About five years ago when Giantseed Creative was started, I described the company more as a web developer than a web designer. There were some of the pages on the site that were written with the keyword or phrase “web developer.” One problem – when people were searching for a company like Giantseed Creative in Google, that wasn’t what they were searching for, they were searching for ‘web designer.’

Thankfully for me, I was still getting good traffic to the site even though many users were searching for ‘designer’ instead of ‘developer.’ In some instances, however, that simple little difference could have a signification difference. This is a mistake that happens for some business when they are setting up their keywords – they use the keywords that they would use to search for them, not the keywords that their users or clients/customers would use.

That’s one of the reasons you need to spend some time doing keyword research before you launch your site. Make sure the words or phrases you are using are the same as those that a user without your knowledge of your industry would use. If possible, I would even survey some of your current clients and ask them what words they would use to search for your site.

Once your site is launched, be sure that it includes some sort of analytics program. I recommend Google Analytics. It’s free and it does as much (and sometimes more) than any of the paid for tools I’ve seen. Once the site has been live for a while, you can look over the reports and see what keywords users were typing in when they were searching for you. You can then go back over the content and reword or rearrange some parts to focus on the keywords that people have been using to find you.

If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site, be sure to work with your web designer (or developer) to get it installed and then start looking over the results and make any needed changes to your content.