There are so many places you can get web design done. The world is your oyster. You can literally deal with anyone, anywhere in the world and have them design pages, and build an entire website. They can write your content, and manage your digital presence. It is amazing!
What is also amazing is there is ZERO regulation on it. Anyone can do it which means there is ZERO quality control.
When you do the work for your business, when you serve your customers, there is a good chance a governing body enforces licensing in your industry; a bare minimum industry standard.
The internet, SEO and Web Development have none of that.
At Simple SEO we offer SEO as Web Design. Let me explain what that means.
What is SEO as Web Design
When we talk about SEO, we talk about optimizing your online presence in a way that it will show up at the top of the search results when people are searching for your product or service. Your website is what usually shows up to represent your business.
When we design a website, we factor in all aspects of what it takes to rank and get your business found.
Let me give you an example of SEO as Web Design:
When a simple service business website is created, there are certain components to that business and the landing pages to help it convert customers. Generally you will have a Menu and navigation at the top, a section with a heading and a call to action with a branded image in the background. Perhaps it is an image of the outside of the business, the team, vehicles… Whatever it might be, it represents the business.
Now when Google bot crawls the html of that website, it won’t be reading things the same way you and I do when we look at it with our eyes. It reads the hard html.
Html documents are structured in a specific way semantically to communicate the roles of different elements on the page and provide meaning to the content in each section. You can highlight the importance of certain things just by using something called semantic markup.
Semantic html is also important for making your website and its elements accessible to screenreaders and users who may have some sort of disability.
The end result is Google better understanding your content, but also users having a better experience on the website which is something that Google rewards. In fact they did a whole Algorithm update on “Page Experience”. Page experience isn’t just something you do to a website but is more a way of life when building a website. A set of guidelines you live by and build by.
When we design websites at Simple SEO, we include user experience, accessibility, page experience… all of it is taken into account in the design.
We look at what devices will be used toand navigate the site. It is important to ask questions like “is the site responsive on those devices?”, “Can the user zoom in to make the text larger or zoom out to make it smaller?”
It is important to make sure the website not only looks good visually, but the user experience is positive for all devices and users including those that require accessibility assistance like screen readers.
“We don’t design websites for you, we design them for your users.“
What SEO as Web Design is NOT
SEO as web design is not duplicating the pages 1 by one and re-using the same content over and over again.
It is not repeatedly using generic html elements that have no role assignment such as a <div> or <span> element.
SEO as web design is NOT building a website for YOU instead of your customers.
SEO as Web Design Service Summary
While there is no real regulation in the web development industry, there are “best practices” that are ever evolving to make the web a more inclusive and user friendly place.
That is what we aim to achieve with our SEO as Web Design service.
We understand that not all our customers think the same or us our website the same way, and neither do yours with your website.
You don’t want to limit your business due to a potential customer not being able to use your website because they can’t properly navigate it on their mobile device. Or your site doesn’t show up when people search for your services because your site so poorly built that Google bot can’t understand and interpret its content.
No, you want your SEO to succeed from the start. And, we want the same.
Our Web Design & Development Process
Web design and development by Simple SEO happens in a 6 step process that I have outlined below.
Step 1: Discovery
There is a good chance we don’t know each other and our team is not intimately familiar with your business. This step changes that.
Discovery includes Researching your company, your market, what SEO will look like for your business, content and messaging, etc.
We go over above in a strategy session and we will map out your website architecture. We will create a sitemap oulining the pages that you need.
Step 2: User Experience & Wireframes
Here we take the information we got from our discovery step and we mock up the wireframes. This will give us the structure and the layout of each of the pages.
Each page will have a narrative, which will be planned in this step.
Step 2 is where we decide on all the Calls to action(CTAs) and points of conversion or how will site visitors actually contact you; what pages will you guide them to, what forms will they fill out, what actions will they take.
Then we’ll meet to review step 2 before moving on to the next step.
Step 3: Copywriting
As Google is getting better at serving the best content for the searcher’s intent, page copywriting is becoming more important.
We will write original content for each sales focused page(AKA “money page”). This copy will be edited and added directly into the wireframe mockups. When your page copy is on point, we can prepare for the design to be consistent with your brand messaging.
We’ll meet to discuss this, get your approval and then move on to the next step.
Step 4: User Interface
This step in the Simple SEO Web Design & Development process means we are creating the high fidelity designs. Your colors, branding, photos, videos, animation decisions will be decided at this point and you will end up with a fully designed website that lives in the design software.
This gives you the ability to visualize every part of your website before it goes live.
Once the UI portion is ready, we will meet to discuss it and get approval to move on to the next step.
Step 5: Development
Since we have everything designed already; we have content, we have the sitemap, we have the animations decided… now we can build it.
The development stage means the site will be built from scratch. This is not some prepurchased template that you get from a marketplace or theme builder.
Our web development is engineered using scalable and maintainable development practices.
We have a focus on accessibility with fluid and responsive design.
Later iterations can be done easily and affordably because we designed them into the build from the start.
Our websites are built for speed, and performance with a specific focus on SEO best practices, afterall, we are an SEO company.
Once the staging site has gone through round one, we perform device optimization so it works seamlessly on all devices. Anything that comes from our device testing will get added to a task list where it will get fixed and tested.
Last part of Step 5 is Deployment. We launch the site, test it all to make sure it is operating as it was DESIGNED to do. We will plan a launch date and we will meet to review the live site, cheers, and celebrate!
Step 6: Management
The websites we build are an investment into your business for years to come and the best way to maintain them is with one of our website care plans. We prefer to manage the websites for you as we are very familiar with the way they are built, bugs that may come up across the sites we build and our support is second to none.
We use premium hosting of the highest caliber. Our hosting service includes:
- Daily, weekly, monthly backups – We store them for 1 year whereas most companies store them for 30-90 days.
- Offsite backups – Its not ok to only store backups on the server. They should be stored both on the server and on off-site storage.
- WordPress Core updates
- WordPress Plugin Updates
- Plugin Licensing
- Speed & Performance Optimization
- Analytics Tracking
- WAF(Website Firewall)
- CDN (Cloudflare)
- Malware Protection & Repair – Our servers are monitored and protected by the Industry Gold Standard Imunify360.
How Much Does Web Design & Development Cost?
The question of the day. How much to get a scalable and maintainable website designed, developed and managed to propel your business forward? Head on over to our website pricing calculator where all the goodies are laid out for you.
