Tom Savage writes …Building a small business or freelance website – the SEO vs Design challenge
Most freelancers and small businesses use a website as a key marketing tool and spend a lot of time developing a website that promotes them effectively. Yet there is a continual battle between building a site to be found, or to look good when people arrive. Often the two are not complimentary and a trade-off must be made.
In our drive to help freelancers, consultants and SMEs with their marketing we at 3Desk are exploring some of the choices that people make and have brought in a couple of experts to discuss this issue:
Tom (from 3Desk – www.3desk.com
Nick, you suggested that SEO often conflicts with a designer’s desire for simplicity and elegance. Tell us more:
Nick, a marketing expert (from http://www.smallbusinesssalt.co.uk/)
Yes. In short, the rule of thumb is that you should have at least 400 words on every page of content to maximize the chances of that page getting better Google ratings. In my experience, this really bugs website designers. However, I would much rather have a less elegant website with thousands of visitors each month than a beautiful website which nobody ever found.
Farhad is a London-based designer (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/farhadpocha)
I agree with the principles of SEO, but what’s the point of drawing visitors to your website if they are turned off by the content when you get there, or overwhelmed with text that takes 400 words to say something that could have been said in 100? As a designer, I always advise clients to think about SEO opportunities, but to keep their branding and design in the forefront so that they are not compromising their value to potential clients, especially those who don’t arrive through search.
Richard is also a designer, based in Plymouth (www.madebyrichard.me)
There is sometimes a conflict between design and SEO requirements, But I always feel that the client’s end goal overrides any internal decision-making. If the client requires their site to be highly visible in search engine rankings, then design would need to fit around this requirement. Design is about problem-solving, after all!
Seb is both a designer and a marketeer (www.flavrbox.co.uk)
The question of whether or not the amount of text on page poses a real ‘issue’ to the designer is a tricky one, as it really depends on what you’re designing. So if you’re running a blog, or an online magazine, clearly your page will be designed to cater for a large amount of text (more than 400 words!). In those cases, I would argue that text is actually what can help drive the aesthetic value of the page, and therefore its overall attractiveness and readability. Beautiful typography plays a fundamental role in anything I create, and today, thanks to services like Typekit (https://typekit.com/) and Fontdeck (fontdeck.com/), we have far more flexibly when choosing which typefaces we work with online than was available previously.
Now I hear you say, but what about for other websites where text doesn’t play such a fundamental role – portfolio sites, eCommerce and marketplaces? Well I would still argue that text can be seen as an advantage rather than a hindrance. And as Richard says “design is about problem-solving”, so a good designer will find a way to create a page that is both aesthetically pleasing and takes into account external factors such as SEO – that’s our job. But I would also say it’s important to remember that although text plays an important role in SEO, it is far from being the only one. Content such as photos and videos can be annotated with meta data to help search engines find and rank your page based on more than just the volume of text on the page.
Tom (www.3desk.com)
In summary, when designing a website there needs to be a clear understanding of what it is you’re trying to achieve.
If you receive 1000 visitors because of great SEO, with a 5% conversion rate because your design is poor, that’s still better than attracting 100 visitors with a 20% conversion rate. Especially as the first website is much easier to ‘optimize’ than the second. By A/B testing – essentially trying different variations, by using a site like Optimizely (https://www.optimizely.com/) – this 5% conversion rate might be improved. Again, having 1000 visitors makes it easier to do this.
However, SEO takes time to ‘seed’. Often a freelancer or small business might actually achieve more by focusing on their twitter account (see this article on Twitter tips http://blog.3desk.com/localfreelance–twitter–jobs/) or by improving the SEO on their LinkedIn account than by spending time building a site. Many people forget that their LinkedIn profile might actually appear higher in searches than their own websites, even if they spend a lot of time and effort on their websites.
Remember to look at some of the free programmes that enable people to build websites, from WordPress (http://wordpress.com/), to Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/). Many of these will be SEO optimized, with clear guidelines, so that making your personal website can take hours, rather than days.
A website seems de-rigueur nowadays… but remember that it’s only worth doing if people visit it AND like it – plus before you decide to spend time and effort on it, there may well be other things you can do that might be more effective for your business.
Tom is an award-winning social entrepreneur and has started a number of businesses. He’s helped companies find talent as a headhunter for 7 years and has most recently started 3Desk (www.3desk.com) – a marketplace for freelancers. He also blogs on simplicity at www.simpletom.co.uk