goal: create a network of keyword-rich content that drives back to your foundational pages
To remain relevant, you need to be continually creating new content, or at least driving regular traffic. Continually developing new content also helps expand on your keyword foundations, both becoming relevant for new keywords and strings and reinforcing relevance for existing or baseline keywords.
HOW TO USE IT
A Hub and Spoke marketing model can be a very powerful baseline for guiding new content efforts. The way it work is essentially three parts:
- decide what your core topics are (usually 3-5 — this is usually decided when building, but can change over time)
- create landing pages to optimize for those core keywords
- develop ongoing content (ie blogs) tailored for related keywords that link back to the cornerstone content
This allows you to expand your reach with longer or less competitive keyword strings, and then drive traffic back toward shorter, more challenging words or phrases.
Takeaway
At the end of the day, SEO is a complex system of strategies and efforts, and there’s no perfect formula to rank at the top of Google. But you can’t get anywhere with SEO if you aren’t building on solid web foundations to begin with.
So be sure to build considering two key angles: customer insights and strategic keywords. Do your research, build a quality site, and move forward with a targeted marketing strategy. And always remember, you will likely pivot early and often as you get started!