Website build process / SEO-first planning

I wanna talk about a very common mistake businesses often make with their website. I'll explain why this is such a mistake and then tell you what you should be doing instead.

The mistake is designing and building your website first and then figuring out how you're gonna optimize it. There's two common ways this happens, and I saw both of them in the last week.

Earlier this week, a company reached out to me for help with SEO, and they said, we just finished spending $20,000 on this beautiful website, and now we just need to help it rank. And they showed me their website, and it was beautiful.

It was this really minimalist design, and it had about 200 words on each page. So the first thing I said to them was, this is great, but we're gonna have to add way more content if we're gonna rank for the terms you're trying to rank for.

And they said, no, no, no. We already finalized the design.

It took us forever. But the truth is, for certain terms, you need a certain amount of content on the page...

eted, which means any terms those pages were ranking for, they were no longer ranking for. Any traffic they were bringing in, they're no longer bringing in.

Now, fortunately for them, the website had just launched, and so they'll be able to recover most of those rankings. But in both of these cases, these businesses could have saved a lot of time and money by planning out their optimization strategy before they started building the website.