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5 SEO Web Design Tips for Small Businesses Written on . Posted in ActionForms.io.

5 SEO Web Design Tips for Small Businesses

As a web developer, it is your responsibility to make your clients’ websites beautiful and user-friendly. But it doesn’t matter how gorgeous the website you develop is if your clients’ customers can’t find it. This is especially crucial if your client owns a small business and is just starting out.

That’s where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes in. SEO is the practice of optimizing websites so that they rank well on search engines. SEO web design is the creation and design of a website that is optimized for search engines.

Here are some SEO web design tips that will help potential customers find the websites of your clients’ small businesses.

1) Figure Out the Problems Your Client’s Business Solves for Customers

When you start working on a project for your client, you must consider what problems this small business solves for customers. You can waste a ton of time and resources chasing the wrong people, or maybe the right people but with the wrong message.

Ask yourself what the circumstances are around a customer deciding that they need your client’s product or service—really get into the how, when, and why of it. Think about the intent behind the customer’s search. Is it informational (they want to know something), transactional (they want to buy something), or navigational (they want to go somewhere but lack a web address)?

The purpose of a search engine is to present the most relevant results to a person’s search. So pinning down your potential customer’s intent is vital.

2) Develop the Right Keyword List

Keyword research entails finding the words and phrases (long-tail keywords) that your client’s target audience will type into search engines. The first step is taking out a notepad and jotting down a list of words and phrases you think potential customers might use to search for your client’s site.

Now comes the time for you to analyze those words and phrases using an SEO tool. Ahrefs and Semrush are great paid tools you can use. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner can also be helpful. These tools will help you to figure out the keywords with the ideal number of monthly searches and level of competition.

Keyword research is complex and takes time, but it’s an essential part of optimizing websites for your clients.

3) Research Your Competitors

A great way to figure out how to optimize your website is to take a look at what your client’s competitors are doing. Once you have a list of keywords, you can enter them into Google. Make sure to use Incognito mode so that your personal search history doesn’t influence the results.

Once you have your SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you can click around and investigate the websites that currently rank in the top five or six for your keyword. You need to know what you’ll be competing against online and tailor your approach accordingly.

Pay attention to what sort of content your competitors cover and apply what you’ve learned to your client’s website. Modeling your site on the top rankers out there will help your client’s small business to stand out in the crowd.

4) Produce Quality Content

One of the most important parts of SEO is producing quality content. A lot of people think that if you pack your site with keywords, you will still manage to rank even if your content is sub-par. But when search engines rank websites, they focus on the ones with well-written content that addresses customers’ needs.

So when you go about hiring content creators or advising your clients in the process, focus on skilled, proven performers who will produce top-notch work. Ranking first in the SERPs shouldn’t be the end goal for a website—it should be to provide customers with content that truly speaks to them. Think carefully about what the customer needs to know about the small business’s products and services.

Great content not only helps users understand what makes your client’s business unique, but it also helps search engines understand what your client’s page is about and their level of expertise.

5) Develop a Solid Website

Something that will help your client’s website ranking is having a solid website that functions well. Important problems to address are speed, duplicate content, and broken links. Issues like this cause potential customers to become frustrated and leave, and search engines to not take your site seriously.

Having a beautiful, well-functioning website isn’t going to be enough to bring in potential customers and get your client’s small business noticed. But when combined with the other tips on this list, it will help to attract your client’s ideal customers.

If you need to set up any kind of contact form for a client’s website, Action Forms can help you get it running in no time. You’ll be able to build subscriber lists, web forms, contact forms, file uploads, job applications, and surveys with no backend. It’s another part of your client’s website whose flawless performance will help to show the search engines that you run a quality site.

Click here to try it out for free and create your first endpoint in seconds.