If you’re like a lot of small business owners, high rankings and organic traffic are the holy grail of your SEO efforts. Achieving top rankings brings in more sales and it plays a big part in successfully branding your business as well.
While most web developers will do a thorough job on creating a polished website that functions well, those that lack experience may forget crucial SEO components that aren’t evident until poor rankings become an issue.
If you’re hiring a web development firm to update or revamp your website, watch out for these common issues that can make it difficult for you to rank well, and even push you lower in the rankings.
Poor Information Architecture
High bounce rates have a negative impact on search engine rank, as it indicates a poor user experience. Keeping visitors engaged with your website has become an integral part of organic search engine ranking, and interlinking relevant pages is an important step towards maximizing your SEO capabilities.
Many inexperienced developers treat each piece of content as an isolated page, which leads to information silos and user frustration as they attempt to navigate to deeper content. In addition, a lack of properly interlinked pages can lead to high bounce rates as users abandon your site.
Poor URL Structure
While content should always be written for readers first, how you present that content plays a big part in search rankings. Diligent keyword research uncovers a wide range of terms that are relevant to your niche, allowing you to create focused content that helps you rank. Most web developers seldom pay attention to the nuances of link structure, which means you’ll need to keep track of keyword use in your URLs, and advise which keywords to use as appropriate.
“Legacy” Code Issues
Many older sites feature deprecated code that requires updating, uncompressed images drag down page load times, CSS errors, and load impact issues during high volume periods. If these underlying problems aren’t corrected, even the best-looking webpage will underperform. Loading speed is another critical factor in SEO, and these coding issues are common culprit for a sluggish site.
Poor Analytics Implementation
Many developers need assistance with analytics implementation, as they cannot know which metrics are most important for you to track. While the basic configuration does provide some useful information, there are other factors that can make a huge difference to SEO. Without relevant data, making informed changes to your site becomes impossible.
NEED A WEB DEVELOPMENT FIRM WITH DIGITAL MARKETING EXPERIENCE?
Each of these web dev mistakes can hurt your SEO, but with proper planning they are all easily solved. Even if you already have a functioning website, it is still possible to clean up the code, find relevant keywords, develop a stronger site structure, and produce a site that caters to both readers and the search engines. Contact us to help you optimize your website for on-page SEO while creating a beautiful, polished experience for your website visitors.