SEO In The Beginning

One of the most common mistakes companies make is hiring an SEO consultant after their site has been built and launched.  They usually start looking for help after a few months of poor traffic results and are confused why they aren’t getting the leads or sales they anticipated.  This is akin to building a new shopping mall and wondering why no one is shopping after it’s done because you never contacted retailers to rent out the spots within it.

Search engine optimization is not a magic bag of pixie dust that can be sprinkled onto a site and have instant results with the demographic of your ideal site visitor.  SEO is to some degree, a science of cat and mouse, chasing the top keywords to gain the highest possible results in major search engines that result in an upswing in traffic to your site.  Hiring an SEO consultant after your site has been built is often costly and can require added time to see results; all because the planning wasn’t put in place prior to launch.

Getting a jump-start by consulting with an SEO analyst during the conception, development and design stage of the site can be an integral part of the puzzle resulting in a total victory when launch day comes.  They will have the ability to cover overall site design flow and how a visitor may potentially use the site, integrate search engine friendly URL slugs and help improve the site’s functionality and end user experience.  Once the site is built, it’s hard to make changes effectively to any of these factors without having some negative impact, most commonly time and money to fix the problems.

An SEO consultant can help way the pros and cons to running a pay per click, or PPC, campaign compared to organic search engine results.  Both are valid ways of bringing traffic in, however one has an ongoing expense (PPC) while the other (SEO) will continue to draw in the desired demographic to your niche for months, even years after the work is done.

The best way to get SEO to work in your benefit is to have the commitment from all involved to help achieve this.  There are many steps along the way and not everyone will always understand why certain coding needs to be done or question the placement of elements on the site.  Rest assured, a trained SEO consultant will have proven methods that will result in continuous traffic to your site for the long haul.  Being honest and up front with them in the beginning, and absorbing the cost of their service in the overall design and deployment costs of your site will save the time, headache and in the end, loads more cash to achieve the same results.

Building from nothing is always easier then going in and fixing someone else’s work, this is true in almost every aspect of life, and the Internet.