Website Design - If You're Going to Optimize, Optimize!

The keyword was affordable custom website design. I was researching some of the competition on it, and really, the results make a strong point about search engine optimization. You will always get advice that you should design your sites for users rather than the search engines, and it's good advice, it really is. After all, at the end of the day, a thousand clicks that don't result in any sales are no more useful to you than a day without any clicks at all.

But my recent experience led me to another theory; if you're going to optimize for a keyword, your site should be a viable result for that keyword.

When I went through the top results for the above keyword, I was amazed to discover that of the highest ten sites, only one actually clearly listed a price. Now don't get me wrong, I understand the basic marketing theory. Website design is a rather expensive service, you certainly don't want that fact to scare your customers away. Likewise, it is a service that can involve quite a degree of variation between jobs. You don't want to risk listing flat prices only to wind up spending more time than you're getting paid for doing updates, revisions, and the like. You do need to get a read on the site before you give a solid quote.

With that all in mind, though, the majority of those sites I looked at gave nothing more than a request a quote option that I could see. Granted, I did not look deeply into the sites, but I do not feel I should have had to. The premise behind my theory is simply this: if the term "affordable" is part of the keyword--indeed, the first word of the key phrase--it suggests that the visitor is rather concerned with pricing. With that in mind, should there not be a clear indication of at least the range of pricing and what will be available at a given rate?

Now, I'm not going to assume that this lack is costing these sites vast amounts of business on that keyword (though I would not be surprised if it was). However, it does provide a useful example for the rest of us. If you are going to optimize for a keyword, consider more than just the monthly searches and competition--consider what the visitor is looking for. This is especially important when you're running a pay per click campaign, where a visitor who doesn't like what it sees just wasted some of your advertising money.

Even in a standard SEO campaign, though, it is hard to get a lot of quality keywords in the title tags, external links, and so on without making your site look silly. It may very well be that you can only reach the top for a few keywords. Shouldn't your site be built around selling to the audience that is searching on those keywords? It's the classic question of the target market. Your market consists of the people searching for those keywords that you are at the top for.

Remember, people on the Internet are notoriously impatient. Some might be willing to look over your site, read what you have to say, and in doing so, may indeed come to realize that your company is exactly what they are looking for. Most won't. And they won't want to contact you or fill out a form to learn about it either. In short--don't expect the visitors to do any work to sell themselves. If all the information that will convince them to buy is not both readily available and designed in such a way to make them want to read it, chances are, they're gone.

Maybe this isn't one of the main points of SEO. No doubt there are a variety of other factors that contribute far more heavily to a marketing executive's calculations. Regardless, it is something worth bringing to and keeping in mind. If you're going to optimize your site for a keyword, optimize your site for a keyword. By providing a visitor exactly what it is looking for as soon as it arrives, you've increased your chance of making a sale by that much. By not providing those things that are clearly of importance to the visitor in an easily accessible format, you've reduced your chance by that much.

I wonder how many template design sites would come up if I typed in "custom website design"...

Copyright © 2007 Dustin Schwerman.

Dustin Schwerman is the primary web designer at Truly Unique--Affordable Custom Website Design. Truly Unique specializes in impressive, custom sites designed to capture the essence of the businesses they represent, as well as creating useful web-based programs to improve and simplify some of the tasks of running a business. Their goal is to provide these services at affordable, pragmatic rates based on effort involved, rather than arbitrary costs based on number of pages or hours.

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