Settling the Debate of SEO vs Web Design
For those of you who do not know, there have been many questions on SEO blogs regarding whether SEO (search engine optimization) or web design is a better career choice for an online entrepreneur. Since some of you may be unfamiliar with one or the other, I will be covering both in detail then giving my opinion as to which is the best choice for someone just starting out. Of course if you know both (like I do) you should choose to offer both services to maximize your revenue but for the sake of beginners I will assume you know neither.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is basically the art/science/wizardry of making a website rise in the search results. Some of you might already have light bulbs going off but for those of you that don’t understand it yet, I will break down why a business would find this so valuable.
To start, a site ranking number 1 in the search results will get approximately 33% of all the search traffic for the keyword. For example, if you are a plumber in Buffalo New York, the keyword “Plumber Buffalo” might get 100 searches (for the sake of easy math). That means 100 people per month (approximately) are going to be searching for a plumber in Buffalo. Ranking number 1 for that term would get you roughly 30 extra visitors to your site per month and if you convert 10% of those into sales, you just got 3 extra clients. Now, add a 0 to each of those numbers and you can start to see how a business might want to pay a good chunk of change for a service that could get them 30, 300, 3000 clients per month.
Before you close this article and go pursue your SEO career that is bound to make you millions (how hard could it be right?) you need to first understand the intricacies of what goes in to actually being able to deliver first page rankings. First, you need to establish yourself as a dependable SEO freelancer, or build yourself up as a credible SEO agency. To do this you will need to understand what goes in to ranking in Google. More specifically, how to keep up with Google’s best practices in order to avoid getting a clients website penalized. Then you need to understand what whitehat tactics you can use to get your client leverage and what does not work anymore. Specifically, things like blog commenting, link wheels, directory submissions, and social bookmarking, which all worked 10 years ago, could actually get you penalized now. An appropriate way to go would be to do link outreach, produce high quality content, and get in touch with industry-related professionals. Now, this is not a course on SEO 101, but I wanted to make sure the readers who saw money signs at the last paragraph were aware that it is not a push-button moneymaking solution and actually involves *gasp* real work.
Next you will need to analyze your own competition in your market. I am going to go off of the plumbing example and assume I am in Buffalo. If I were to open a new agency, the first thing I would do is find a Buffalo search engine optimization company and copy what they are doing. I would see what kinds of links they have build, what kinds of social profiles they have, and what they are ranking for. Then I would look at their content and try to do something similar if they are ranking well for keywords I want. For social profiles, small details can be important. Take a look at the Apache SEO Buffalo Facebook page for example. If you did not see what I am talking about, look again and then come back to this point. Did you find it? If not, I’ll tell you. It’s verified. That check mark next to the brand name means that Facebook has verified it as a legitimate business which Google takes into account. This and other factors are very important for ranking organically and in the Google maps.
Okay, so how do I learn to do this?
There are plenty of resources online to learn how to do SEO properly (check out Matthew Woodward for great information) so I do not want to get too technical in this post (although I might do a more technical post later). I suggest you do a little Googling and research whoever you decide to listen to. This is important because there are a lot of people out there who simply do not know what they are doing when it comes to SEO and could lead you very, very far astray.
Web Design – The SEO Killer?
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Web design can really be summed up in one paragraph (if you want to learn more about it check out my future posts on the topic) as it is not as intensive as SEO. Essentially, with the advent of CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, anyone can become a web designer. You just need to learn how to upload things to a web server, access cpanel, and set up hosting/nameservers properly.
Now, I know some hardcore designers who might read this post will be very unhappy with me for saying what I just said, and yes, I know that coding a website is more “pure” and is real web design BUT for a beginner who does not know code, learning how to manage CMS sites like WordPress can be a real money grabber. So, if you are a budding web designer, you will need to set up your own agency (just like in SEO). Again, going off of the above examples, you will want to look at your competition, see what they are doing, and be sure to brand yourself as a local Buffalo web design agency (for example) to make sure you are found by businesses in your area.
Some people charge a couple thousand dollars to build a site for a client, and all they need to do is upload a WordPress theme, customize it to the clients liking, and its done. In the day of only coding sites from scratch, this could take weeks to complete but now it could take as little time as a week. This current site is on a free WordPress theme (I will update it later to make it better don’t you worry) and it took me 5 minutes to set up. There are also significant benefits with offering clients a CMS site. First, WordPress is highly customizable with a drag and drop design function that lets you create truly awesome pages (pictured below) with absolutely no coding knowledge.
Secondly, it comes with plugins. This is the most important feature to me, because you can use plugins for security, forms, widgets, sliders, and all sorts of other cool stuff that would take you forever to learn how to code. Now, not saying that coding does not have benefits (we will go into this in another post) but for beginners, the learning curve for coding well is pretty steep, so I highly recommend WordPress as a starting platform to get your business running.
If you want to dive into WordPress now, you can download it to your site, install everything, and watch the tutorial below to learn how to set everything up properly. I think I am going to leave it at that for this post, and I know I have not given my opinion as to which is best (it’s up to you!) but frankly both can be highly profitable if you utilize them correctly. Below is the WordPress video in case you are interested. Until next time!