Difference between an SEO Friendly Website and Professional SEO

A common question our sales team faces is ‘what is the difference between a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) friendly website having professional SEO completed?’  Let me start off with a terrible analogy of a website on an SEO friendly CMS vs. a non-SEO friendly CMS, and then I’ll go into some more detail on what it means.

My Terrible Analogy

Having a search engine friendly website built is similar to having a relocatable store built.  When you are provided with it you may not be on George Street with thousands of potential shoppers passing by everyday but it has every potential to easily move there with the help of some marketing.  Putting your website on a non-SEO friendly content management system (CMS) is like having your store built permanently in the back streets with no hope of attracting any visitors no matter how much you spend on marketing.

I told you it was terrible but I’ll try to explain myself.  A website built on an SEO friendly CMS provides you with all the elements required for either you or someone you pay to optimise your website on a monthly basis to achieve high rankings in the major search engines and get the phone ringing.  This is extremely important as this SEO friendly base is where all your online marketing will be launched from.  At The Web Showroom we have spent the last 7 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars making our CMS as SEO friendly as possible.  This includes incorporating the following features:

• Search engine friendly URLs
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Sitemaps that are both human friendly and search engine robot friendly
• Editable header tags
• Editable and individual page/meta titles
• Image alt tags
• Easy internal linking
• Ongoing SEO audits of the content management system by SEO professionals

Everything listed above are either features that will be essential for someone to conduct SEO on your website, or in the very least dramatically increase the speed at which you achieve high rankings.

Professional SEO on the other hand, is a continuous process of building your online brand to prove to Google and the other major search engines that you are the most relevant website when people search for the products and services that you provide.

Professional SEO is best completed in two stages, SEO setup and ongoing optimisation.  The SEO setup includes work completed in areas such as:

• Keyword research
• Keyword allocation
• Onsite changes to improve keyword saturation

Ongoing optimisation would include a mix of the following items on a weekly or monthly basis:

• Link building
• Content generation both on and off your website
• Directory submissions
• Forum participation in relevant forums for your industry
• Building of referral networks

As you can tell, professional SEO is ongoing and can be quite labour intensive. Like all marketing it’s a continuous process of using expertise, established networks and a great deal of hard work to get the exposure required to increase your sales/leads.

Buyer Beware

If generating leads from your website through the major search engines is a requirement then an SEO friendly CMS is essential.  This should be one of the first questions you ask when shopping for your new site.  However, be careful that you don’t get promised the world. If a company offers you a website and a claim of professional SEO (not SEO friendly) at a low onetime fixed price, chances are you won’t be receiving too much ongoing optimisation and your website traffic will suffer as a result.  Like everything in life, you get what you pay for, so ensure that the investment you are making provides your web design company and/or online marketing company enough hours to turn your website into a lead generating machine.