To establish whether or not you should offer SEO as a website designer, there’s one thing you have to consider first: What level of success or growth do you want your clients to achieve when working with you? What is your end goal of working together?
If your goal is to design a website that your client would be proud to drop the link at any given moment of their day, you don’t necessarily need SEO. But, if you’re looking to create a platform they’re excited to share and can rely on to kickstart their long-term growth — then yes, you likely need to offer SEO.
Adding SEO to your offer suite isn’t the quick answer I made it out to be, but there are ways to integrate SEO into your design business without spending hours learning a new skill. Let’s talk about it:
The Relationship Between Web Design and SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, allows Google and other search engines to place websites in search results — the websites you get to design. However, unlike common belief, SEO is more than keyword placement and creating content; it’s tied closely to a website’s design.
The design creates a user-friendly experience, impacts site speed, adds titles and meta descriptions to the backend of pages, and even determines a page’s structure. These factors impact how a website is crawled and ranked on search engines and affect its visibility.
In fact, you may already be doing the basics of SEO in your website design process, intentionally or unintentionally!
Why You Should Offer SEO Beyond The Basics
The main reason? Client results.
Offering SEO beyond the basics and dedicating time specifically to research and optimization for your clients will make a huge difference in how well their site performs on search engines after launch.
Better client results lead to better testimonials; better testimonials create more social proof for leads to book. An elevated client experience leads to more referrals — which is even better for your long-term lead generation.
How to Start Offering SEO Services to Your Website Design Clients
There are three main ways you can start offering SEO services to your website design clients. Depending on the time you have available and what you feel comfortable with, you can choose what works best for you:
#1. Learn SEO
If you’re confident in your ability to learn and apply SEO strategies for your clients, then you can DIY it! I recommend taking a few SEO courses and programs — potentially even signing up for a mentorship program to get hands-on help and experience.
The downside of this method is the time commitment, which can be difficult to juggle if you’re already spending most of your time managing clients and marketing your business.
#2. Partner with an SEO Strategist
This functions similarly to a referral partnership. Connect with an SEO Strategist familiar with your client’s industry and recommend them when onboarding your website design projects. You can include this in your proposal or simply make the introduction.
This option is great for providing the best results for clients, but it can be a bit clunky in your onboarding process as they’ll technically be working with two different service providers.
#3. White Label SEO Services
You connect with an SEO Strategist who offers white-label services and outsources the SEO portion of your design projects. Most SEOs offer a specific white-label price for their services, and you set the client-facing price to make a profit still and be paid for your time in finding the client and managing the project.
With white-label SEO, the process is smoother for the client because they’re investing in working with you while an SEO Strategist helps in the background. This gives you the same SEO success without the clunky client experience.
Finding What Works for You
If you’re not sure what would work best for you, but you know that SEO is something you want — or even need — to offer your website design clients, book a free consultation call.
We’ll discuss whether you’re ready to offer SEO services, how they can fit into your offer suite, and what it looks like to partner with white-label search engine optimization.
Comments +