Why Website SEO Has a Branding Problem

Some of the most important SEO work happens before there’s even a website to optimize.

When you hear SEO, what do you picture?

Maybe it’s adding keywords to a page. Writing title tags. Trying to rank higher on Google. Tweaking an existing website until search engines like it a little more. That makes sense, when you consider that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

But we think SEO has a bit of a branding problem.

The word optimization makes people think it’s something you do once the real work is finished. You build the website first, then bring in SEO to polish it up, tweak some headings and tell Google where everything is.

After building a lot of websites, we’ve learned that most people don’t realize that the valuable SEO work happens much, much earlier.

In fact, sometimes there isn’t even a website yet.

Before you decide what to build, you need to figure out what people are trying to find.

At Array, a new website starts with research. We explore the creative brief, spend time with the client learning the business, look at competitors, dig into existing website analytics and then complete a thorough keyword analysis.

Each piece gives us another part of the picture:

• The client tells us what matters most to the business.
• Analytics tell us what people are already finding and exploring.
• Competitors show us what the rest of the market is saying.
• Keyword research shows us what people are actually typing into Google when they go looking for it.

And this is usually where something clicks:

• A service everyone on the client’s team calls one thing is being searched under a completely different name.
• A product thought of as a side offering has surprisingly strong hidden demand.
• A competitor is dominating a topic nobody has really considered.
• Or one little page buried on the old website turns out to be bringing in some of its best organic traffic.

Those discoveries don’t just give us a list of keywords to sprinkle into copy later. They help shape the website itself.

Enter Information Architecture, SEO’s best friend.

Once we understand what the audience is actively looking for and the language they are actually using, we start building the Information Architecture.

That’s the blueprint for the website: what pages should exist, how they should be grouped, what the most important content is, and how someone should move through it. The SEO research informs the core of these decisions:

• Maybe a service needs its own page because there is a clear search demand for information on it.
• Maybe we change the language in the navigation because customers consistently use a different term.
• Maybe we keep and improve a page that initially looked expendable because the analytics tell us that information is more valuable to visitors than we thought.

Even the content starts taking shape here. We know which questions people are asking, which topics need more explanation and which language is going to feel immediately familiar to the people the website is actually for.

By the time we start writing copy or designing screens, SEO hasn’t been ‘added’ to anything. It has already helped inform the decisions we’re making.

It turns out good SEO and a good customer experience are often the same thing.

This is probably the biggest shift in how we think about SEO.

The goal isn’t to build one website for people and then somehow optimize another version of it for search engines and seo bots.

A clear page structure helps both. Using the language your audience understands helps both. Answering the questions people are genuinely asking helps both. Making important information easy to find helps both.

That is why SEO research has become such an important part of our very early website process. Yes, we want the site to rank. But the research also makes us better strategists, better writers and, ultimately, better at building a website that makes sense to the people using it.

There is still a lot of ongoing SEO work to do after launch. We watch rankings, look for new opportunities, build content and keep learning from what people are searching for.

But we aren’t starting from scratch.

The foundation was poured long before launch.