This 2 part series aims to educate individuals and companies that are about to venture into a new site, or redesign their existing website. The web is filled with lots of bad SEO advice, and as a responsible internet marketing company, we hate to see another company fall victim to bad SEO advice.
If you think you are “buying SEO” from a web designer for an extra ~$500 dollars, or trying to save money by managing your web design and SEO efforts separately PLEASE KEEP READING!!
If You Build It, They Won’t Come
A big misconception on the web, even in 2010, is “if you build it, they will come“. Unfortunately, the last time this strategy really worked was when Kevin Costner operated a small farm in Iowa.
Competing for search engine rankings today is harder than it was just 5 or 10 years ago. Back then, your competition didn’t employ an SEO to improve their ranking above yours, or perhaps they didn’t have a site at all.
Today the web is growing rapidly while the amount of search volume for your keywords is remaining relatively the same. This means in order to out rank your competition your website architecture is very important. Gone are the days of simply building a site and having it rank well. Now you must understand how to properly build and market your site in order for search engines to rank you well.
Web Designers Don’t Know SEO Like A True Expert:
Often times web design firms will say “SEO, sure we do that”. When all this really means is for an extra ~$500 bucks they will do a hack job on your sites title and meta tags. SEO consists of much more than title tags and meta tags, and you really are getting what you pay for when you go this route.
Sweet Spot has great relationships with several web design firms across the nation. Our intent is not to put down web design firms when we say they don’t understand SEO. We need them to build us great looking web sites, but that is typically where their expertise ends. Sweet Spot strongly recommends hiring a true online marketing professional to take a look at your SEO goals before you even get locked into a particular web design.
SEO is a term that is loosely thrown around these days without any real standards. With several articles released every day on the topic of SEO, you can image it’s difficult to filter out what is true and what is not. Because of this cloud of SEO confusion out there, many agencies and web designers who venture into SEO trying to find out what this “SEO” thing is, inevitably end up lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Inevitably this leads them to make uniformed decisions about how to properly SEO your site.
Hire A True SEO Professional:
True SEO professionals are your bridge between web design and accomplishing your online marketing goals. We have the experience, data, and knowledge about online marketing that enables us to easily wade thru what is real and what is not. This gives companies like Sweet Spot Marketing an edge over any professional web designer. We go to SEO conferences and have data to back up our methods. Quite simply, there are just not enough hours in the day for a person who builds websites all day to have the same expertise as someone who is dedicated to educating themselves daily on the latest online marketing trends and search engine news.