You can stop playing the SEO blame game, says the Avenue A | Razorfish search business development manager, if it's thought about from the start.
Over the past year I've given Search Engine Optimization (SEO) presentations to diverse audiences ranging from developers and designers to brand managers. Regardless of how receptive and interested the audience is, there is a point in the discussion when things take an odd turn. I begin to discuss how search engines process a site and how invisible many sites are; it is at this moment that I notice feverish whispering, note taking and several awkward stares.
After a few moments of this, someone, usually a brand person, musters up the courage to say, "How come my agency built my site this way?" Before I can respond people begin shifting in their seats, and hands fly up so fast, whiplash has occurred on at least three occasions. One of my all-time favorite comments was when a client actually said "they should tie a search-friendly design to agency compensation"-- try refocusing a meeting track after that comment.
This simple and somewhat accurate comment creates a heated conversation-- to which the answer is: It was not your agency's fault, nor your fault, but really everybody's fault (except for me because I don't build sites or market products).
Before I go any further, I need to make sure that one thing is abundantly clear: You build your websites for users and the intended action you desire-- not for search engine spiders.
Therefore, my answer is never about how you should make a terribly drab site that is filled with text links and lacking imagery. Instead, this conversation is about recognizing and understanding where the responsibility lies and how we can all work together to develop a site that is appealing to your audience, yet, is also search friendly.
Where did I go wrong?
Recently we worked with a client that had a section of their site dedicated to paying bills online. Although we did not build the site I can pretty much guess that the conversation with the agency went along these lines:
The brand manager spoke to his agency about this new section and talked passionately about how this service will allow consumers to pay bills online. He probably threw statistics around about how many people currently pay bills online and how much more convenient life is by paying bills online.
With this brand download in mind, the agency developed the site around the joys of paying bills online. The site looks and works great and I am sure everyone is happy that they are now reaching people who pay bills online.
Unfortunately, "Pay Bills Online" receives far fewer searches per month than "Bill Pay" and "Online Bill Pay" receives. So what happened?
Before we even touched site design and architecture, we missed our target audience.
What's even more interesting about this is that "Bill Pay" and "Online Bill Pay" don't even sound like proper English. The wife has yet to complain to me about having to "Bill Pay" every month-- she complains, just not about "Bill Pay". Yet we as searchers have grabbed onto these terms and given them verb status similar to TiVo and Q-Tip.
In this example, you can't blame your agency because they wrote copy that mapped to what you told them. Both client and agency need to work together to address the keyword research. The end goal is to marry what people are searching for with your corporate marketing message.
Design, coding and architecture
As a dedicated SEO practice, we not only work with our other offices but also consult with other agencies on SEO. As we embark on these endeavors, we're finding many instances in which the agency is only involved in the design of the site, rather than the full site implementation. While site design obviously has an implication on SEO, URL structure, redirecting and about 30 other characteristics play a role in how a site is evaluated.
I have been involved in several engagements in which an agency delivered clean, SEO-friendly templates. However, the client coded them using excessive JavaScript, a deep directory structure or a CMS that generated URLs that looked more like ancient hieroglyphics. This is the result of many agencies offering best practice SEO, but not really digging deeper into the specialty of SEO.
From a design aspect, you and your agency may have chosen a font that may not have a real text equivalent. In order to keep the branding, you stick with an image-based navigation, which can present a challenge for search engines. We can have a healthy dialogue that the curvature of the letters in your brand font is not represented by any real text format-- but just try to remember many can't notice the difference. This is another shared responsibility in which to maintain a brand identity-- potentially at the expense of your search rankings. So again, if your agency does the design and coding, don't take it for granted they will automatically pay attention to fonts vs. images and don't be too guarded to look at alternative fonts.
Link submission and link popularity
This one is interesting because, from a pure marketing perspective, it has nothing to do with building a world-class site or your brand. However, the practice of factoring in the quantity and quality of high ranking sites that link to you is an extremely important piece of Google's algorithm. Imagine back in the days of yore, starting a business and not listing your company in the Yellow Pages. How would anybody know where you were?
This is exactly what happens when you don't do your Link Submission. When creating or re-designing a site, is this part of your RFP? If you are redesigning a site, have you considered the pages already in the index? Does Google magically find these new pages? Why do I want to link to .org sites? Agencies that are not specialized in SEO probably do not understand the full implication of these issues and will potentially miss them.
We all know that search is not going away. Therefore, SEO needs to be integrated into your design and development process. SEO is still a specialty and not all agencies have this capability for various reasons. I have worked with agencies that integrate SEO into their process and others that work with an outside SEO agency. As the client, you need to ask your agency to go through their SEO capabilities and review the sites they've designed to determine how well they performed. As the agency, you need to bring up SEO if it clearly appears to be lacking from the project scope.
This will hopefully provide a better understanding of how SEO can easily be compromised during site design and will help you to ask and get answers to important questions. It is up to all of us to share this responsibility and to make sure your consumers find the answers to their questions.
Joshua Palau is search business development manager, Avenue A | Razorfish. Read full bio.