How the Jake Group Builds an SEO Foundation
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a new website is incredibly important. The SEO foundation plays a critical role, alongside the design and development of the website, in setting the site up for future success. This means getting you discovered by those people conducting searches relevant to your business.
The Jake Group goes above and beyond your average agency when it comes to our defined SEO process, implementation checklist, tools, and our extensive experience in creating search engine friendly websites.
Here’s how we stand out.
Understanding Ranking Factors
When thinking of SEO, it is common for people to first gravitate towards keywords–incorrectly thinking that the right words and phrases alone will be what drives traffic to the website. The right content certainly helps, but there are other important factors that contribute to how a page and site rank within search engine results.
For us, this means ensuring the following ranking factors are included within our design and development process.
- Website and Page Loading Speed
- Mobile Friendliness
- Website Navigation and Content Hierarchy
- Website Security
- User Experience
As your agency partner, you can trust in the Jake Group taking ownership of these technical elements to build a strong SEO foundation.
Performance Related Choices & Testing
Site performance can really impact a number of things. First, a performance indicator such as a slow site or mobile difficulty creates a flat-out bad user experience. And second, search engines take performance into account causing poor performing sites to rank lower. This means all the work you do regarding keywords might be for naught as the proper foundation isn’t in place for you to have a fighting chance in the highly competitive search results.
Jake Group’s Performance Checklist for SEO:
- Select the appropriate server according to the site’s expected needs. This helps manage load times, a speedy site, and ultimately a strong user experience.
- Consider performance when selecting the website’s design. We use tools in the early development stages to confirm that the site will look good and perform well.
- Optimize images. This includes knowing the optimal image sizing and format, which helps with load and speed. Read our post on how to make your images web friendly.
- Set up cache rules. This speeds up the site for future visits.
- Test for performance using Google Lighthouse and Pingdom for both desktop and mobile. This is an important element before a site launch so we can be assured that the site is optimal according to Google’s standards of performance.
Impactful Best Practices
Beyond performance items, we also implement a number of advanced best practices. Upon launch, we want your site to be found, and we want you to understand how it ranks.
Jake Group’s Advanced SEO Practices:
- Install Yoast SEO plugin and complete basic configuration. This is a valuable and user-friendly tool that works within WordPress to define and understand usage of keywords.
- Add meta descriptions and title tags to the core pages of the site. These help with rankings and also reinforce your brand.
- Configure SEO-friendly redirections from your prior site. This needs to be clean and ensures no loss of prior “SEO juice.” This also ensures users do not end up on expired 404 pages.
- Submit sitemap to Google and Bing. Rather than wait for the search engines to find you, we submit the sitemap upon launch.
- Ship with SSL Certificate. Google makes it known that sites using HTTPS protocol receive a ranking preference when it indexes sites for content. More on what an SSL certificate is here.
- Set up Google Analytics to understand and track your organic traffic.
- Set up Google Search Console to understand which keywords and terms you rank for and which ones bring in traffic.
- Perform a Google Analytics post-launch review. This includes organic traffic activity and any intel on rankings.
Keyword Discovery
Back to keywords — they are certainly important, and we work with clients in several ways depending on their needs. This can include top-level guidance on relevant keywords (volume, rank, difficulty) or a more thorough keyword research exercise to uncover opportunities and establish a long-term approach. At the outset of any project, we’ll discuss options when it comes to keywords and how you might benefit from our digital marketing services.
It is worth noting that SEO success is a long game so a strong SEO foundation is critical. This is how the Jake Group puts our clients in a position to succeed. Our defined list and approach around performance and technical SEO provides value that many agencies simply don’t offer. While much of this SEO work is “behind the scenes”, you can be sure our team is knee-deep in the details to ensure your site is performing at its best.
Interested in learning more? Drop us a line to see how we can help with your website design and ensuring future SEO success!