Bretts Marketing Bytes

The question of whether a company should hire an SEO before or after a site redesign often comes up in my seminars.

Let me put it this way. Would you let a contractor start to build your house without a blue print? I hope you said no.

My point is that you have to think about your web developer just like that home contractor. Their only job is to build something that functions and looks pretty. Without a blue print they cannot do this, so they rely on you to tell them what you want. However,  you are relying on them to know what works best for SEO, but I have news for you…9 times out of 10, they haven’t got the slightest clue.

Just because they are a web developer doesn’t mean they know SEO. These are two different skill sets.

Let me give you a more practical example. The other day I recieved a call from a company who just had their website redesigned and are now looking for SEO services.  They told me that they used to rank pretty well with their old site and now with their new site their rankings have completely dropped off the face of the Google. The weird part is that they told me they were okay with it, because the new site looks and functions better than the old one. ( Okay, are you kidding me?)

You can have the best looking website in the world but if no one is going to it, your site is worthless.

So I pulled up their site in my browser while I was on the phone with them and immediately noticed that their site navigation was way off for SEO efforts and worse, their pages are producing dynamic non search friendly URL’s.  Those seem like easy fixes right, yes, but the underlying technology that this site was built on was just a nightmare.

So essentially they want me to make gold out of a turd. I’ve done these types of projects before and they never turn out good.  When the technology is not right, you cannot expect good results.

In a nutshell they chose a bad platform to put their website on and probably a web developer who doesn’t know the first thing about marketing. That’s why they call themselves a web developer and not a marketer.

Web developers are not marketers.

Now this company has to back track and spend more money to try and get their website to be search friendly, when all they had to do is get guidelines in the beginning from an SEO. This would have saved them a ton of money. Instead, they are stuck with a turd.

To summarize this post and answer the question of should you hire an SEO before or after your site redesign; do yourself  a favor and start working with an SEO right away. Let them create the blue print. It will save you a boat load of money. Not to mention,  there is a lot of effort that goes into getting solid top rankings and any good SEO might turn down the offer to work with your company if the technology is not going to work in their favor.

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