Introduction

Many start-up businesses, especially, face the problem of spending all of their digital marketing budgets on getting a new website designed.

Now, you are probably thinking, well, since we are a web design agency, surely we would strongly recommend spending as much as possible on getting a new website designed, right?

Well, not really, because here’s the thing: If you’re an electrician, you’re going to compete with hundreds, in some cities, thousands of companies. So, a website alone is not going to cut the mustard.

You must think about how you will promote your website; otherwise, it will not attract any visitors.

So, are you going to:

• Spend on social media advertising?
• Are you going to invest in SEO, that’s search engine optimisation
• Are you going to spend on Google Adword advertising?

So, if you have, let’s say, typically a business has around 5k for a start-up business to get their digital marketing rocking and rolling, and you spend all of this on getting a website designed, well, how are you then going to promote it?

This is why, here at W&P, we design brochure websites suitable for start-up companies. We can build these for a starting price of £950.00. Then, we can offer fixed monthly SEO packages, which vary in cost depending on how much competition your business faces.

For the purposes of this article, we will discuss why your company website may not be appearing on Google.

A common question that many businesses ask us is whether SEO is included when our website is designed so that our company websites appear in Google’s results.

The simple answer is SEO is omitted.

So, SEO, which stands for search engine optimisation, involves a massive effort on behalf of an SEO consultant/ agency to get that website on the first page. The reason for this is as follows:

• SEO takes a considerable amount of time
• Your competitors may have invested for donkeys years before you, so you need to beat that standard of work
• SEO is hard, in terms of it needs constant work every month

So, is SEO included in our web design quotes?

The short answer to this question is no; it’s not included. A lot of web design businesses say that “basic SEO” is included in the quote for the website to be designed; this often only means the following:

• They will send the website for indexing
• They will add basic onsite SEO, such as page titles and meta descriptions

This is often not enough work to get any business on page one of Google. In fact, when Google first indexes a website after the web designers have built it, it is more than likely going to be beyond page 10 of Google. So, this is where the work starts in terms of moving the website forward towards page one.

Now, bear in mind that depending on the level of competition, this can take anywhere between 6 months and over a year. So SEO moves at a snail’s pace, but in our experience, if the work is done correctly, that is, white hat, it does take a considerable amount of time.

Here are some of the tools that our web design business uses when we are tasked with improving a business’s local or organic SEO. Please note that search engine optimisation is a separate service that we charge separately for, separate from the web design work.

We use Google Search Console practically every hour of the working week. Namely, it’s a tool made by Google, so the SEO information, such as the incoming links, which pages are indexed, and the average position information for keywords, is 100% accurate.

Yet, Google Search Console is how we communicate with Google; for example, if our web designers have just finished building a website, we need to say to Google, “Hey, we have just built a new website; can you index it?”

You need to link your business’s Google Search Console account to your website to do this. Now, your web designer should be able to help you with this. This is a crucial first step, as you can request manually that some pages get indexed. This tells Googlebot to crawl and index this page now. This is essential because if Googlebot can’t crawl and index the page, then it will never appear in Google’s results.

So, to get a page or blog post indexed, you manually request that it be indexed. We recommend that you use Google Search

Console for this. If the page cannot be indexed, you should get a reason why, such as leaving the no-index tab on.
As you can imagine, if the website is brand new, you may have a number of issues stopping some pages or blog posts from getting indexed. These must be fixed if you want your website to be indexed by Google.

So, with Google Search Console up and running, you can find out the following information:

Have all of the pages/blog posts been crawled?
Are there crawl errors?
Are there any redirect errors?

Contact your web developer if there are any crawl errors:
When you first get your website indexed by Google Search Console, there may be crawl errors. This must be fixed if you want those pages to appear in Google’s organic results.

Is duplicated content marketing holding your business back?

We have met with businesses that have spent a fortune on having their websites designed, yet the phone does not ring, the SEO is extremely weak, and there are no sales coming via the website. Sometimes, this could be because all of the pages, such as the blog posts, have duplicated content marketing.

This could be text copied, let’s say, from a direct competitor or, let’s say, a supplier, yet this can massively damage your business’s organic search engine optimisation. Google does not like duplicated content marketing; on your website, it’s to be well-written, high-quality information.

Google E-EAT

If the web design agency you hire is writing content marketing, they must understand the advice stated by Google E-EAT. This means that if you want your company website to rank high on Google, then you need text that shows that you are an expert in what you are talking about.

Is your website mobile-friendly?

We highly recommend using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test because if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not appear in the mobile results. Now, when you think that over 50% of shoppers, when they are looking for a business, use their smartphone, then if you don’t have a mobile version of the company website designed, making the website mobile friendly, you could be halving the number of visitors your website is getting.

So, the website does need to be mobile-friendly.

Could low-quality backlinks possibly be holding your website back?

Some businesses, after they have had their website designed, sometimes try to improve their SEO themselves.

Sometimes, they just hire the wrong SEO company that builds low-quality links. This can be disastrous for a company’s search engine optimisation. Building spam links can be problematic because the business can get a link penalty.

A link penalty can mean the website is taken off Google’s results.

This is called a Google Penguin penalty—it must be avoided at all costs, as it can cause long-term damage to a business’s rankings.

Why not hire us?

There’s a reason so many companies based all across the city of Cardiff have hired us: we build unique, quality websites at very affordable prices. The other reason is that if a company chooses to do so, they can partner with us over the long run so that we can start to improve the company’s search engine optimisation. As we alluded to in this article, it is worth noting that SEO is a slow and lengthy process, so businesses need to keep in mind that they could be investing for a very long period before the sales increase.

Yet there’s a reason why companies have hired us for over eight years to improve their SEO: when SEO works, it can generate many sales for that business.

So, if you need a new website designed or help improving your company’s organic SEO, why not call us?