The Emperor’s New Clothes Gets A Modern Twist....This Time With Websites
A few weeks back I was a bit surprised at some of the conversation in a meeting between a client, their web dev firm, and us —their SEO team. It was a bit shocking to hear the following:
“We already do SEO for your website while we are building it,” said one of the dev team members.
It was a bit of a shock not only to us, but to also the client. Obviously a client would not want to pay for two services doing the same thing, and we would not want to step over another agency that already had a contract in place for this work.
However, after asking a few key questions of the web dev team, it became clear. This was NOT the SEO that you want in your website!
If by “doing SEO” you mean “checking a box off your list,” then you are sorely mistaken. Just having auto-generated meta descriptions based upon the exact same text as the page does “check the box” of having a meta description, however, you are leaving a TON of value on the table. If you think that creating the same title tag for all pages in a category works, you are very much mistaken. I could go on and on. I can explain every natural phenomenon...woops that was Maui just messin' around. Sorry that was a little Disney dad joking around. You see Disney song lyrics have become a part of my wife and I's code, ☺️ but I digress...
Maybe worst of all, the dev team had no strategies for optimizing website code. Here's why that is a red flag:
Web developers can leave uncompressed or even additional files around after completion—much like a construction crew on a build site, they can leave items in the background for the owner to hopefully not find. The big issue here for the client is that the search engine spiders will easily find those things the dev team didn't clean up, didn't do well, or didn't do—and will rank the website poorly, based on those background elements. And it will be harder to undo a poorly ranking website, the longer those issues go unaddressed.
But unlike in the The Emperor's New Clothes, our client's website didn't go up naked for long. Through the meeting with the web dev firm and the client, we discovered what needed attention and then could explain how we could improve the website's SEO while also taking stress off the web dev firm. This allowed for a powerful and proper launch!
If you're wondering how to determine if you're in an Emperor's New Clothes situation, the #1 thing that will tell you is if your dev team gives you programmatic responses. You're also welcome to reach out to us, we'd love to help you.
As a full service SEO web design agency, we can help identify missing technical SEO elements with a routine post website launch audit—or build your website for you with SEO in from the ground up—NON PROGRAMMATICALLY!