Leaving SEO for last is a common mistake across organizations of every size. Here are a few things worth keeping in mind while building a website.
I was going through my messages and noticed an old contact had written to me, subject line: "Let's finally talk, we just launched the website!" In his email he asked me to review it and send over a proposal to do SEO for his new site. I responded with a sincere congratulations (launching a website is no small feat) and asked for a call, because I suspected I couldn't help him the way he expected.
On the call, he told me everything was ready: his developer had confirmed WordPress was running the latest version of Yoast, and all that was left was to configure it. I congratulated him again and then asked three questions:
What do you expect a user to do on your website?
What topics are most important for people to know about your service?
At what moment in someone's life do they go looking for what you offer?
I only got an answer to the first question, and it wasn't a very convincing one.
This situation is extremely common, and it shows up everywhere from small businesses to large corporations. Throughout my career I've met many people who were misinformed about SEO by people and organizations who weren't qualified, or whose knowledge was simply outdated.
To me, SEO succeeds when it solves the specific problems an ideal customer actually has. Yes, SEO requires a lot of tactical, hands-on execution, but without a real strategy behind it, that execution is just repetitive work, and its return drops substantially.
Think about the user first, search engines second. When building or improving a website, it's important to think about the experience of someone who isn't especially comfortable navigating websites. It's easy to assume our own site is intuitive, but watch a real person use it and you'll see every complication they run into.
If a user gets confused, a search engine will very likely get confused too, and the result is poor organic rankings, or rankings in front of the wrong audience for the business.
Forget the numbers. Every SEO content tool comes with its own set of metrics for what the "perfect" piece of content should look like. But search engines now use AI and machine learning to understand content and how it relates to other topics and subjects, what's known as "entities."
How many times a keyword repeats in an article doesn't matter much if the content itself isn't high quality and isn't properly backed by other relevant topics and good content.
Remove the barriers. This is probably one of the trickiest parts, because corporate structures, no matter how small, have barriers. A simple example: a developer who only receives designs to implement, whose only job is to code the HTML, fix the CSS, and connect the database. Or content creators and designers working separately, then having to fit the design to the content (or the content to the design) after the fact.
For an SEO strategy to actually work, every team needs to be involved, from brand strategy all the way to the server administrator. Otherwise you're building a house of cards.
Step outside your comfort zone and do the research. It's understandable that many agencies love platforms like WordPress for how simple they are and how easy it is to find people to maintain them. Yoast is a good tool too, and its premium version is genuinely valuable. The problem is that to actually rank well, you need to optimize content and code constantly, and often plug-ins start conflicting with each other and hurting the site.
There are plenty of content platforms out there that are reasonably easy to use and give full access to the site's and platform's underlying code. That access lets you optimize the site in ways that are nearly impossible on platforms like WordPress.
It's nearly impossible to find a company today without some form of digital presence. Competing gets harder every day and takes more effort, knowledge, and creativity. I've had the privilege of working on websites for globally recognized brands, and they know very well that the website is a top-priority channel.
A website that can compete for top search engine positions needs a strategic view of the business, its competitors, and its position in the industry. It also requires knowing which topics to cover and how to talk about them, in other words, a solid content strategy.
And finally, it all has to come together as excellent content delivered through a fast, error-free experience, on any device.
This is where the Iron Chef shows what they're made of: everything has to work flawlessly, with no broken links, to get the results you're after.
To have a website that can compete for top positions on Google and other search engines, there needs to be a clear idea at the executive level of what the website is worth within the company's overall business plan.
The website needs to present the company's positioning within its industry and its unique value proposition across the different stages of the buyer's journey.
Want to keep learning about SEO in Spanish? In the Learn SEO in Spanish section you'll find links to my articles and podcast, all in Spanish.
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