Digital marketing is a difficult world to break out into. Without the proper experience or research, you could end up making decisions that have real negative consequences for your business, products, or services.
SEO can be an incredibly important tool and online marketing strategy to use in order to gain web traffic. On the other hand, web development is crucial to building trust with your prospective customers and putting your best foot forward online. So what should you chose between, web development vs. SEO?
When considering what is the best thing to invest in for your website in order to promote growth and sales, you may be stuck in a toss-up between web development vs. SEO. Like any decision that you will be making to further the success of your business, this isn’t an easy one.
However, we think that we can help you decide where to make changes to remain within budget while still making a positive impact on your product and service sales.
Let’s discuss the specifics of the differences between SEO vs. web development and how you can make the most of these two aspects of online marketing for your growth.
What is SEO?
SEO is actually an acronym that stands for search engine optimization. More specifically, SEO is a method of adding chosen keywords to your online content.
This action of adding a specific set of keywords then means that your content will then appear to be associated with those keywords in the algorithms of search engines. When thinking of search engines, we don’t just mean Google. Instagram, YouTube, and even Facebook all have search engines that take SEO into consideration.
This means that every time that you upload your content and put it out there, these search engines will try to find out a way to rank your content according to what they think it is about. When you use SEO and keywords that are applicable to your brand image, products, and services, you are telling the search engines what category the search engines should put your content in.
Within those categories, there are rankings. When you think of typing in “cars” into Google, the top results on that front page of Google are the top-ranked results. Through SEO, you can climb those ranks with your own content and matching keywords.
The process in which ranking occurs is a little bit more complicated than this, but let’s go over an example of where not using SEO for your content can severely negatively impact your potential for growth.
Let’s say that you are a brand that is offering to sell Disney Princess costume dresses. Your website and social media posts mention all the princesses by name but never mention any of the keywords “Disney Princess costume dresses” or any combination of those words.
However, “Disney Princess costume dresses” is exactly what someone looking for your product is going to search for when looking for it! This critical mistake is going to mean that even if you are selling the most phenomenal product, your target audience is going to have an extremely difficult time finding you on Google and other search engines.
Now that you know what SEO is, let’s go over what web development is all about.
What is Web Development?
Web development refers to the development of a website, as well as the maintenance of a website. This includes front-end and back-end web development, which are two halves of the whole of web development.
Front-end web development focuses more on web design and the overall look of a website. It is commonly referred to as the “client-side” or what the client sees when they visit your website.
On the other hand, back-end web development is the invisible side of a website. It includes all of the storage and integration of data, as well as the processes that occur when clicking around on the websites.
More specifically, when it comes to marketing and making improvements to your website to increase traffic, you will want to be looking into giving your website a facelift.
By making your website look more appealing to your prospective customers, there is an element of looking reputable and building trust with your clients. Websites that are not well-developed on the front-end side are seen as untrustworthy and people are not as likely to want to spend their hard-earned money on websites that they do not trust.
Giving your website a facelift through web development can lead to increased sales and web traffic due to easier navigation and improved relationship between you and your customers. If your website is unsightly or has misspellings, you will want to consider giving your website a new makeover.
Now that we’ve discussed the specifics of web development, let’s talk about how you can get the best of both worlds and improve your sales.
How Can You Get the Best of Both Worlds (on a budget)?
You may want to hire freelancers or contractors in order to make these changes for yourself, but you may not have to make both of these changes to your online presence separately if you do your own research.
As we discussed before, adding SEO to your website is as easy as doing keyword research to understand which keywords are most used to direct traffic to your content. In fact, SEO keywords can be part of your front-end web development by using SEO keywords in your website navigation, product descriptions, and website headings.
Instead of thinking of these two aspects of putting your best foot forward online as being separate, think of them as working together in order to help you make sales and boost web traffic.
When you are redesigning your website, add SEO keywords to your website text to maximize the growth that your new website design will gain for your business.
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