There are three main elements that come in to play when designing a website: 1) branding, to create the look and feel of your visitor’s web experience, 2) marketing content, to speak directly to your customer and help them understand that you can help them reach their goal/solve their challenges and 3) SEO content, so that your website can be found online to help draw new clients to you.
I was actually about to write this topic when it also came up in conversation with a client as well.
Designing a website (or logo, or business cards) is a process that is based on my creative insight and expertise, and also my client’s input and feedback as well. The creative process sometimes also involves exploring a balance of branding compared to marketing.
For marketing purposes, I always recommend having a one-line sentence that explains what you do, and how you help your clients so that they can know they are in the right place right away. (or the wrong place, if they aren’t your ideal clients). I’ve been on websites where I had no idea what their products or services actually were, until going further into the site.
For SEO purposes, it is also important that your first headline includes the most important keyword phrase for what you want your homepage to be found for.
Other important steps also include directing your clients to the information that they most want (or that you most want them to land on).
Branding vs Marketing vs SEO
I look at a client design process as a collaborative experience, and the more skills I have, the better a resource I can be for my clients.
For that reason, I make branding, marketing and website SEO an important part of each process with clients. Each client has a different purpose for their website and sometimes it’s more of a branding website, with marketing content, and sometimes it’s a marketing focused website (with branding in the backdrop), but we also place extra emphasis on the content for on-page SEO. Some clients want the full picture, but I definitely take branding and marketing into practice based on results a client wants to achieve.
Marketing content is about connecting with your customer and creating a conversation so that they understand how you serve them and KNOW you are the right one for them.
SEO content is about focusing on the bots to help improve your rankings for the right keywords, while ALSO still writing to the human reader that is reading the page.
One has more of an art to it (connecting with humans) and one has more of a science to it (writing to algorithms for the search bots).
Each project is unique and each client has their own goals and requests in the website process. I’d love to talk to you about what you are looking for in your website, whether for a rebrand, to get more conversions or to get more traffic to your site (or all three!), and would love to see if we are a good fit to work together to reach your goals. Message me to book your free Marketing Strategy Session.
