Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is don't let design perfection get in the way of your SEO. This is an important aspect because SEO is a long-term game and oftentimes people perfectionism in design or the UI can get in the way of general optimizations. So I want to talk about that today, but before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a [Kemon 00:00:30] black tea from Tea Station. This is one of the OG Boba shops that kind of ... was on the forefront of bringing Boba, at least I know, to the West coast of the Southern California area. I bought this tea a long time ago because I wanted to make black tea on my own at home, but let's go ahead and skip brewing and get talking about the topic.
So the reason why I want to talk about this topic today is because when we're doing SEO, it's never in a void. We have to work with a lot of different parties and that's... We have to work with the management, website, other marketing teams working on other areas like social or paid. There's often many players at hand. And what we often find is that website design, not the design team, but the design itself can often be one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to our SEO. And so the reason why we're talking about this, because when you're doing SEO, a lot of SEO is still very text-based. Google doesn't read images or videos very well. They read texts on a page well. And so when we're trying to roll out optimizations on the site for SEO purposes, it is best for us to throw texts on a website and move quickly.
Now, of course, the text and the webpage needs to be readable. It needs to be somewhat aesthetic so that someone coming across here doesn't think that this is a total scam or a joke, but generally it doesn't have to be Pablo Picasso in the sense either. So why I bring that up is that a lot of times when we're working on projects, we'll have a lot of the design be the main thing that takes up most of our time. Generally it's management, the business owner or the team, they want the text to look a little bit better, or the colors look a little bit better. Whatever it might be, generally design is what they kind of nitpick on. And in many areas in your life, you've probably experienced that before, even in your own business. Designing something can really... Can we move that here? Can we move that here? And it pushes things back weeks to months.
Now, what I often do with my clients is I talk to them about... Getting the design right is totally valid, and we should do that, but there's no reason why we can't quickly get something on the website and we can prefect the design later. So a good example is let's imagine you're rolling out a new page for a new service you're adding. And so as you're rolling it out, a lot of clients ... the normally they'll do is they'll look at the content, they'll get the design, a mock-up, then they'll design it, develop it, and once the development's there, usually the client's like, "Oh, can we move this here? I don't really like the way it ended up looking. Can we move that there?" And then that takes a little bit of time. What I generally advise clients is, what would be best is, let's go ahead and publish the content on the website already.
If you're concerned about people seeing it, we can publish it and treat it as an orphaned page. Now, again, I've filmed a video not too long ago about orphan pages, and you don't want to use these too fervently, but in some of these cases, when you're just rolling it out, then yeah. I usually try to create an orphaned page, put the text on there, I go and get a search console and it gets ... the page index. So that Google's aware that that page is there. And then as the design team can work on it and fix the design, the page is already there. So it's already kind of been indexed by Google and we can start the process of ranking. The flip side, and this is what a lot of people do. They will not publish the page until they think it's perfect.
And so what can often happen is now that you ... trying to get this page perfect, the content needs to be perfect, the design needs to be perfect, suddenly it's two to three months out and now we're two to three months behind on our SEO. And generally an SEO campaign can take anywhere from six months to two years, you've already pushed that six months to two years to nine months to two years and three months. So therefore, I like to tell my clients, let's be quick about this. Let's move agile, right? And so let's go ahead and publish it, index it. Let's just not make a navigate-able to anybody who is on the site, but let's index it with Google and we can perfect it over time. Other rather than trying to get the design perfect, because what often happens is everyone's just frustrated.
Usually, we're two months, three months on the line, the design is perfect, but we ... all the marketing got pushed back and everything, and just the management team or whoever was the one that wanted the designed to look perfect, doesn't even care anymore because they just want to move quickly, right? So in that case, I really encourage clients. Move quickly when it comes to publishing pages on a site. If you care a lot about the design, that's good, but don't let it stop you from executing other things. We can publish, not making navigate-able on the menu, and get an index and as generally a great way to do it. So what I want to kind of impart is if you are adding new pages onto the site, don't always wait for the design to be done. You can always do it in stages. Text on a page first, then the design, okay. Then does the team want to make more edits on the design because it's not perfect? Well, let's keep the one we have for now. And then let's get ... when the design's done, we'll add the new designs in.
That would be a best case scenario for SEO, but isn't always available. I know for some teams, but in your case, I would do it. I would do that if the option's available for you and your team. Talk with your teams, see if that's doable. It benefits SEO greatly if you get that speed and that time to kind of give you a space to get the page index and starting to get ranked on Google. So hopefully that will help you in your operations. It's more of an operational SEO thing, but it will really help if you can get that kind of cadence going. But if you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.