Building SEO — Why Does It Seem So Complicated?
Typically, when folks are talking about building SEO, it’s natural to assume that content creation is what they mean. As someone who comes from a deep copywriting background, that was certainly my perspective for a long time.
However, the more I collaborated with website designers, particularly folks like our very own David Kerr, Vicki Tolmacheva, and Garrett Jackson, I very quickly realized that my ideas of SEO and “optimization” were very much limited.
Now, with AI-powered search engines becoming more and more prominent, I wanted to sit down with the experts in order to address this specific aspect of building SEO — the backend, structural work that helps businesses in making their websites more effective.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Kerr, where he generously shared his insights on why building SEO can take so long, and how Formada uses techniques across content and design strategies in order to build, maintain, and improve great websites.
How Structure Contributes to Building SEO
There’s a whole world related to SEO building that is rooted in website design.
Obviously the main thing most people are thinking about when it comes to SEO is content.
And developing good content is, of course, the primary way to improve your standing with search engines, but there are website design considerations that help search engines index and elevate your website’s search results.
These things aren’t entirely unrelated to content. But they’re more about how that content is structured and how your website is built. And, believe it or not, the way your website is built will impact your search results.
You need to structure your content with hierarchy in mind. When you build a website, this hierarchy is made explicit by your website designer with the specific HTML tags and organizational approaches they’re using.
Good technical organization of your content is going to help your website in building SEO, so to speak.
That’s why making sure that your pages and articles or blogs have appropriate Titles, H2s, H3s and so on is critical. They’re not just to help readers scan the page, they’re also for search engines. You need to write those headers in a way that engines can, analyze, and index, or even pick up to use as a snippable segment that appears in search.
What Does Building SEO Mean to AI Search and GEO?
There are definitely differences when it comes to what we’re now calling “traditional search” vs. generative AI search or GEO or whatever we’re deciding to call it now.
It’s less about battling for keyword dominance and more about responding meaningfully to longtail queries. But the structure still matters.
Your articles need to be tagged in a way that makes sense, like whether it’s a quote or an FAQ answer, having them written in that specific format and having them properly tagged in HTML is going to make them more effective in those search tools.
Generative search is essentially turning search results pages into a chat bot format, so having website content that plays well with that style is probably to your benefit.
FAQs are really great for this. Q&As, too. Summaries are also vital. Structuring your content in these formats, at least for now, is very important in building SEO and generative search visibility.
How User Experience Affects SEO
There are other things the layperson isn’t thinking about when it comes to building SEO that aren’t visible on the front end, but are used for organizing sites, like proper meta descriptions or proper title tags on a page.
You still need well written content for those things like the meta description. A clear, descriptive, succinct summary is going to help your page be more effective in search.
Having all of your meta links filled properly helps the robots that search engines use to crawl the site are able to analyze how the site is organized, how the pages are organized, what each page is about, and what information it has to offer the people who are searching.
Search engines are getting more sophisticated at judging things like poor contrast on the page, elements that are overlapping, angled text, things that are upside down — user experience will absolutely affect your SEO.
Those things, when left unaddressed, will compound. The intention behind a 20-image gallery followed by a video followed by another element is typically good, but they also can really slow down things, especially if you try to add multiples of those features onto a page and don’t have a good “lazy loading” optimization setup.
Is your content and layout optimized for mobile responsiveness? This is where page speed and user experience really matters. How quickly can the site load? How much of a person’s data are we eating up here? And on top of that, how legible is the mobile site? How easy is it to scroll through and find what you need?
We can’t forget images, either. Meta and Alt tags are for accessibility, but they’re also for search contextualization.
Building SEO One Day at a Time
No matter if it’s search robots, generative AI search, or the searchers themselves, context matters.
Building SEO is often a slow process, but that’s because it’s an ongoing process. You’re constantly updating your site with new, relevant, well-structured content in order to stay relevant.
But these regular efforts are, in our experience, rewarded in a compounding manner over time, way more so than the strategy of just redesigning your website every few years.
You’re essentially starting over by employing that technique, whereas ongoing optimization and refinement is the more effective approach.
Building SEO, creating generative search relevance requires attention to the way people are searching for information, creating and publishing useful content that directly addresses what they’re searching for, and structuring that content within a website that pays careful attention to the unseen elements that enhance the user experience.
This is precisely what we do at Formada. And we can do it for you, too.
If you’re interested in learning more about how our website and content services can help you achieve your business goals, then let’s talk! Contact us today. Let’s build a plan together.