SEO for your clients?

Dave1975

Active Member
Hey guys,

A question to put forward to the web designers, how do you approach SEO with your projects? Is it something you/your company has good experience/knowledge with and something you would include as standard for a website proposal/quote? Or is it an additional service you can offer, and then complete in-house at additional cost, or then outsource to a reliable SEO partner? Or do you just never receive requests regarding SEO?

Interested to hear opinions as from my own experience I think it's something that differs greatly across the board.

From a personal view I'm tending to focus on just the front end web design these days working with developers on their projects or on 'white label' trade projects for other design companies, so it doesn't really come into play at my stage in the process. I'm trying to teach myself more about it as and when I get chance to and have recently been reading up on some highly recommended books and websites.

Thanks,
Greg
 
I'm tending to shy away from it at the moment unless the client is really commited to it as the time needed to make it a success is normally quite significant and therefore quite expensive.

We're actually quite good at it and have various tools to make things easier but clients think if they spend £100 once a year on it there gonna get at the top of google - not gonna happen!

So I tell them to go to a specalist company - that soon gives them a shock on the realistic prices involved in doing it properly.
 
I normally point them in the direction of someone else also, although I don't have a company I send people to on a regular basis.
 
We certainly don't "specialise" in SEO, but we offer SEO and eMarketing services to help things along. Just simple things like keeping things updated, submission of pages and links to social networks etc etc.
 
Yeah we are very much the same as Alex, we do the basics and make sure we build websites to be as SEO as possible, but if they want to really push for it then we refer them as it does take a lot of time and commitment for proper SEO.

Brett
 
Currently offering the offsite and onsite SEO side myself however to be perfectly honest its something that im going to be taking off my services list and no longer offering- id prefer to concentrate on just the onsite seo stuff and this is where i'll be in the future (for clients anyways).
 
I'm doing more and more SEO, whereas Design and Development were the major part of my work before. I think that if you are offering a client a finished web site then it should at least be search engine friendly and have their keywords in the right places. And it should be indexed by the search engines! I know some companies don't incorporate SEO unless the client buys it, but this isn't a model that I have used as I believe that if you study the business objectives of the website then it is usually to bring in traffic to develop leads, sales and enquiries.
 
Over the last 10 years having come through web design and development to SEO I know only too well how holistic the approach to SEO needs to be. I've been specialising in SEO for the last 5-6 years so naturally offer it to my freelance clients. The key thing is to manage their expectations - it can't be done overnight and positions aren't guaranteed. If nothing else at least put analytics on the site so you and they can see how the website is progressing and how SEO could improve it.
 
Hi Guys, just joined up having arrived here via Sphinn.

As both a web designer and an SEO I do find a lot of differences in clients' ideas and expectations. Most who come to me for design seem to have lower budgets and usually can't afford SEO and often don't know anything about it. Those who come for SEO often seem to think they already know about design (not always the case!).

My sites are always SEO-friendly but that's very different from being fully optimised - for one thing you can't optimise a site without doing decent keyword research first and most clients choose the wrong keywords if left to themselves. If they wrote the text content themselves it almost certainly isn't optimal for either SEO or user-conversion.

I also work for another web design and SEO company as well as running my own and increasingly I'm trying to persuade clients that what they should be looking for is a much wider body of experience from both of us - what might be termed "web optimisation" - where we advise them on usability, accessibility, copywriting, conversion, integration with their business practices, etc. They're all connected and all required for a successful site. With some of them it's a hard task to get them to think that way unfortunately.
 
Well free lancing is a new area for me, and the one thing I am so surprised about is how dumb people are, when you tell them what is better for them and their business and apparently they know better.

For example, in my latest site I did all the normal stuff and started on the text and started to go for the synonyms terms, I said that yeah the text was good but if I add just 1 word in here and 5 words in over there they would have been able to hit for a second and touch slightly on a third term as well, well more effectively anyway, but apparently it was not to be.

But SEO IMO, depending on how good you are, should be charged seperately and should be a higher price than the design.

Yeah the design is a good part, good for the user, Useability, Accessability etc.... but thats it it's a design if it does not rank then what???

Then again you can have sites that rank and don't preform so it's a matter of balance.

That said SEO is a constant it's not a 1 time variable, 99% of the time any way, so what I have started playing with is offering either a 1 off larger payment for 4 weeks or a reduced monthly payment with a minimum of 1 years contract.

Not sure how this will pay off when I get a few more clients, but hay.
 
As standard, we create websites with SEO in mind. That is, the pages are accessible to spiders, H1 tags are used in headings, etc. We also tend to offer a short consultancy session, where we explain to the PR/marketing department through how search engines work, and the ways in which they can boot their own rankings.
 
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