The Creatives verses SEO war has been going on for years. One side says “make it pretty”, the other side says “make it wordy”. Funny enough, both sides are right. When marketing your web site online, you could possibly make something so ugly that you get a lot of traffic from a favorable Google ranking, but no clients or conversion.
Why is that? Because Cleanliness is next to Googleness. If you would like, take a few moments to search some highly competitive keyphrases in Google. The web sites that are ranked on the first page are normally, professional, well designed web sites. This is not a coincidence. Clean sites rank higher and convert better.
So why does the average search engine optimization company pay such little regard to professional design? Because search engine optimization specialists are analytics gurus and designers are artist. In short, it takes two to make it work.
When working with a designer, you should ask them what their strategy is for maximizing your search engine exposure. While designers do not have to speak fluent SEO, they do of course need to know what not to do to your web site so that an SEO can come in after them and help increase your search engine ranking.
When considering SEO friendly design, think clean. Web sites that have a direct point (call to action) at the top of the page will convert visitors to customers much better than the competition. If you searched for health insurance quotes on Google, you would see a list of natural results. Most of those allow you to start the health insurance quoting process right at the top of the home page.
If you work with a guaranteed search engine optimization company, (one that guarantees first page ranking) they may require you to update your design to decrease their risk. Yes, design makes that much of a difference. Search engine’s like what people like. Easy to navigate web sites, text that is clear and to the point, and simple vertical layouts.
So if high search engine rankings are at the top of your concerns, make sure your designer plays nice with search engine optimization specialists or even better, use a search engine optimization company with a talented on staff designer. This will greatly increase the success of your online presence.