When your customers or potential customers first search for your name, or products relating to the services you sell, the search results on Google are often their first impression of your business. Try it for yourself and see if this fits the brand image you want to portray.  After all, first impressions count!

Good SEO isn’t just about the Google Search results page.  There is a science behind it, to research and select the right keywords, evaluating your competition and gaps in the ‘search market’, producing relevant and engaging content, building popularity through social media, and much more technical aspects and things we won’t explain here.  Needless to say, if you want to do a good job and do your brand and your company justice you need professional help.

Most companies ask their web developers are the people to speak to about building your website.  In our experience, web developers generally build excellent websites, but they are not your SEO team.  In fact, Search Academy have a number of partnerships with leading web development firms for the very reason they cannot effectively provide these services themselves.

We’re not saying all web developers don’t provide good SEO services, nor are we saying all web developers know nothing about SEO.  It’s just we believe you should be aware that SEO is an area of specialization all in itself and you should discuss search engine optimization with more than simply your web developer.

We also think it’s important to note that SEO must NOT be an afterthought to your website.  We are almost always asked to audit existing sites, and rarely brought in from the beginning (perhaps to my point above, it’s not in the core strengths of the majority of web developers to have considered thoroughly enough).

Why should you consider SEO from the outset?  There are THREE main reasons why:

1. You assist the development process by getting the sitemap and content map built from both an SEO and design perspective.
2. This saves future development and re-work costs when you come to implement our SEO recommendations (and possibly after your development budget has already been exhausted).
3. You save opportunity costs – why would you want to launch a site that looks good but can’t be found?  We believe there has to be a good balance of both, and by engaging SEO expertise from the outset you are saving yourselves thousands in opportunity cost.