FREE PDF Guide: SEO for Beginners

We’ve partnered up with our favourite website designers!

We've partnered with Cheap Web Design

SEO Scoop has officially chosen our favourite cheap website designers in the UK as our partners. Cheap Web Design have been operating since 2002 and offer a professional service and cheap websites which load at lightening speeds. We highly recommend them if you’re looking for a new website which doesn’t cost a fortune but looks great and functions well. Visit their website if you’d like to learn more.

Web Design and SEO have always been two services which go hand in hand. As SEOs there is the constant challenge to make sure that both the on-page and off-page SEO are completed properly. It’s very common for meta titles, descriptions and alt tags to be left as an afterthought and many website designers don’t even bother to put them in! There’s also the risk that when a new website is built, it’s done with so many different plugins, unoptimised images and next to no consideration is made about the website’s load speeds.

Any professional web designer will know that there’s a trade-off between design, experience and speed. When choosing a company to build you a website, make sure to ask all of the right questions.

Common examples include asking how the agency will upload images, which formats they use and how do they ensure that the website loads quickly and smoothly across all devices. There are also tools which you can use as a benchmark for speed including Google’s own tool, Pingdom and GTMetrix. You could always test some of their portfolio websites to see how they perform. Just remember that many clients do like to host their own website, so be sure to check which ones they are hosting.

Furthermore, check which specific on-page SEO elements are included with the build and if they just install a plugin such as Yoast SEO and leave you to write your own titles and descriptions or if they conduct any keyword research on your behalf.

It’s crucial to remember to step on your web designer’s toes, regardless of whether they are cheap, in the same way we’ve written an article about stepping on your SEO expert’s toes – just make sure you approach it in the right way!

When you’re working with a cheap web designer, it saves a lot of time and effort if you know the direction you’d like to take your website in. As an example, providing a simple, easy to read brief about the purpose of the website, the reason it’s being built and also the style you’d like to go for, will leave less room for interpretation.

In the past, when we’ve used cheapwebdesign.co.uk services for some of our own internal projects, we make sure to supply a few key example websites where it’s easy to determine the look and feel we’d like to follow for our design.

It usually only takes 30 minutes to scroll through some of your competitors, pick out the different areas which you like and dislike and then write it up in a document to pass on to your designers. Understand that if you later change direction and begin supplying guidance after the design has already been created, that there will most probably be an additional cost as it will take up more time. After all, you’re looking for a cheap service, not a free one!