Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a type of marketing focused on helping search engines better understand what it is you do and how you’re different based on the content and behavior of your website. At it’s most basic, SEO focuses on creating content that drives value and serves search results from a set of key words and phrases. The SEO expert might have a list of two or three-hundred words and phrases your website should serve in order to rank better than your nearest competitor.

SEO experts also look at hundreds of other factors in a website, including but not limited to: Accessibility compliance (ADA compliance, that’s a big one these days), words used in navigation, words used in image ALT tags, the names of image files, how fast the site loads (also related to image optimization), how well it behaves on tablets and on mobile phones, checking if it is correctly secured by SSL, removing any duplicate content from the website itself and any other web properties that the client owns that is duplicating the content, the list goes on.

You might have noticed that these are aspects of a website that are best considered before it is built. If you want to be competitive on the web, you should already have written out your core value proposition, your explanation of services and products, and other important communications. You should know the navigation structure of your website, including the words that appear in the menu system.

Your SEO expert is going to re-write most of that anyway, but if they don’t have a starting point, it gets even more expensive.

I don’t provide SEO services, but I work with SEO people all the time. My advice is to bring an SEO expert in on the very first meeting. SEO is a marketing endeavor, and you want to make sure that all your ideas and writing fit with the overall SEO strategy you are paying for. If you wait until the end of the project, until after the website is launched, the SEO expert is going to inevitably come back with a raft of changes that need to happen. The cost to have a web designer like me implement SEO requirements after the site is built can be a bit of a shock. In the world of web design, these are billable Change Requests nobody budgeted for, including the web designer. If the SEO expert is in on it from the start, the web designer can estimate the cost of what the SEO person wants to see put in place as part of the initial build.

We all want to contain marketing costs. Bringing your SEO expert to the table with the web designer (like me) as soon as possible will result in a site that is SEO ready at launch with a cost that is known up front.