Designer Boss
Designer Boss
Despina Gav on Avoiding Major SEO Mistakes Designers Make - Summit Speaker Series
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0:04
Welcome to the designer boss podcast, listen, learn, love and level up with the ultimate success guide for web and graphic designers.
0:17
My name is Anna Dower. I'm a cake lover and success-slaying graphic design mentor. And I'm Emma Kate, your personal sensei for mastering the wonderful world of the Web.
0:30
Together, we'll show you how to harness our tried and tested experiences and hard-earned lessons while you soak up everything we know about building a successful design business.
0:47
Hi, everyone, I'm pretty excited to be joined today by my go to gal for anything SEO related the lovely Despina Gab, there's been a say hi, and tell everyone a little bit about yourself.
1:00
Hey, I'm Despina as introduced. So at the moment, I do all things SEO. But really, I got into this because I love the digital nomad lifestyle. So currently, I'm living in Bali, enjoying a nice life here that's nice and relaxed and working online. So that's pretty much what I do.
1:22
Awesome. I think we're all very jealous of you living in Bali. I know I get like that when I hear you living it up over there. Sounds so lovely. So if anyone has been following me for a little while now, you've probably seen Despina space cover in a few places. She's always super helpful in my Facebook group. Whenever there's any SEO questions, whenever they sort of tend to come up. She's always really eager and happy to answer those questions, which is awesome because that's definitely not something I'm very good at.
1:56
She's also she was also a speaker at our very first designer boss summit earlier this year, which was awesome. And I'm honored to say we actually recently collaborated on our very first course together SEO for designers. But Despina actually started working with me or we started working together probably about three years ago, I think we were talking about earlier on I think it was about three years ago, when I was contracted to build a couple of websites for a marketing agency and Despina was like the SEO lead and that sort of project manager of that project. So just been on why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got into SEO in the first place.
2:35
Sure. It's actually not really a straightforward journey because I started off cheering maths to unwilling teenagers and my youngest student was about four and I wrote a book that then I didn't know how to market. So that was my first introduction to well, I've got this product, but I don't know how to get it out to the world. I don't know how to get my message out there. And at the time, I hired a like a publishing agency, and they did Amazon SEO. So that was my first taste of anything SEO related. They managed to get my book to hit the number one bestseller spot internationally within three days. And I was like, well, this was a journey, like how. I Seriously think that my book would get to that level of success. And I guess from there, I went through that journey of like, ultimate excitement within the early days of it. And I saw this big spike of hope, you know, the graph that just shoots right through to the moon. And then a few days later, there was the flatline of nope, and I was like, sure your best selling book doesn't just stay flatlined. But then I started learning that in order for marketing to work with any type of product or for any business, you actually need to keep investing in it. And I'm not really the kind of person who's into you know, pushy sales and anything that feels kind of slimy and sleazy. So I fell in love with this idea of SEO because it was attraction based marketing. I put out good quality content on the internet can turn a flatline of note into a nice, steady, consistent stream of traffic that I didn't have to feel like I was pushing into sales. It’s what people were already interested in anyway. And so understanding the idea of asking you shall receive that's really what it is to meet people had questions or they wanted information and SEO is what delivers the answer to them. And so that's really how I got into it. And so once I made the decision to get into it, I started learning about it. And then I met the people who had a really successful agency in the Gold Coast and that's how me and I then started working together while I was you know, on my training wheels
4:43
Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know about your journey. That's really cool.
4:50
Not many people sideways, you know where to get into it. Well yeah, when we started working together, I always in my in my client services, my web design business and I was hired to like design and develop a website. But it was for a marketing SEO agency and you were working there. And I'd worked with SEO consultants in the past, not very successfully, I might add, like, it was always kind of a lot of push and pull everyone trying to get there, you know, me wanting the design to be really beautiful, and the SEO person just wanting it to rank and there wasn't, you know, trying to find that middle ground was really hard a lot of the time, whereas working with you is such a breath of fresh air, like it was so much easier to like you fully understood that design was really important. And we can't just like make it ranked number one, and then people land on a really ugly website that doesn't convert people. And yeah, I loved that you actually you taught me so much throughout the process to like I got like your free course really just by working with you. Learning all these like tips and tricks that even as a designer who'd been building websites for almost probably seven or eight years by that stage, there was so many mistakes I was making, even though I thought, you know, I ticked a lot of the SEO boxes that a lot of designers try to avoid, but there was still so many that I was making so many mistakes.Especially because SEO changes so often, like sort of, it's hard to keep up when I'm a designer and SEO bores me to tears. So it was so cool.
Working with you, and learning that stuff, it was a unique experience that I haven't had with other SEO people before. And that's why I was so excited when you started going down this SEO meets design venture that you're on because you're the perfect person to teach SEO to designers.
6:59
Yeah. And I can say the same right back at you. Because at that point in time in the agency, I was managing a few website built in the one we had together that very first one I remember it was like a breath of fresh air. And I think it's also it goes both ways SEO people struggle against designers and development teams all the time as well. And that's really like bridging that gap between SEO and design in such a fast paced world. Anything to do with online technology changes so far. So yeah, that's really that that experience is what inspired me for SEO meets design. So people can stop having those frustrations on both sides.
7:37
So I wanted you today to hopefully to share some of those sort of top mistakes that I made or most designers tend to make when creating websites and sort of what those mistakes are and how we can avoid them.
7:56
Like in the years of working with designers, I noticed there are general patterns that happened. And I guess it comes down to many designers don't realize that SEO is about more than just ticking boxes in a plugin or a checklist. So a lot of designers think SEO is and after fact, I've worked on so many projects where the client is working directly with the designer, and then they loop in me as the SEO person. And the designer often says oh, we don't need to worry about SEO until after I finish building the website. And that is one of the biggest mistakes that I think designers having their mindset is that SEO is not something that gets tacked on the end. And I'll share some actionable tips later on. And you'll see what I mean by this as well. But there's also the issue of minimal design. And a lot of designers feel like it's okay to hide content, because things can seem a little bit wordy and you know, distract from the fonts and the images and the nice layout that you've worked so hard to create. But content really is something that can't be second in a design just because you don't think it looks good. It has to be there for SEO because ultimately what good is a beautifully designed website that no one is finding. A quiet, who doesn't get customers from their website will then not have the income and the budget to keep investing in good design or any other services anyway. And so I've seen this time and again, we're agencies deliver a nice website or designers, they they create a graphically really beautiful site that the client is in love with. And often that's the first thing clients want is a beautiful website. But then after months of it not working, then they turn to an SEO agency that then butchers that designers and that's the other problem I'm trying to stop here is that SEO agencies don't know as much about beautiful design as designers do. So the to do need to collaborate together. I've definitely seen that happen quite a few times, even to my designs that, you know, other SEO agencies have taken over and I look at the website six months down the track and I'm like what is going on?
9:54
Yeah, exactly. And so if a designer knows that if they've got tricks up their sleeves for managing long form content. So if you know how to design content that's at least 1000 words, that then solves a huge problem automatically, because a lot of SEO content needs to be that long or even longer. But if you can design 1000 words, you can design 2000, it's not that much harder. But going from less than 100 words to 1000 is a huge step. So that's probably one of the biggest mistakes and tips that I can share is handling content. Yeah, the other really big mistake that I see, which again, kind of transforms into a bit of a tip is understanding site architecture. And this is where, if you tack on SEO, at the end of a project, and the SEO person comes in and says all your URLs are wrong, the structure of the website is not SEO friendly, you basically have to go back to square one and redo the whole thing of, you know, how do you structure the website, the folders? Do you need to do redirects, and it becomes a much bigger project than you initially anticipated. And so like, really, SEO, comes down to a balance of a lot of little details. And it's not a designer's place to know all those details. SEO people can't expect designers to know this stuff. SEO people need to work with designers, so that both sides have what's needed the functionality. And the beautiful design can merge on the final product, which is the website, that's really what needs to happen. But if the designer isn't even open to understanding that SEO starts from inception, not after the design has finished, then that can lead to a lot of issues and tensions between designers and SEO people as well.
11:40
You know, I've made all of those mistakes over the years, but I definitely made the one of thinking like SEO is just something that gets tacked on at the end. Whereas, you know, not thinking about it from the beginning. And you know, there are a lot of things you can do, like you mentioned, like the site architecture and thinking about, you know, what the URLs will be and stuff like that, towards, you know, the beginning of when you're building the project, not after you've launched the project, and then you hand it over to an SEO agency. Another another thing you mentioned too, about designing content, like long sort of long form content. And I know one tip that you taught me when on one of our very first jobs together, probably our first job together was because you've written all this long content, obviously to get it ranking. And I was like, Oh, well, to make this look nice. I'll just put it in toggles, I think I was just using toggles or like an accordion kind of thing to hide all this content. Because if you know what easier to like hide it all. And not have it just like as you know, all this text on the page. And you taught me that that's actually the way a lot of toggles work. It probably depends on often what the theme you're using, I'm assuming but a lot of toggles hide that content. So Google and search engines can't actually read it until it's proven. Is that right?
13:08
At the time when we were working together? Yes. But recently, Google's algorithm has changed to mobile first indexing. But we have to also keep in mind, Google's not the only search engine. So just because Google is using mobile first and indexing and can now read content that's hidden most of the time, not all the time, most of the time, like toggles and accordions in WordPress with most of the popular themes. And now, okay, but what happens is that content gets devalued. So Google's like, well, you've hidden it in your design. So why should I prioritize it over content you have shown, so even like best case scenario with hiding things behind toggles is that it gets devalued and the value of it isn't factored in for SEO. So a good tip that I like to think about at least is any content that's there for SEO should be visible, if it's got keyword optimizations in any of these headings associated with the keywords and all that stuff. If it's extra stuff, that's fine to hide, because there's no SEO value in it, it still contributes to the word count. So that's fine. And then you can, as a designer, you've got a bit of leeway with hiding some of the content that maybe the client wants it there. Or if it's like disclaimers, or you know, extra stuff that people may not really want to spend, you know, a lot of their visual eye space in their attention reading anyway, they might want to see a See More button, use that feature there. And so it's pretty good compromise with design and SEO when you do it that way. Yeah.
14:32
That's a great tip. Well, that's good to know. I didn't know that.
14:37
I forgot to mention this. But there's also one more tip I wanted to share regarding headings. Headings are a designer's BFF and that's where you get to use your creativity with beautiful font styles and all of those things and you can also use code to help you structure what your design will look like using heading tags. as just a little pro tip, when you use heading tags purely for design purposes and the content inside those tags is not actually supporting the SEO or the content, then that can lead to some SEO issues. Because the way that bots read heading tags is to support the structure of your content. So it really should be your main headings and subheadings that are in the article that you use. And so if you're designing with, you know, over 70 Heading tags on a page of 300 words of content that can then look a little bit suss to search engine bots. And so it's just another little actionable tip you can take away right now is to consider how you use headings in your, in your pages. And there's a cool free little extension you can use in Google, it's called SEO meta in one click will add the link below if you want to use that. And it shows you all your heading tags, and you can identify any better empty, you can identify ones that have been repeated, or ones that don't really make sense in the flow of an article. So it's just another little thing I see a lot of designers doing too many heading tags does have a net negative SEO impact.
16:00
And for anyone who's sort of new to web design just started building websites, when when we talk about heading tags, that's when you sort of formatting text, and you get to set whether it's paragraph text, or it's a Heading One, Heading Two, Heading Three. And depending on sort of the theme or the Page Builder you're using, you'll set it potentially in a slightly different place, but they're all generally worded the same. And what you can do and what I have done in the past is usually you know, if I want the text to be really big, I just set it as a heading one tag and or a h1 tag, and it would just make the text quite big. And then I just leave it at that. Whereas what sort of Despina been saying here is doing that for any text you want to make big it can be really detrimental to your SEO, you should only have one heading one tag per page. And then you can have sort of multiple HTML page threes and stuff, but they should follow a logical order. The good thing about a lot of page builders and stuff now like Divi and Elementor, for instance, is that you can actually style the text to be big, even if it's just paragraph text, or even if it's a heading for text or something like that. And you're heading 2 text could actually be smaller than your heading 4 text or something like that. So you have so much flexibility over styling it. You don't need to use those heading tags unnecessarily.
17:24
That's 100% You got it. You hit the nail on the head with that one. Yeah.
17:29
Cool. Well, um, lastly, I wanted to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, pretty much if anyone's sort of keen to sort of get into more about SEO, and you know what's involved, maybe you could share sort of what you do on a day to day basis. There's a lot of creativity in SEO, though I know, it doesn't seem that way to a designer right off the bat. Because the kind of creativity we rely on is on problem solving. So we've got a bunch of problems. And SEO really is a fine balance of a lot of little details. If you've ever started to learn about SEO yeah, I've probably, I'm sure that you've read the same blog posts, I probably have as well. And you get overwhelmed with all the little stuff that people pay attention to for SEO, and it's finding that right balance. So what I like to do, at least to keep it easy is just to think about what is the objective? And What problems are we solving. So the first thing I always do is start off with the goal. And for SEO, it's usually by either increasing online visibility, or were helping a website improve its revenue goals, or its business goals. That's really what it comes down to. And much like a designer, you're working to the same kind of goals from a different angle. But because SEO involves a lot of data and a lot of things, there's certain tools that we use, and we just keep an eye on certain signals of how things are performing. And then we tune according to the performance of our content, and links. And I guess I always use this analogy that you know, an SEO professional is not just an SEO professional, they do a little bit of design, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of content, even a little bit of PR, and so many other things go into it. And so the hats that we wear in the SEO industry are so many depending on what avenue of those two goals, really, that we're working towards visibility and earnings for the business, depending on what's the solution there for improving the search engine visibility. And so it's not a one size fits all thing by any means. If you ever get into SEO for your own website, you kind of need to make the decision as to is more content going to help me or is more of the PR and in getting my brand mentioned on other websites is going to help me more and so it's figuring out those problems, and then implementing the solution that we discover. And also my my most favorite part is actually competitive research. I love seeing what other people are doing and how I can beat them. Yeah.
19:53
It's like when I talk about how I love doing a little bit of code and some designers like no like Get that away from me. So Yeah.
20:00
but you know, like for me to choose colors and fonts and how to brand a website. No, thank you. I'd rather just give it to someone and say make it pretty. And I like I just trust they'll do what they know how to do best, you know? Yeah.
20:12
Well, that's all I'll give you all my competitor research.
20:17
Thank you so much for joining us today. And for sharing all those awesome tips. I know, they'll be super valuable to a lot of designers out there. Even if you just want to implement them on your own website. Like definitely, there's a lot of actionable steps there that you can go through your website and make sure that you're, you know, taking all those little SEO boxes there. And for people who want to find out more or sort of get in touch with you. Firstly, I mentioned this been is actually going to be part of our next designer boss Summit coming up in February 2021. So I'm looking forward to having you talk again there and sharing all your awesome SEO knowledge. But in the meantime, or even after the fact, if you're listening to this podcast afterwards, where can people find you?
21:13
Yeah, great question. So I've set up a Facebook group for free, we'll pop in the link below. And it's a place where design professionals SEO professionals can mix in it's where we can play nice together and bridge the gap between our two disciplines so that we can understand more of each other. And it's like at the moment, it's really just designers in there who have SEO questions, and I go in and answer them. But over time, I hope that it will evolve to be no a nice mix of people who want to bridge the gap and collaborate more with each other and understand how to solve problems together.
21:42
So there's a Facebook group, we've also got, there's the blog post that I did on your website Emma, as well, we can pop the link in below if anyone wants to read more actionable tips right away. I think there was quite a lot of valuable information there. And there was a freebie as well, you could get your hands on so that would probably be the next stop if you want something straight away. Awesome. Yeah, definitely. We'll put links to both the group and the blog post in the shownotes. But thank you so much for your time today. It was lovely chatting with you.
22:14
Likewise, thank you very much!
22:23
You've been listening to the designer boss podcast with Anna Dower and Emma Kate. If you'd like to learn more about us and our upcoming digital summit for graphic and web designers, head to our website designerboss.co