Imagine if someone could work for you all the time, for free. That would be pretty amazing right?

Let’s say you’re a CEO, CMO, or someone who is in charge of marketing/business development at your company. You need to get your company exposure and more revenue. By investing in a great website that is built with research and analytics data in mind, your website can become a 24/7 sales rep that accomplishes both of those tasks. On top of this, it’s completely measurable.

Users will see your brand in search results more frequently. And these users won’t be random people, they’ll be qualified prospective customers that are truly interested in your products and/or services. Those users will visit the site; find exactly what they’re looking for (all of the associated details); and ultimately be encouraged to make a phone call, email or purchase with your business.

I know it seems too good to be true, but we’ve done this for clients time and time again. You can see examples of growth on our SEO page, where we have graphs of client traffic. We also wrote a post that showcases the results of local businesses converting to mobile-friendly websites with SEO.

Let’s get down to it and discuss how research, website design elements (link to old post), and SEO working together can produce results for your business.

*Note: Throughout this post, we’ll assume that you’re including SEO with your website design (ideally an ongoing plan). This is the most effective way to get your website appearing in the search results, gaining on competitors, eventually ranking well, and maintaining that dominant presence.

Start: The Design Process

Everything we do at webFEAT starts with research. In the case of website design, we look to you for the basics. For example: what sorts of website designs do you prefer, key components of your business, competitors, goals, etc. This allow us to get an idea of what we need to do, research what your industry is currently looking like online, and how we can make your brand better.

Once we gather information from you, the design team creates a mockup for your approval. We edit or redesign that mockup until it’s to your liking, and then begin creating interior pages. Our design team is constantly learning and stays on top of trends to deliver a sharp, professional website that your prospective customers will remember.

See my colleague Justin’s post for more a more detailed description of the general web design process.

At this point, SEO and Design begin to work together.

Refine: SEO and Design Teams Working Together

Our design team is familiar with some best practices regarding SEO, and they’ll do their best to guide you in the right direction with some recommendations. This may include the placement of CTA’s, or making sure you have a little bit of content above the fold. That being said, a few best practices and a full-on SEO campaign are two different stories.

Along with the information you’ve initially given our design team, we may have some additional questions, but we also start with research. We want to see what people in your space are talking about, what details are being provided for particular products and services, who are your primary competitors (that you may not have even known about) and who your target audience is. With that, we can work with design to build your website around that information.

Much of this work is behind the scenes (tweaks to make your website fast and easily crawlable by robots, meta information, etc.) However, some topics like content require additional input from you. For example, when you send over a piece of content, we may recognize that additional pieces of information may be valuable to the user, and competitors are not providing it. (ex: price or scope of work.) From there, we’d request additional content or work with you to create it. We also may want to work with you on some of your requested design elements or the navigation. Ideally what we want to do is make the website easy to use for robots and site visitors. For site visitors in particular, we want to provide them with exactly what they’re looking for and create a funnel to your desired conversion (call, email, appointment, purchase, etc.)

Our SEO team has been working with websites since they were all .html and .asp! Given this familiarity with code, it makes it even easier to work with our design team, and take your website to a higher level.

As far as design goes, you may also find these 2 recent posts interesting:

Web Design Elements that Affect Rankings: URLs

Web Design Elements That Affect Rankings Pt. 2: Links

Launch: Testing, Launch and the Start of a Return on Your Investment

Now it’s time for the best part: the launch of your new website. We’ll take all the necessary steps to get your website up, and test on different browsers and devices to make sure all of the functionality is there.

So what’s next?

If you had a website before, our SEOs will have crawled your old website and mapped out redirects from any old URL’s to the new ones. This will minimize any ranking fluctuations and help to maintain any momentum or authority your domain has developed over time.

Read more on launching a new website.

On an ongoing basis, our SEO team will do a lot to get your website ranking (and keep those rankings on the first page when they get there.) Without going into too much detail, we’re always staying up to date and implementing best practices, performing research, testing, and making your website stand out over competitors. The SEO process takes time, but when done properly the results are outstanding, and you will see a return on your investment. Our efforts don’t stop, even when you’re ranking on the first page for all key products/services. We want to be your online partner for the long haul, and make sure you’re a force to be reckoned with in the SERP’s.

Measurable ROI

The hard part is done. You have a new website, you have an SEO team working on things. Great. Getting that taken care of and growing traffic is important, but the real indicators of a successful SEO campaign come from tracking your key conversions.

Some common conversions we track are: form submissions, purchases, PDF (brochures, data sheets, etc.) downloads, clicking to an external link (opentable for restaurants), and appointments scheduled. You can learn about how we track these in our click tracking post.

By tracking this we can expand on the traffic metrics and show you that we’re bringing the right traffic to your website, the traffic that converts. We can show you this, see where those users came from, and learn from their path to conversion. If we’re able to put an estimated value on each conversion, we can show you a specific return on your investment.

An Investment That Pays for Itself

At first, it takes some time for search engines to understand your website. At month 6 you may be getting 1 sale or lead more per month than you did when you launched the new site. However, at month 12, or 18, you may be getting 10x what you initially were. Our pricing depends on the amount of work associated with a website to get it where it needs to be, and how large the site is. If you have a website with 1,000 products, that’s much more to manage than a standard site with some basic services pages.

Let’s say you own a business that is selling a set of products or services that are all $500 (just to keep it simple). As is, it generates 0 leads or sales per month. After 6 months, it’s generating 5, and after 12 months 10 ($5,000 per month). In a case like this, SEO may only be costing $750-$1,000 a month (all dependent on your particular case, but this is a solid number to refer too). In situations like this one, or a service-based business where you can get one-time and recurring revenue, your return will be substantial once SEO has run its course. You may take a little bit of a hit in the beginning, but in the end, your business will have that online sales rep that is drawing in leads and sales.

Don’t just build a website, build a resource for your prospective customers that helps answer their questions or provides a solution to their problem. Be transparent. Continually provide a great experience for site visitors, be consistent, maintain, and you’ll reap the benefits.

Tell us more about your situation by filling out our site form. We look forward to discussing your situation, and improving your digital presence.
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