Having enjoyed being an SEO Agency web developer for just over a year, I wanted to share some of my favourite SEO tips that I’ve learned in that time. When joining an SEO agency, you soon find there’s a few design and editorial rules you may rethink when you’re working for both a web design and SEO company.
If you’re already well versed with the SEO basics, then these SEO tips could be the difference to your web pages to the next level.
SEO Tips from an SEO agency web developer
Much more than meta descriptions
When budding webmasters first show an interest in SEO, they’re encouraged to ensure all their pages have meta titles and descriptions. Including meta descriptions and meta titles, sometimes called SEO titles, adds content that are not necessarily included in the readable content of the page, but they are used to describe the page to search engine crawlers.
Meta titles and descriptions are typically thought of as the title and description at appears for a page in a search engine results page (SERP). However search engines may chose to re-write these, particularly the description, if it better serves the user’s query.
Setting the meta title and meta description for a post.
There was a time when perhaps meta was given more weight than it is now. This allowed for black hat SEO tactics where page content could be one thing, and the meta content another to help a page to rank higher or for less relevant search terms.
With search engine crawlers now more able to read and interpret the entire text content of a webpage, search engine optimisation needs to factor in the entire page content and not just the meta. Search engines are smarter than they used to be, so relying on meta and not optimising page content won’t guarantee good rankings.
Accessibility, readability and speed as ranking factors
An SEO agency will have a better understanding of the factors that help a page rank higher than others, but search engines are understandably opaque about precisely how they decide to rank content. With so much content competing to for rankings, search engines are open about some of the factors that will help a page outrank others.
The most obvious consideration for a web design and SEO company is ‘what is the content on the page’. But if a search engine finds two equally relevant pages for a search query, it’ll take other factors into consideration. These will include the accessibility and performance of that web page. Ultimately, if a webpage is more user-friendly, it will outrank competing pages.
Web accessibility refers to websites that are built in a way that allows users with disabilities to operate them. As the web has developed over the years, some coding techniques that achieve certain appearances or functionality have arisen that may not be accessible to all users. Search engines prefer to return accessible sites in their results as this guarantees the results will be helpful to all users.
In simple terms, the performance of a website refers to its speed. A website demonstrates good performance if it loads quickly and doesn’t make the user wait a long time before the webpage is fully interactive. Search engines prefer to serve pages that load quickly as they offer a better user experience.
There was a time where content readability was considered important for SEO. The Yoast SEO plugin is renowned for offering a Flesch reading ease score because it used to be believed that web content that was easier to understand would outrank content that contained more challenging words. Content readability is still worthwhile for user experience. More satisfied users can lead to more engagement which could offer SEO benefit. However readability is no longer considered a direct ranking factor.
Location location
One of the really enlightening SEO tips I picked up from my time at an SEO agency was targeting key regions to help rank for location-oriented queries. For example, for an SEO agency that’s based in Plymouth, SEO landing pages could be created to target the following:
- Web design and SEO company in Plymouth
- Web design and SEO company in Cornwall
- Web design and SEO company in Devon
- Web design and SEO company in Exeter
- Web design and SEO company in Bristol
Even if the company is not strictly located in these places, optimising pages for these terms will help the SEO agency rank for searches in these areas. Provided the company is able to provide their service to a client in these locations, these are reasonable SEO strategies to employ.
Focus on the user’s search query
The most important objective for search engines is to correctly interpret a user’s search query and serve the most relevant results. Our objective as an SEO agency is to understand what those queries will be and get as close to these search terms as possible.
An interesting shift from being a design-led to an SEO agency web developer is seeing how a business may want to talk about itself on-page as secondary to how the on-page content relates to a potential search query.
For example, a website client may feel that they simply want a webpage called ‘Services’ on which they would like to say ‘We are an agency offering web design, influencer marketing and content strategy’. An SEO agency may respond by expanding the sitemap to have a separate page for each service, which allows for more targeted optimisation. In this case, they’d also rework ‘agency offering [service name]’ to ‘[service name] agency’.
This would mean that a service page with ‘influencer marketing agency’ in the title could rank for an informational queries like ‘influencer marketing’ or ‘what is influencer marketing’. But it would also be directly optimised for a more commercial query like ‘influencer marketing agencies’ or ‘influencer marketing agency near me’.
Thorough keyword research and understanding how search queries using these keywords may be structured can inform content decisions that differ from a web designer or client’s initial ideas.
Set out your sitemap structure from day one
It’s common to start a website project knowing that a business is still growing and that a service or website feature will be needed post-launch when the business is ready to provide it. However, researching the sitemap thoroughly and accounting for future additions will lead to better search performance down the road.
For example, if an existing site with about 30 pages is to be replaced with a new site, it would be harmful to search rankings to replace it with an initial one-pager with a view to expanding the sitemap later. In the interim period, all previously index pages will either give a 404 response or a redirect to the new homepage. In the process, this will decimate the many different links that the site had in search engine indexes.
Similarly, when you submit the sitemap for your updated site post-launch to Google Search Console, Google will prioritise crawling the new site using the new sitemap as a basis. If you add important pages to the site later, this key first crawl has already happened and it will take longer for your new pages to be indexed.
Even if the content of the future pages is not final, it can be beneficial to include them in the sitemap early on for the initial crawl.
Break content writing rules to cover synonymous keywords
Thinking purely from a content perspective, it’s best practice to be decisive about the written style in your copy. This includes categorically deciding whether or not a key term in your content is two words, one word or hyphenated.
With SEO in mind, it could be beneficial to cover your bases by using multiple versions of a term if the consensus online is not clear. For example, if you were writing a post about ‘tips to get a six-pack’, you may wish to use the non hyphenated ‘six pack’ in the same page. Search engines don’t care about different styles, but they do care about matching content to user queries.
Maximise your page titles
In agencies I worked at previously, it was considered neat and tidy to keep page titles as terse as possible. Alternatively, the objective at the SEO agency was to put the page title, sometimes called SEO title, to work. This could make the text in the browser tab look a little unwieldy, but if ranking is the priority then this SEO tip could be worthwhile.
Instead of a title that simple reads ‘About – [SEO Agency Name]’, a title like ‘About our web design and SEO company – [SEO Agency Name]’ would be preferred because it includes more keywords. You have a recommended maximum of 60 characters for your SEO titles, so do your best to make use of them.
Rank Math vs. Yoast SEO
For WordPress websites, Yoast SEO has long been the dominant plugin for enriching your website with important SEO features. In more recent times, one of the most significant A or B plugin discussions has been whether webmasters should stick to Yoast SEO or move over to Rank Math.
As far as this SEO agency was concerned, Rank Math is the preferred choice. There are already a host of articles making this comparison, but for website owners on a budget, Rank Math offers local SEO and redirection management features for free. These features would be premium only with Yoast.
Rank Math is a feature-rich SEO plugin that’s fast becoming the preferred choice for SEO agency web developers.
It’s quite likely that the free version of Rank Math is simply more feature-rich in a bid to knock Yoast SEO off of their perch. As a blogger that that loves a freebie, I’ve made the switch.
Pay attention to the website you are replacing
When working for a web design and SEO company and creating new websites for clients, you need to take the previous site into consideration first. If a number of the site’s URLs are already indexed and ranking well, you should try to incorporate these previous URLs into the new sitemap to reduce the amount of drop-off when the new site goes live.
On the other hand, it can be really surprising how many existing sites aren’t doing the basics and you may find you’re replacing a site that’s not ranking well at all. One site I was analysing appeared to have some SEO-agency-written blog posts that featured multiple H1 tags in the content; a pretty basic no-no.
Check how the existing site is performing and take the easy win when you find it’s performing woefully.
Semantic heading structure helps crawlers understand your pages
All web developers with an ounce of respect for SEO know that there should only be one H1 tag on a page. But beyond that, most of their considerations over which heading tag to use for sub headings come down to font size or other style choices.
Well-structured heading hierarchy can be beneficial for SEO. Search engine crawlers use heading tags to understand the hierarchy of the topics and sub topics within a page. Gaps in heading tag structure can cause the search engine crawler confusion, so it’s important to get the structure right and use consecutive heading tags that the crawler would expect (i.e. don’t skip from H2 to H4 without an H3 in between).
Here’s an example structure for a web page about animals, in which the H1 tag is ‘All about animals’
Bad structure:
- H2 – Farm Animals
- H2 – Cows
- H3 – Pigs
- H3 – Sheep
- H2 – Household Pets
- H3 – Dogs
- H4 Cats
- H3 – Hamsters
- H3 – Dogs
Better structure:
- H2 – Farm Animals
- H3 – Cows
- H4 – Dairy Cows
- H3 – Pigs
- H3 – Sheep
- H3 – Cows
- H2 – Household Pets
- H3 – Dogs
- H4 – Border Collie
- H4 – Golden Retriever
- H3 – Cats
- H4 – Domestic Short Hair
- H3 – Hamsters
- H3 – Dogs
In the bad structure above, pigs and sheep may be interpreted as sub-topics of cows. In the better structure, dairy cows is a sub-topic of cows, pigs and sheep are separate topics at the same level as cows, all as sub-topics of farm animals. In the bad structure, cows are at the same level as farm animals, so the farm animals topic may appear to be empty from this perspective.
Results make a real-world difference
Not all optimisation efforts are successful and an SEO agency would be irresponsible to guarantee results. You’re always at the mercy of how Google and other search engines decide to serve your pages.
That being said, it is very satisfying to see when SEO work gets results. Unlike design or style tweaks, these optimisations can result in significant real-world changes for a client’s business. They get more traffic, more enquiries and potentially more income, so take SEO seriously.
Content can get lengthy
Since my editorial days, I’ve always been tried to keep written content concise and to get to the point. This principle has been central to all my work until I started building SEO landing pages.
In the interest of building internal and external links and becoming an authoritative source, being thorough and expansive in your content is recommended. Long pages with lots of internal links, in-depth blog posts that explore many facets of a topic; building out bulky well-written and comprehensive pages and posts offers big benefits for SEO.
Using schema to break into SERPs
Until a few years ago, search engine results pages (SERPs) were just a list of the top ten links that matched a search query. Now SERPs are bubbling with rich snippet features like ‘People also ask’, ‘Related searches’ and integrated image results just to name a few.
Finding ways to make your content appear in these SERP features can help your pages rank in lots more places. For Google’s rich snippets, this is typically done by adding structured data, also known as schema, to your pages. Schema communicates directly with search engine crawlers to help them understand the page. General website users do not see schema.
There are many types of schema described by schema.org, and only a small selection of types are used for rich snippets, so make sure you’re investing your time in schema that serves your purposes.
Descriptive links: death to ‘click here’
For some reason, web content authors have a strange desire to make their anchor links as short as possible. When they want to link to a helpful resource, they’ll do something like ‘read our expert guide to helpful SEO tips here‘.
The hidden issue arises when a search engine crawler reads your content and sees you have a link to another page of content. The search engine will use the link anchor text to help inform what topics that link should be indexed for. So in the above example, your link to helpful SEO tips is being associated with the word ‘here’, which doesn’t tell the search engine very much.
A much better approach is to write something like ‘read our expert guide to helpful SEO tips.’ The search engine crawler will now see this link in a more topical context. And you don’t need to use the word ‘here’ or ‘click here’.
SEO audit tools will identify the use of ‘here’, ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ as links with non-descriptive anchor text and recommend using more descriptive text.
Conclusion: SEO tips from an SEO agency web developer
When I first started working as a web developer for a web design and SEO company, my understanding of what to prioritise and how to approach web pages changed forever. It was particularly enlightening to learn about how an SEO-led approach was equally valid to a design-led one whilst yielding different results.
Using these SEO tips, we can all work towards either a purely SEO-led approach or a design-led approach that still prioritises look and feel, but takes closer consideration to how these pages perform in SERPs.
I still feel that the very best websites for user experience and technical prowess are design-led. When design and UX boundaries are pushed, the result is a more exciting website than a purely SEO-led approach usually achieves. But taking SEO into consideration is essential and can offer real-world results that make a difference for clients.