Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Building and Designing Your Website

With the multitude of topics jockeying for your attention, it would be more practical to slice website design and web building issues into comprehensive chunks that you can more easily identify and tackle. This article aims to do just that by emphasizing the four strategic areas that you should address before you design and build your digital “place,” along with your usual SWOT analysis and pricing models. Here are five strategic decisions that you will have to make prior to building your site:

When you have established your brand’s selling point or “value proposition,”you will have to figure out how to propagate that selling point through the web. It would be easy if the terms describing your value proposition were the same words that search engine users would use to look for the particular problem or solution that concerns your brand. If the terms describing your value proposition will be scarcely sought, however, you would have to create a set of attributes that search engines will be able to associate with your brand that would reflect in the search results of potential customers seeking information relevant to the problems or solutions that your brand deals with. Finding the right attributes and proposition terms are challenging as you are facing competition from other brands as well.

To answer this question, start researching the size of your target market. Then, determine if the size of your potential audience is increasing or decreasing. You may use Google Trends to help you in this matter. Identify your key targets and establish the characteristics of their demographics, roles, motivations, and needs. With the help of this data, make a model of their online and offline behavior that you can use to guide your online marketing strategy and marketing content. A model will enhance your understanding of the target segments. This, in turn, will translate to crafting a website architecture that revolves around known and anticipated behavior.

You can broadly classify your rivals into three main groups. The first group includes everyone else who would compete for the position on the search engine’s first page. These may include other organizations who might not cater to the same market or target as you do but nevertheless use the same keywords as you do and offer reliable information that gains search engine users’ attention. The strategy that they use would edge you out from landing on first page results. The second group are those rivals who are top-ranked in your line of business when it comes to the same product or services you offer. The third group are your actual rivals in the same line of business who are also currently engaged in solving the same customer problems you also aim to solve. By knowing who you are up against in the world wide web, you will be able to make informed decisions that could help aid your website builder to craft a site architecture that cultivates a better user experience and reach so that you can have more of an edge over your competitors.

The platform you are using should be flexible enough to allow quick but large changes on your site in response to the ever-shifting recommendations and updates of Google. In the process of building a flexible platform and avoiding a future redesign, you would have to consider having an effective information architecture to enable search engines to easily retrieve your content and display it to users. Secondly, you should also mind the kind of content the site is expected to host and map out a content strategy accordingly to inform the type of design and user interface your site will adopt. Thirdly, you should be aware how using a variety of user experience enhancing technologies such as Ajax, Javascript, and Flash on your web pages could affect your websites’ ability to be picked up and understood by search engine bots.

While we are on the topic of flexibility, your long term goal should be to make the user experience smooth and consistent across all kinds of devices, from laptops to smartphones. Thus, having a design that remains responsive to users regardless of the device they are using to search or access your site should be put in mind.

Spend your time concentrating on these fields

By focusing on dealing with these four questions, you do not have to waste your time going down the rabbit hole and overwhelming yourself with a lot of distracting but insignificant issues such as whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. Instead, use your time to address these four areas with the people whom you delegated to do the task of designing and building your website.