Are you a business owner ready to take the next step with your company? Are you looking to change the way you present yourself online and reach larger audiences? If so, our web design agency is here for you. Our marketing agency focuses on SEO driven web development and social media management. This is done in order to help you outrank your competitors and reach new and established customers.
Having a beautiful and full developed website is great, but if you aren’t getting any online traffic, what’s the point? At Houston Small Business Marketing, we offer a wide range of marketing services that go hand in hand with web design.
Our team works with you to build websites from the ground up. We do it all from logo design to building out your website. If you are interested in learning more about the services we provide, or finding out where your website ranks among your competitors, reach out to us today.
Developing an SEO-friendly website
At a fundamental level, an SEO-friendly site is one that allows a search engine to explore and read pages across the site. Ensuring a search engine can easily crawl and understand your content is the first step to ensuring your visibility in the search engine result pages.
A search engine utilizes a web crawler for this task, and we are trying to work with the search engines rather than against them. Unfortunately, there are many ways to make a website, and not all technologies are built with search engine optimization in mind.
Building an SEO-friendly site requires careful planning and a structured approach to representing your business and the services you provide. For many businesses, this can be complicated — it’s not always easy to document exactly what you do.
As a marketing tool, your website should be built upon a solid digital marketing plan with a clear business model and value proposition. If that’s unclear, then you need to revisit that first.
Assuming you have all that good stuff in place, let’s dive in.
Fundamentals
There are a few core elements that set the stage for a well-optimized website design process.
Domains
Your business may use example.com as the primary domain. But you may have others. Ensuring your domain makes sense and relates to what you do is super-important. Ensuring that all variations and subdomains correctly point at the main site and redirect to a single canonical version of the site is important.
Our business is called Bowler Hat. We operate in the UK. We are a web-based business. It naturally follows that our domain is www.bowlerhat.co.uk. All subdomains 301 redirect back to the main URL www.bowlerhat.co.uk. We have few domain variations that 301 redirect back to the main URL. This all makes sense.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that having-my-keywords-in-my-domain.com helps. It just looks daft. It can help a little for local businesses, but ensure you are mapping to the real world. Be sensible.
Hosting
Your hosting is also important. A slow site makes for unhappy users. Your hosting should follow common-sense rules. Be situated where your audience is situated. Be fast. Be platform-specific, if necessary. WP Engine is a great example, as it provides a platform tailored to WordPress websites.
CMS
The CMS (content management system) you choose for your business can hugely influence how successful you are. WordPress is a great option in many situations, but it’s not the only one. It certainly is wired up at a basic level in a way that Google can understand. This is not to say it is the best choice for all situations, but certainly, it’s a good starting point for most businesses. Just be sure that the CMS you choose is the right one for your situation, rather than the one your chosen web company prefers to work with.
Crawling & accessibility
The first step is ensuring a search engine can crawl your site and understand what it is that you do (and where you do it).
Indexation
To understand your site, they have to be able to read the content of the page. This means that the main content of your site should be text-based behind the scenes. Not images. Not flash or video. Even in this ever-advancing world, your main content should still be text-based. There are some great tools, like web fonts, that mean you can still look the part, and your images have a place, but be sure to talk in clear language about what it is you do so the search engine can read and understand your offering.
Images, videos, PDFs and content are also important and can be a source of search engine traffic. Again, these need to be discoverable and indexable.
Link structure
To index your content beyond the home page, you need internal links that the search engine can crawl. Your primary navigation, search engine directives and tools like XML sitemaps all help the search engine crawl your site and discover new pages. Tools like Screaming Frog can help you ensure that your site can be easily crawled by a search engine.
Navigation
Your navigation is equally important. When a site is well-structured, the navigation works with the structure, the URLs and other components, like XML sitemaps, to help solidify what each page or piece of content is about.
Navigation is more than just the menu at the top of your website. It is how you signpost users to the most relevant part of your site. Navigation can be a tool to raise awareness of additional services and includes not just text links but content on all pages and in the templated design elements of your site.
It is very easy to get this wrong, and careful thought must be applied — before you build the site — regarding the needs and wants of your users. A website is a digital component that should execute the strategy from your marketing plan. Understanding users here is crucial so you can ensure you are meeting their needs.
SEO Web Designer in Houston
Securing a top placement on Google search results for searches that are relevant to your industry and local area can be the difference between having a successful business and a struggling one. The online marketing professionals at Houston Small Business Marketing help small and medium sized businesses thrive on local search results.
We understand for many business owners, online marketing strategies feel like a foreign language. This is why we actively work to stay on top of the forever evolving SEO trends and standards, to keep your company at the top of local search results. If you are not working on your brand online, you can bet your competitors are. Let us help you design your website today.
Why Choose HOUSBM?
These days it is becoming increasingly more important for businesses, especially those working in highly competitive and saturated markets, to dedicate time and resources to developing a responsive, dynamic, and informative website. As time has gone on websites have started to take less passive roles in the the success of businesses and become critical components. This is because in our modern world, everyone is glued to their smart devices. We use our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other smart devices to help us locate and learn about what is around us.
This includes how people learn about businesses around them that offer the services or goods that they are on the market for. At Houston Small Business Marketing, we are experts in search engine optimization. This means, when we design and develop your company’s website online users looking for the particular services and goods you offer, will be directed to visit your website.
Do not run the risk of losing potential customers to your competitors just because they are working with a digital marketing group and you aren’t. We understand that business owners are busy running their business and do not have the time on their hands required to stay up to date and savvy on the newest SEO trends and algorithms.
This is why we do everything we can to stay relevant and aware of current marketing trends, to keep our customers at the top of Google search results. If the business you see as your main competition is investing time and resources into their web development, they will attract more customers to their website which oftentimes will result in more customers and transactions. The more customers you have visit your website, the higher you will rank, and the greater traffic you will see for your company.
Affordable Web Development Near Me
Stop missing out on potential customers and become a force within your industry! From excellent web design and social media management to Google Business Listing optimization and a weekly-updated blog, the team at Houston Small Business Marketing is here to help you get to the next level. Grow your business when you expand your reach online. If you are tired of giving away potential customers to your competitors, contact us today!
We dedicate ourselves to working closely with business owners to come up with a marketing plan that helps them succeed. We provide each customer with a free consultation for your website and social media to let you know how you can improve your placement online and grow your engagement with local potential customers looking for your services. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.
Houston Small Business Marketing
713-492-0025
1415 North Loop West #950
Houston, TX 77008
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