SEO Strategies for Website Integration

A lot of money and time is getting wasted because of not building an SEO-friendly website. All too often, brands build websites only to have SEO team point out numerous issues that need to be addressed, resulting in additional time and resources spent on optimizing the site. Here is what happens in most of the cases: 1. Website gets built without considering SEO requirements 2. SEO team audits the website and highlights the issues  3. Tech team keep fixing the issues for next 3-6 months 4. SEO team keep reviewing the changes being done to the website What is the business impact because of this? 1. Opportunity cost - Delay in making SEO optimized website will take longer before your site start ranking well. As you create pages, Google takes time to rank them in its top 100, 50, 20, and eventually top 10 search results. The more you delay, the longer it will take to get organic revenue. 2. Real dollar cost - A lot of money gets wasted in rework. What could have been done on day 1, takes a lot more time when SEO team gives requirements later. In our experience of more than 200+ engagements, it usually takes 3-6 months to fix these issues. This leads to a lot of additional SEO and tech team costs to businesses. Root cause of the problem? 1. Lack of awareness on correlation between website development and SEO 2. Development team not having SEO expertise 3. No business focus on SEO atleast for next 1 year - therefore, businesses decide not to think about it in the beginning What should be done? There are two type of scenarios: 1. SEO is an immediate priority 2. SEO might become priority after 6-12 months. In either case, here is what you should do: 1. Involve SEO team in the website design and development process to get technical, UI, UX requirements from SEO team 2. Get programmatic and manual page creation requirements from SEO team. A lot of pages can be created using product attribute, location, etc. E.g. if you sell tshirts, then your red tshirts, red round neck tshirts pages should be created on day 1. 3. When the website becomes ready for testing, SEO team should test and validate it 4. The website you launch should have a page speed score of 50+ on both mobile and desktop. ____________________________________________________________ Conclusion It is highly recommended to develop an SEO strategy and create an SEO-friendly site before its launch.  Even if SEO is not your immediate priority, your pages will age and improve in rank over time. When you focus on SEO after 6-12 months, you'll already have a head start and save both time and money. Your desired keywords will already be somewhere in top 50 or 100. Some might be in top 10 or 20. Your efforts to further rank them in top 3 will be significantly less. PS: Need SEO checklist that you can use before the website launch? Let me know in the comments.

Hope I'm not shooting myself in the foot by saying this but... "Our SaaS website is not getting leads from Google" is NOT something most web design agencies can help with. That's right, I said it! In fact, every week I speak to 2-3 SaaS marketers that don't realize this. Typically, they're interviewing design agencies who are assuring them that they will "do SEO" as part of their redesign process. Spoiler Alert: they don't. Do they mean harm? No... It's just that their "strategy" for SEO typically starts and ends with setting up Yoast SEO or a similar plugin. To effectively optimize your Saas website for more demos booked from organic search, you'll need: 1) a keyword strategy: A well researched strategy looking at search-intent, competitor data, customer data, and more. One that focuses on high-intent keywords that interested buyers would actually search for. 2) a content strategy: Now that the keywords that would drive high-intent traffic have been chosen, the content has to be planned to ensure the website will have pages covering the topics relevant to the keyword strategy AND that satisfy the search-intent. This is a very nuanced process and a mistake here can mean you waste time and money on content that has zero chance of ranking. For example, you may optimize the sh!t out of your CRM solutions page to rank for "best dental CRM" and get no results, because that keyword requires a blog post to actually rank for it - just an example of what a good content strategy would include. 3) a strong technical SEO foundation so your pages are indexed and crawled properly 4) a strategy to optimize all of your blogs and resource pages to boost your solutions pages 5) a lot of your copy edited to follow SEO guidelines 6) a backlink strategy because without backlinks you'll probably be hovering around the 6th page of Google 7) a content migration plan that consolidates, redirects, or culls existing content These are just some of the activities we do at Takeoff in our website redesign projects. They result in us driving more high-intent traffic to our clients' websites and then the UX and design improvements we make help convert that traffic into booked demos. If you're considering redesigning your SaaS website to get more leads, ask any vendor you consider to show you: 1) their SEO process (it should cover most of the items I listed) 2) a recent case study of how this process improved lead gen for another SaaS website (not just keyword rankings or overall traffic, but more importantly qualified leads) ----------👇 ---------- I'm the CMO at Takeoff and we believe “A company’s website should fuel its growth 🚀." ‘Follow’ me for insights into how we're helping SaaS brands grow. 🚀🚀🚀

In an ideal world, you could hit publish on a podcast, upload a video to YouTube, or share an infographic on social media and streams of organic traffic would follow. But simply creating non-textual content isn't enough if you want it to be visible and rank in search. Plain and simple - if search engines can't read it, they can't rank it. That presents a challenge for marketers. You know you need to meet your audience where they are - and where they are is on YouTube watching videos, listening to podcasts, and engaging with visual content. But you also need to ensure that content performs for SEO and that you're getting maximum value from your investment of time and money. So - given the popularity of this type of content, how do you ensure these non-text assets are discoverable by search engines? 𝟭. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀 🎙️: Transcripts are Your Friend: While search engines can't "listen" to your podcast, they can "read" it. Provide a full transcript of your podcast episodes on your website. This not only makes your content accessible to a broader audience but also gives search engines text data to index and rank. 𝟮. 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼𝘀 🎥: Metadata Matters: Just like a book has a title, summary, and chapters, your videos should have a descriptive title, a detailed description, and timestamps. Platforms like YouTube allow you to add all of these, making your video more searchable. Thumbnails and Captions: Compelling thumbnails have a massive impact on click-through rates. Additionally, adding captions not only caters to a global audience, it also provides text content that search engines can crawl. 𝟯. 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰𝘀 📊: Alt Text and Descriptions: Since search engines can't "see" images, use 'alt text' to describe what's in your infographic. Accompany your infographic with a brief description or a summary to provide context. Embed Codes: If you're sharing an infographic on your website, provide an embed code. This encourages others to share your content and potentially link back to your site - which is a key factor in #SEO. ✴ 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀 𝗧𝗶𝗽: Host on Your Own Domain: Whether it's a podcast episode, a video, or an infographic, hosting it on your own domain (instead of solely on third-party platforms) ensures that any traffic and backlinks benefit your website's SEO and that you're not just building some other site's audience. In today's multi-media world, brands need an optimization strategy for non-textual content. By supplementing podcasts, videos, and infographics with semantic signals through captions, alt text, transcripts, and more, you can unlock their SEO potential. The result is great content that is interesting and compelling to audiences while still working for organic search - the best of both worlds for today's marketer.