When you start a company and want to gain recognition and brand awareness, there’s no way to avoid launching a website. Today, your website is arguably the most effective marketing and sales tool your business has. However, it is crucial that your site is both unique and meets the needs of your audience in more ways than one – from terms of use and comfort to actual solutions. These things blend together, of course, and when done correctly, help create a platform that wins quality leads for your company.

One of these aspects is search engine optimization (SEO). Although it is primarily a web marketing tool that helps get your site to higher positions in search results, it still makes a serious impact on your audience by guiding them to the content they need. It’s simply not wise to neglect SEO, especially if you want to use your site to the fullest extent possible.

SEO starts at the initial stages of creating your website. Unless your company is built around UI design services, you will need to hire another firm that would be able to build a great site for you and optimize it for search engines. The market is full of great UI design agencies today, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a reliable and reputable one. You want to make certain that the company you hire can provide you with all the web creation services, including design, development, copywriting, and, of course, search engine optimization. While each aspect is crucial for a successful website, SEO helps put all the effort out front and makes sure as many users can see your site as possible.

SEO Is Crucial for Your Website Lead Generation

When you hire an agency to build, update, or redesign your site, a lot of that time will be spent creating great graphics and writing engaging copy. But if the website doesn’t make it to the first search results page, it won’t matter very much. Therefore, you have to optimize your site’s content for target keywords, so that users can find it by them. While you’re not going to do it alone, you should have a good idea of what SEO is like. Several practices in particular help push sites up the line in search results.

Title Tags

The title tag is essentially used to let the search engine know what a particular page is about. Every page must have a unique title tag that is associated with it only. It includes the target keyword and the company name if there’s enough room. Title tags are just 55-60 characters long, including spaces between words.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are essentially short descriptions that describe the contents of a page. Right now, they can be up to 160 characters long. It’s important to use these descriptions wisely so that visitors to your site can understand what they’re going to see upon visiting your website pages.

As for the main pages of your site, it’s best to make descriptions that sound and look like short ads. Make sure to discuss this with your UI design agency and come up with the best options possible. This way, you will be able to pitch your brand, services, or products to users before they load your site.

Header Tags

Header tags, or H1 tags, are essentially a web page subject line. It’s necessary to use a keyword one time in the H1 tag. In case your page has multiple sections, you can also use tags from H2 to H6 and use keyword variations and various related keywords in them.

Body Copy

The one thing that defines whether a web page will land a good position in search results is its main content. Good content is valuable for two reasons in terms of SEO: it can be linked and supplies a demand.

When speaking of demand-supply, your site’s content has to address the needs of your target audience by providing answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. If your UI design agency creates truly great content, it will not just solve a user’s problem, but will as well guide them to the next buyer’s journey stage. There should be keywords in your content, but it also should feel natural and be completely readable. Content crammed with keywords or with keywords that feel forced will not help your site get to the best positions. Moreover, in the long run, it will only hurt your website in terms of search results.

Also, good content must be helpful, keyword-targeted, responsive, shareable, valuable, and ensure overall great user experience for visitors to your website. If your content manages to do all these things, users will want to link to it. However, if your audience can’t link to your content, it will more than likely negatively affect your page ranking.

Image Alt Tags

Alt tags describe images. Since search engines aren’t able to ‘read’ images and videos, adding alt text with a target keyword ensures the indexing of your images.

Internal Links

Internal links connect your website pages together. From the standpoint of SEO, adding internal links to other relevant articles or pages provides Google with additional information on the value of your content and helps the search engine understand which content on the site is related to what.

From a user experience standpoint, internal links add value to the content and result in longer periods of time spent on your site by visitors. Moreover, adding internal links may potentially reduce the bounce rates on your site.

Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are a significant aspect of your page that should not be forgotten. You can get more backlinks by doing the following:

• Reaching out to an influencer and asking them to link back to your blog post or article;
• Reaching out to a blogger in an associated niche or market and ask them if they’re interested in publishing a guest post written by you;
• Reaching out to an industry publication, pitching an interview with you;
• Sharing your blog snippet on forums within your industry and linking back to your website (it’s important not to overdo it and be banned for spamming).

Determine Broken Links

Broken links negatively affect your website’s usability and SEO. They limit link equity flow, thus negatively affecting your site’s rankings. Also, they harm the user experience. For instance, if a visitor tries clicking a link and is then taken to a 404 error page, they will most certainly get frustrated and may potentially leave your website for good.

Check the site for broken links to avoid such incidents. One other option is making an agreement with your UI design agency that allows their team to check your website every few weeks or months. Once the broken links are discovered, you can take users directly to your site by removing or fixing the broken links.

Conclusion

If you want your website to be a tireless helper that makes your company draw new prospects and convert them into quality leads, it must work properly in all areas. Adding some high-quality SEO will make it more effective in search engine results and will thus make it more visible to your target audience. If you hire a UI design agency that can take care of this for you, your company will end up in a win-win situation, where you get a spectacular website with outstanding content that also provides your visitors with great user experience. Such sites create quality leads that end up being loyal customers. This is exactly what you need.