“Many people believe SEO is simply about using the right keywords in your blog posts. The reality is that it’s far more complex than that. Before you can even rank on the first page for a keyword, Google and the other search engines need to be able to crawl your website efficiently and understand what it’s about.

That means the code used to build your site has to be accessible, up-to-date, and fast to load. It should also display properly on mobile devices. That starts during the web design and development phase.

For example, if your phone number is displayed within an image and not as text, the search engines are going to have a hard time finding it because they don’t understand images as well as text. The end result is that someone searching for your phone number may not find it and could go to one of your competitors instead.

If your website isn’t kept up-to-date then it becomes vulnerable to hackers. If Google believes your site has been hacked, it will place a warning next to your search result discouraging visitors from clicking through to your site.

Likewise, if your site is slow to load, it doesn’t give a good user experience for your visitors. Therefore Google is more likely to push your site further down the results pages and promote a quicker site instead.

Finally, if your site doesn’t display correctly on mobile devices this can also have a detrimental effect on your search rankings.

So overall what we are seeing is that SEO is less about having the right keywords on a page and more about providing the best overall result for visitors. Your website design plays a fundamental role in many of those ranking factors.”