Important SEO Considerations Before Developing a Website

Searching engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial strategy for getting a new website found online. Too many businesses wait until their website is already developed before thinking about SEO best practices. This can lead to lost opportunities, wasted resources redeveloping pages, lower rankings, and poor user experience that hurts conversion rates. That’s why considering SEO Geelong early in the website development process is vital for maximising your reach and success online.

Proper planning and relevant keyword research during the planning and information architecture phases can profoundly impact your pages’ ability to rank. Getting these fundamentals right from the start will also make any future SEO optimisations easier. Here are some of the most important SEO considerations before you develop your website.

Conduct Keyword Research

One of the first SEO steps is conducting detailed keyword research to determine relevant terms and phrases (known as keywords) that you want your site content and pages to rank for in search engines. Focus first on head terms that comprehensively describe your overall business and offerings. Then expand into more specific long-tail keywords too. Analyse search volume data to estimate demand for each keyword and identify ones with high search potential that are viable to target.

Once you’ve compiled your keyword list, you can then align your information architecture, page structure, content topics, metadata, and optimisations around those core terms. This helps search engines properly interpret relevancy to rank your pages well.

Plan Out Site Structure and URLs

Your website’s structure and content organisation plays a big role in onsite SEO in Geelong. An intuitive, seamless site architecture that allows users and search bots to easily navigate to pages is ideal. Determine logical content groupings and categorisation schemes. Pages that target a main keyword should be easy to find from the site menu. Minimal clicks show search engines relevancy for those pages to keywords.

It’s also important to create clean, concise, and descriptive URLs using hyphens to separate words (not underscores or camel case). URLs with keywords help pages rank for those terms specifically.

Design and Develop Mobile-First

With more and more internet usage happening on smartphones, a mobile-first indexed, responsive website is mandatory for SEO Services in Geelong. That means optimising site design for mobile screens first before enhancing layouts for desktop interactions. From a technical standpoint, ensure your development platform and stacks are mobile-friendly and meet page speed benchmarks. On the content side, display information in easily scannable sections, use larger text sizes, minimise complex multimedia, and customise CTAs for touch interactions.

Leverage Site Architecture for Faster Speeds

Page speed significantly impacts SEO rankings, user experience, and conversion rates. There are technical performance optimisations developers implement like compression, caching, minimised redirects, and asynchronous loading of non-critical assets. However, site architecture also influences speed. Simple, clean layouts with minimal HTTP requests load fastest. Enable lazy loading where possible to defer offscreen media. And consider separating out resource-heavy pages like product catalogs, news sections, blogs, or multimedia content so each page isn’t bogged down trying to load everything at once.

Plan for Dynamic Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions don’t get weighted as heavily for rankings as actual content. But they do play a vital role in click-through-rates from search listings. Dynamic templates that generate customised titles and descriptions based on page content are essential. This allows you to squeeze keywords relevant to each specific page in a compelling way to entice clicks while maintaining proper character limits for proper indexing.

Determine High-Priority Pages

Not every single page will appear in search results. Determine what pages align to keywords and topics you want to prioritise in order to bring initial traffic that converts into customers. Home and landing pages, especially for high-value products or conversion-oriented offers, usually take top priority along with location pages for local businesses. Make sure these pages are developed for both users and search bots with lots of contextual content, efficient HTML, quality links, and optimised technical elements.

Map Out Content Development Plans

Relevant, engaging website content that satisfies user intents for targeted keywords is how pages earn high rankings. Determine what kind of content you need, including blog posts, guides, local listings, testimonials, multimedia, and tools that align to keywords. Plan content development workflows so writers create SEO- friendly material from the start, including keyword integration without over-optimisation. Scheduling consistent content expansion also helps with rankings over time by showing active sites.

Implement Structured Data Markup

Search engines are getting better at understanding context and featured snippets in results thanks to structured data and schema markup. When planning site architecture, determine what types of schema are applicable. Creative Work, FAQ, Product, Article, Job Posting, Event, Review, HowTo tutorials, and more allow you to highlight important data. Structured data also powers rich result previews in the SERPs. The proper tags just need added development-wise.

In Conclusion

That may seem like a lengthy list of SEO considerations before even starting website development. But dedicating upfront effort to planning for search optimisation and user experience pays off exponentially once you launch. It prevents unnecessary rework, technical debt, lost early traction, and mistakes that might get baked in once live. Getting SEO right from the initial build makes continually evolving and ranking your site much easier long term.

By collaborating with professionals at Make My Website during the planning and development stages, businesses can ensure that their websites are strategically designed to rank well in search engine results. Planning for SEO ahead of website development and launch is an essential investment all websites and businesses should make.