When Should You Involve Your SEO Agency In Your Website Project?

Creating a new website or revamping an existing one is a significant undertaking that involves multiple stages, from initial planning to design, development, and launch. 

One crucial aspect that often gets overlooked or is brought in too late is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Involving your SEO agency at the right time can make a world of difference in your website’s success. But when exactly should you bring them into the picture? Let’s break it down.

The simple answer is, the earlier the better. 

The slightly longer answer is “are you planning major changes to your site? A redesign? A new domain or CMS? You should probably involve an SEO then” 

Our Approach

At Impact we encourage our clients to involve their SEO team or agency from the planning stages. 

We invite them to join our Discovery and Strategy workshops, to ensure organic search is considered from the outset. Whether that be the SEO strategy for a new site, or the careful migration involved in preventing a negative impact on SEO performance. 

Where An SEO Agency May Be Involved During Your Website Project

1. Project Inception

The best time to involve an SEO agency is right from the beginning of the project. At this stage, the SEO team can provide valuable insights that influence the overall strategy and direction of the project. Here’s why:

• Keyword Research: Early involvement allows the SEO team to conduct thorough keyword research. This research informs the content strategy and helps ensure that the site will rank well for relevant search terms.
• Site Structure: SEO experts can advise on the optimal site structure to enhance crawlability and user experience. A well-structured site improves both search engine rankings and user engagement.

2. Design Phase

Involving an SEO agency during the design phase ensures that SEO best practices are integrated into the visual and functional aspects of the site. Key considerations include:

• SEO-Friendly Design Elements: Elements like headers, image optimisation, and schema markup should be incorporated during the design phase to prevent costly redesigns later.

3. Development Phase

During development, your SEO agency can collaborate with developers to ensure that the site is built with a solid technical foundation. This collaboration includes:

• Technical SEO: Proper implementation of meta tags, header tags, alt text for images, and other technical SEO elements is essential. An SEO agency can ensure these are correctly set up during development.

4. Pre-Launch

Before launching the website, a comprehensive SEO audit is essential. Your SEO agency should conduct this audit to identify and fix any issues. Key activities include:

• On-Page SEO: Ensuring all on-page elements like meta descriptions, title tags, and headings are optimised.
• Redirects and Canonicals: Setting up 301 redirects for old URLs and checking canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Analytics and Tracking: Ensuring that analytics tools are correctly set up to track performance and gather data from day one, including testing any event tracking that may be required.
• Benchmarking: If this is a site migration, rather than a site build, an SEO agency can benchmark the current sites performance to better determine whether the migration has been successful.

5. Post-Launch

SEO is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. Post-launch, your SEO agency should continuously monitor the site’s performance, make necessary adjustments, and keep optimising the site based on new data and evolving best practices.

• Performance Monitoring: Regularly checking site performance metrics and search rankings to identify areas for improvement, as well as also comparing rankings and traffic to the previous iteration of the site to see if improvements have been made.
• Content Updates: Continuously updating and expanding content to keep it fresh and relevant, while also creating content to match search intents.
• Technical Audits: Periodic technical audits to ensure the site remains optimised as new features are added and as search engine algorithms evolve. As well as allowing for any quick fixes to be made to site.

What To Expect From Your SEO Agency For A Website Project

A lot can go wrong during a website project.

Depending on the particulars of your website project, your SEO partner should provide services to suit. Some examples are listed below under each project type.

A New Website

• Input on the sitemap and site structure and potential site hierarchy.
• Input on page templates to ensure best practice followed for content structuring.
• Input on the content itself, keywords research, heading structure, and best practices to follow.
• Input on schema.

A Website Redesign

• Input on the sitemap and site structure/hierarchy.
• Input on page templates to ensure best practice followed for content structuring.
• Redirect mapping and the creation of a redirects document (CSV, .htaccess, or other format depending on developer preference.)
• Input on any technical aspects that may need resolving before launch to follow best SEO practices.
• Input on schema.

A Website Redesign With A Domain Name Change

• Input on the sitemap and site structure.
• Input on page templates to ensure best practice followed for content structuring.
• Redirect mapping and the creation of a redirects document.

Post Launch Benefits

Having a good relationship between your website and SEO partners will also continue to bring benefits post launch.

We have many clients who continue to evolve their websites and remain with us for both ad hoc development and WordPress support, maintenance and hosting. 

Where they retain their SEO partner, we are able to work with them to ensure that ongoing changes to the website are looked at from an SEO perspective, as well as from a development standpoint. 

We can also advise SEO partners on whether the technical recommendations they make are viable or could have a knock on impact.

It also allows for direct communication to be had between both teams to potentially resolve any issues found, that could affect each other’s work.  

Things To Look For In An SEO Partner

This is where I get to use the famous SEO answer of “it depends”. As there are loads of things to look for. However, there are some fundamentals that you should probably start with:

• Experience with website migrations and launches – This one is fairly self explanatory. They have done this before (hopefully many times), and they know what is required to make these projects work.
• Familiarity and experience with the CMS your website is built on – Experience with launching sites, and website migrations is self explanatory. CMS familiarity is useful as it means that your SEO partners can also potentially amend any fixes they find, freeing our dev up to do the more technically challenging tasks.
• Happy to work in partnership with your web development agency – Some SEOs are happy to work by themselves, or may want to own the tasks rather than collaborate. But if you are looking for a partner to your web agency, it’s probably best to check that your SEOs are ok with that too.

Trusted SEO Partners

Not all companies have an SEO team or partner in place, and the task of finding one can be daunting. Especially when already bringing on a web development agency. 

That is why we have a list of select SEO partners that we have vetted and trust, who we can recommend to our clients if they wish. 

Is It Time For A Website Redesign?

If you’d like to learn more about our website redesign approach and if it could be a good fit for your business, drop us an email or give us a call.