A modern designed, beautiful website is a lot like a great YouTube video. It's great, but.. if you don't have any people visiting that video and watching it, what's the point of having one?
Same goes for a website! If you just invested money in a website, without taking into account good SEO in mind, there's absolutely no way that people will be able to find your site. The entire point of having a successful website is having great SEO, so people will be able to find your website when entering certain search terms within Google.
There are tons of factors to building a website when it comes to having good SEO in mind. In this post, we'll just scratch the surface with a few beginner tips, going over the must have foundations for building a website with good SEO in mind.
Lets say you own a coffee shop in Toronto. You want local people to find your coffee shop online. Wouldn't it be weird if people typed in "Toronto plumber" into Google, only for your website to come up?
If that were the case, you definitely didn't take good SEO measures in mind!
It all starts with keyword research. What specific keywords do you think your customers would search for, if they're looking for a coffee shop in Toronto?
Off the top, I'd probably imagine the following:
People search with intent - hence the words, "best", "small", etc. The more intent behind a person's search, the higher chance they'll likely buy from you. Creating a keyword list of strong, intention-based keywords are great for keeping good SEO in mind for your website.
Okay, okay. Yes, WordPress powers about 1/3 of the entire internet. Why? Well, it's easy to use, business owners who aren't web developers can update content easily. Most likely if you're reading this, you probably want your website built on WordPress because it's that common. But there's a price. A price that most people fail to take into account.
WordPress is incredibly slow on page speed, website performance and coding best practices. All of which Google looks at negatively.
Google favours websites that are extremely fast to load, offer an amazing website performance and are clean coded semantically. The vast majority of all WordPress websites are the exact opposite of that.
If you want to build a website with good SEO in mind, take a look at JAMStack websites. These static site generators are extremely fast, have amazing performance and are clean coded. They're basically built to rank well in Google.
There's nothing more frustrating to you or your users that coming to a website and being either overwhelmed by the information, not being able to find what they're looking for quickly, or both.
Having a great sitemap navigation on your website as well as an amazing user experience - meaning, making it super simple for users to find what they're looking for, is absolutely imperative. You have to keep this in mind when working with a web designer and developer if you want to reap good SEO rewards from your website.
As mentioned, this post scratches the surface. You have to setup a foundation on your website by having great keyword research, opting out of using a clunky and bloated content management system such as WordPress, and having a great navigation and user experience. All of these factors will help you build a website with good SEO in mind.