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Business solutions
- SEO in website development
SEO in website development
Mandatory SEO work and possible fixes require additional time and resources.
The SEO Driven Development approach allows you to launch a website with high search potential that meets the current SEO requirements at an early stage. In this article I will explain why it is important for an SEO specialist to get involved in the development at the initial stage, what processes in the team he is responsible for and how he helps to create an effective website ready for the flow of customers.
Approaches to development
Website developers apply the methodology of BDD or Behavior Driven Development, translated as development through behaviour. In it, the interests of the business or product are closely linked to the actual technical requirements.
The client prepares for the developer a description of the desired user behaviour on the site, based on the specifics of the business. The developer designs what elements on the site help to get exactly this behaviour and how the system will react to these actions. It turns out to create the most user-friendly interface without the need to correct it at the programming stage, when the code is already partially ready.
Another popular approach is Customer Driven Development or CDD, which stands for "customer-centric development". In this case, the process is focused on the customer:
the site solves the users' actual problems;
the site is built taking into account the characteristics, needs and expectations of the CA;
the designed functionality meets the expectations of potential users.
To work with our projects, we have formed on the basis of these two approaches a third, more complex approach - SEO Driven Development - website development taking into account the requirements of SEO. It is as effective as the first two, helping businesses to fulfil their main purpose - to get profit from the site immediately after launch.
SEO Driven Development allows you to make a ready-made tool for online communication with current or potential customers that fully meets their expectations. Such sites are easy to maintain, and the user has no problems when searching for information, services or goods.
Stages of SEO Driven Development
The process of SEO driven website development consists of several steps and each step is accompanied by an SEO specialist:
Conduct a brief with the client to study the client's needs.
Do a competitive analysis of the market.
Collect, analyse and form semantics.
Think through the structure of the site.
Make a map of relevance.
Prepare a prototype and design layout.
Monitor layout and development.
Prepare content.
Test the site.
Install and set up a system for collecting statistics.
Brief
At the first stage of site development, a basic brief is formed to study the needs of the customer. It is necessary to understand the goals and objectives of the future project. SEO-specialist, marketing specialist, business analyst participate in the preparation of the brief and prepare the terms of reference on its basis. The brief is used not only for SEO, but also for UX and design, advertising and SMM.
The brief consists of sections with questions, the purpose of which is to get complete information about the features of the business and the target audience. The list of questions in these sections should be adjusted individually for each client, taking into account the theme of the business and the tasks of the site as a promotion tool.
The basic brief, which we use as a basis for our projects, consists of seven sections:
information about the business
target audience: age, interests, income, decision-making algorithms;
in which regions the company operates;
All answers are given to the developer even before the work starts. The more data we get now, the more likely it is that the needs of the customer and their customers will be met. The brief helps the developer understand how the work will be structured and how the client plans to evaluate the performance.
Competitive market analysis
Market analysis is carried out by a whole team: manager, business analyst, marketer, SEO specialist - all together they study competitors' websites: they compare how companies do business. To do this, they analyse:
Strengths and weaknesses;
TSS;
promotion strategy;
site structure, navigation principles and connected services: calculators, search and comparison services, payment services, etc..;
attendance and traffic sources;
completeness of the response to the user's enquiry.
An SEO specialist is responsible for analysing traffic and source structure. I use SimilarWeb service for this purpose. It allows you to compare the indicators of five sites in the form of diagrams.
Analysing the traffic volume per month helps to find out what devices the target audience of competitors prefers, to predict the volume of load on the resource and to understand what type of traffic will dominate.
User behaviour analysis allows you to identify the most successful competitors and, based on their indicators, understand what services a potential visitor expects to see on the site, what structure and navigation are convenient and familiar to him.
Studying the structure of the main sources of traffic to competitors' sites makes it possible to develop an optimal strategy for working with them: which are the most effective and how to take their specifics into account in the development process.
Statistics on audience coverage in different regions helps to find promising geolocations for promotion and learn more about the specifics of the customer's market. On its basis, recommendations on the structure of the future site and its services are written.
Collection of semantics
Having studied competitors, SEO-specialist collects all queries that users enter when searching for a product. For this purpose we use Key Collector and Just Magic services, with their help we analyse the array of word forms and choose which of them will bring the most targeted traffic.
The list of queries is divided into clusters taking into account the intent - the user's desire and goal when searching.
There are three types of intents:
Informational. The user wants to learn more about the product: read articles, reviews, analytical data.
Transactional. The user is ready to make a purchase or order and clearly expresses this desire in the request.
Navigational. Search for a particular brand, trade mark, site in a particular geolocation.
Such work allows you to obtain the data necessary for further design of the structure of the site.
Site structure
After we have done the clustering of the semantic kernel, together with the business analyst and project manager we create a simple and intuitive structure based on these groups. We define word form types to understand what sections will be on the site.
To make the structure user-friendly, we need to work out the user's routes to conversion. Then study the elements of navigation, identify links between documents and sections of the site. This will allow you to create an effective relinking of documents.
Such schemes allow you to understand the need to develop and implement a variety of services - from simple calculators and systems for comparing products with similar characteristics to the payment system on the site, the features of the implementation of search and communication with visitors: callback, feedback form, chats and online consultations.
Layout and development
SEO specialist together with the tester and project manager participates in the direct development and layout processes. He checks important points:
navigation and internal relinking;
breadcrumbs, menus, linking blocks;
divider, canonical pages and pagination pages;
headings and page structuring;
micropagination;
availability of phone numbers and email addresses;
indexation management files;
loading speed;
presence of tags pointing to canonical pages, if the resource uses pagination;
presence of 404 error page;
processing of arising errors and variants of their occurrence;
elements for content placement.
It is important to make sure that the site is adapted for all screen resolutions and proportions. The volume of mobile traffic on the Internet continues to grow, so adaptive layout remains the standard for the development of any website or portal.
Content Preparation
We have reached the stage where the SEO specialist works together with the content manager to fill the site. In this they are helped by statistics on user behaviour in search, the use of word forms, as well as data obtained after the analysis of semantics.
SEO-specialist conducts statistical analysis to identify the density of keywords in the texts on the site, draws up a technical assignment to the copywriter. It specifies the following important parameters:
text volume in words or symbols;
list of basic word forms;
recommendations on the number and forms of occurrences of words in the text;
recommendations on the structure and content of the article;
additional information that helps the copywriter to disclose the topic as fully as possible.
After the text is ready, the SEO-specialist checks the main aspects by the number of occurrences and submits the material for placement on the site. It is important that the text is relevant to the user's request.
Testing
Testing of the project is carried out by the tester and SEO-specialist. They check:
Site speed. Optimal indicators for mobile devices - 40+, for desktop computers - 80+.
Presence of pages giving error code. Pages with errors indicate the unstable operation of the resource, which can negatively affect indexing.
Broken links and images.
Server response code. Pages should give the code 200, redirect pages - code 301. Documents that give 500 server error should not be.
Duplicate pages. A large number of duplicates in the index base of the search engine may entail sanctions.
Absence of empty and repetitive meta tags.
Correctness of micropartitioning on the site. It is worth to use micro markup formats schema.org and Open Graph, these are the most popular and modern formats.
Redirects. It is necessary to avoid 302 redirects.
Adaptability: the layout should work correctly on mobile devices.
Installation and customisation of statistics collection systems
In order to evaluate the effectiveness and outline ways of further development, we analyse user actions on the site, collect statistics and generate reports on the required KPIs. An analyst, who can be an SEO specialist or a marketer, sets up goal tracking and generates reports on various data slices in Yandex.Metric, Google Analytics and LiveInternet.
Important metrics:
This way we can see the degree of fulfilment of the KPIs that were noted in the brief, and therefore can identify problem areas and business growth points to increase revenue in the future.
AVSEO believes that within an SEO-centric approach to development, the role of an SEO specialist is significant at every stage. Accompanying the entire process from start to finish, he or she implements all the requirements necessary for search engine optimisation so that the site is ready for customer flow. Based on our experience, this is much more convenient and effective than standard development with subsequent optimisation.
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