SEO for Creative Agencies: Why a Beautiful Website Isn't Enough
Let’s say you’re a creative professional, perhaps a graphic or web designer, and the sites you build are beautiful. But let’s also say your business is slowing a little and you’re not sure why more people aren’t finding your website. Do you know why?
Time for a case study.
The Problem With Beautiful Websites
Recently I did an SEO audit for a world class real estate marketing design firm. Their website has gorgeous full screen videos, no navigation, no favicon, and no back button. Literally no navigation or calls to action. Once you watch a video there is nowhere to go. They get most of their business from referrals and are using their site as social proof only. Once someone has their name the website serves as a portfolio to show their quality of work, but they are basically invisible online and their organic traffic is zero. This can work if the owner is a good promoter, but as the global real estate market has become softer, their referrals are slowing down so they decided to look into optimizing.
What do we need to do? How do we get this company on the map? How do we get them found by AI and google?
The answer is all the boring stuff I talk about all the time. No fancy stuff, just the basics. This might sound obvious by now but here’s the playbook.
How to Get a Creative Business Found by Search Engines and AI
Make sure they have copy on the website that clearly tells people what they do and who they’re for (keywordsssss)
Clear headings, structure and hierarchy (one H1 per page, H2s and H3s in proper placement)
SEO titles and meta descriptions are compelling for each page
Immediate tracking in Google Search Console
Create excellent on-page user experience (UX), buttons and navigation to view different pages and contact the business (calls to action)
Bonus SEO points for alt text on images 👀 (in the case of our design firm they didn’t have any images aside from their logo)
Extra bonus SEO points for creating a Google Business Profile and implementing a review strategy. This is known as off-page SEO and is equally important.
The above is a great start. These basic things need to be done first before we can start getting fancy. If you’re curious what “getting fancy” means, that’s when we start adding things like backlinks, FAQs, fixing page load speeds and other technical errors and doing competitor analyses (and more).
But honestly, you’d be surprised how much difference it makes just making sure these basic things are done. If your competitors are doing this and you’re not, you’re going to get left behind.
Maybe I should rename my business to be “no frills SEO” 😅
A common question I get asked is…
can’t AI do this?
Yes but not completely. I use AI a lot. I’m happy to share with you HOW I use AI with my work. Let me know if you’d like to see a video about this and I’ll make one for my youtube channel.
Thanks for reading, stay optimistic, and as always reach out if you’d like a free five minute SEO audit of your site.
