Why SEO experts should be at the center of website development

Why SEO experts should be at the center of website development

I never understood why for many SEO experts have little or no word in developing and designing a website. In my opinion and any digital agency out there that develops websites should have at least one person doing SEO and that person should be at the center of a new website's strategy and development.

Almost in every digital agency that I worked in SEO were the last person being asked to abut certain features and aspects a new website might have. Everyone sees SEO as something to be done only after the website is live. This is not true, we need to have our saying right from the start, including the design phase. It doesn't matter if we are talking about a totally new project, a brand new website or about a re-design of an old already running website, SEOs need to analyze and having a say in the big picture and strategy.

I had really big SEO problems to combat at a future stage where all the strategy and design was already done. I had to educate my colleagues on the importance of SEO and how it all works. How can you ask me to implement proper on-page SEO if the user experience part of the website is pure trash and nobody thought on how the actual structure of the website can impact SEO in a very negative way.

Here are some examples and ways to ensure SEO experts are integrated into the strategy part of a website before it can be too late to change anything:

1. The actual design of a website needs to be search engine friendly.
The SEO expert can help guide the website designer into the right way, ensuring content has the best chance and follows search engine's best practices. If you leave the designer unchecked he/her tends to go wild with creativity, destroying any chances an SEO may have to optimize the content.

I personally have seen cases where the designer envisioned a whole website made only from popups with little content. How are you going to rank a website on a difficult niche only with the homepage and pop-ups? You need to have additional pages, targeting sets of keywords that niche may have, you can stuff all the content on the homepage.

2. The copywriter must work closely together with the SEO expert.
Copywriters, same as website designers tend to have a very creative part and if they don't collaborate with an SEO things can go bad right from the start. The content strategy will be addressed from the very start of a website, why not include the SEO in all of this? I'm sure the SEO expert will have plenty of tips as well as provide plenty of resources and keywords the copywriter can use, ensuring the end content is optimized and ready to rank.

3. Website structure.
Never start developing the structure of a website without having the SEO expert in the room to help guide you around. A lot of mistakes can be made at this point in the website's development.

He needs to clearly envision how the users coming from search engines will surf the website and how actual search engine crawlers will index those pages. Everything from ugly URLs and keywords needed to be used in the URL to actual content pages that you may consider insignificant can have a huge organic potential, all of this will be noticed and suggested by a good SEO expert.

4. Off page SEO can benefit from an early SEO strategy.
If you plan on making videos, images, infographics or any other media content for your new website you also need to ask your SEO expert to implement a proper research on what actually can be used later on in the off-page SEO campaigns.

5. Make sure you are full SEO friendly right from the start.
Why implement certain features that have a big SEO weight right from the start? I'm referring to having HTTPS, Open graph, twitter card, schema.org markups, microformats markups and everything in between!

You SEO can work closely with your programmers to make sure every possible implementation that can help your website get more organic traffic is implemented before the new website is live!

So, there you go! You now have 5 some reasons not to ignore your SEO expert and actually include him/her into your website' strategy ensuring success!
Why do you think SEO experts are so ignored in the digital world when it comes to website strategy and planning?