Congratulations! You’ve decided to build a website. Now where do you start? How do you find a quality website designer?

Know Your Keyword Strategy

You should be building your website with the goal of being easy for your potential customers to find. I realize this sounds obvious, but few people take this approach.

People with money to burn and things to buy use Google to search for what they want. They search using keywords. For example, if I want a cup of coffee I’ll go to Google and search “coffee springfield mo.” “Coffee springfield mo” is the keyword phrase. It’s what I entered into Google’s search engine. Make sense? Good. Let’s move on.

So before you register a domain, secure hosting, or hire a designer, you should know your keyword strategy. What keyword will you optimize your site for? To decide, consider what keyword or keyword phrase your buyers use to find what you sell, how many people are searching this keyword, and how easy or hard will it be for you to show up near the top of page one on Google for this keyword or keyword phrase.

Fortunately, Google offers a research tool called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool that offers the answers to these questions. This free tool gives you an estimate of monthly keyword search volume. This tool can be found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Visit the link if you’d like – it’s fun and easy to use.

If you own a business, it doesn’t take long to find your online search market using this free tool. For example, if you owned a coffee shop in Springfield, Missouri, you’d quickly notice that 1,000 people per month search “coffee springfield mo” using Google. So the online search market for such a business is 1,000 people per month. Pretty neat, huh?

So now you have a keyword strategy. How can you find a website designer that will help you help you put your strategy to work and get you in front of people looking to buy what you sell?

Find a Quality Website Designer

Too often, consumers are laser-focused on how their website looks. Looks are important. But they aren’t as important as whether or not your potential customers can find you. If you aren’t showing up near the top of the first page of Google for your keyword or keyword phrase, nobody will care about how pretty your site looks.

You can spend thousands of dollars paying your Web designer to make sure your site looks like a piece of art. Just understand that your competitor might be focusing on getting all the Web traffic and online leads while you do so.

So what should you be focused on? How about keeping it simple? Focus on whether or not the people that want what you make can find you on Google.

How do you find a website designer that can do what is necessary to place your business near the top of Google’s search engine returns? Ask them the following questions:

1. What do you think our keyword strategy should be? What keyword should we optimize for? Can you help me research this?
2. What will you do for me to optimize the site for this keyword?
3. What steps will you take to ensure quality on-page search engine optimization?
4. Will you validate the code used to write this website with using the W3C validator tools?
5. Do you know what SEO stands for? (I’m only half-joking. But if they don’t…run…seriously.)

If they can’t answer the above questions, keep looking…

…or you could just hire us.

Thanks for reading.