Count me among the industry professionals who believe it is a good idea for small businesses to pay for SEO alongside web development services. The two go hand-in-hand. So if a company is paying for one, it might just as well pay for the other.
Web development and SEO are distinct and separate disciplines. But they overlap in so many ways. And knowing that a website’s success is tied intrinsically to its SEO potential, it doesn’t make sense to put a ton of money into professional web development services while ignoring SEO.
The Nuts and Bolts of Professional Web Development
Professional web development services exist to give business owners an opportunity to get online with their own websites. A typical agency will build a new site from the ground up, using a combination of raw code and modular tools that increase efficiency. In addition to building the site, most agencies are available to maintain and update the new site long term.
The Nuts and Bolts of SEO
As a separate discipline, SEO (search engine optimization) serves an entirely different purpose. SEO services are designed to improve the performance of a client’s website in organic search results.
In the simplest possible terms, an SEO agency wants its client’s site to appear on the first page of search results whenever a potential customer searches specific terms. While SEO is impacted by website construction and overall quality, the practice itself is separate from building and maintaining websites.
Where the Two Overlap
The premise of this post is that web development and SEO go hand-in-hand. That’s true because they overlap in a number of different areas. Salt Lake City’s Webtek Digital Marketing suggests a few key areas of overlap:
- Technical Characteristics – Website developers pay attention to technical characteristics as they design and build. Those same technical characteristics can impact SEO performance. Examples include alt text for images and title tags on posts.
- Responsiveness – Web developers want their sites to work effectively on mobile devices. This is known as responsiveness in the industry. Likewise, SEO providers need to be concerned about responsiveness because Google gives responsive websites priority.
- Page Speed – Page speed is an indicator of website quality. It makes sense that web developers would pay attention to it. SEO providers also value speed because, once again, Google prioritizes it in organic searches.
- Site Structure – Web development services prioritize website structure in order to make sites easy to navigate. A site that users can easily navigate is one that web crawlers can easily navigate as well. That is good for SEO.
A number of other areas of overlap are worth considering. But given the limited space of this post, this is where I will stop. The point I am making is that some of the same things are important to both web developers and SEO providers. So to separate the two disciplines for the purposes of paying for professional services doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Get It All In One Place
If I were paying for both web development services and SEO, I would be hard pressed to justify working with two service providers. My preference would be to get both services in one place, if only due to the fact that web development and SEO overlap so frequently.
Web development and SEO go hand-in-hand like smartphones and mobility. An agency capable of providing quality in both disciplines has an advantage in my book. That agency is able to deliver a quality website that is technically sound and performs well in the search engine ecosystem. That’s exactly what I would be looking for.