Basic SEO Website Design Tips for Your Showit Website

Design

SHARE THIS POst

When you’re in the early stages of creating your website, one thing keeps coming up: SEO.

It’s easy to feel bombarded by SEO information and not know where to start or how much it actually matters. This post will break down some SEO basics and give you practical SEO website design tips specifically for your Showit website.

Before we dive in, hi! I’m Emily, a web designer at Blue House Creative Company where I specialize in custom Showit websites and website template design. While I’m not an SEO expert, there are foundational best practices that every website should have, and that’s exactly what we’re covering here.

I’m breaking this post into three sections: what SEO actually is, what to do before you start designing, and what happens during the design phase that directly affects your SEO.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In plain terms, it means you’re setting up your website and content so search engines can easily understand what you offer, and serve it to the right people who are looking for it.

When you search for something online, you type in a word or phrase and a list of results appears. Each of those results is what the search engine determined was the best match for what you searched. Good SEO helps your website show up in those results.

There are two main categories of SEO. The first is on-page SEO, everything that lives directly on your website. This is also the type of SEO you have the most control over. The second is off-page SEO, external sources on the internet that link back to your site.

Both matter. But when you’re in the beginning stages of building your website, on-page SEO is where you focus first.

SEO Before You Design

Before you start designing, you need to know what you want your website to be found for. This is where keywords and keyword research come in.

Many of your core keywords will come naturally from clearly defining what you do and who you do it for. This is also why having a focused niche matters so much. Every page on your website needs its own target keyword, and ideally you want to do a little research upfront to find out whether you can realistically rank for it, or whether a more specific variation would serve you better. You also do not want multiple pages competing for the same keyword. One keyword, one page.

Ranking for a keyword simply refers to where your page shows up in a Google search for that term. Some keywords have high search volume and lots of competition. Others have lower search volume with less competition. Some have almost no search volume at all. The goal is to find keywords that are realistic for where you are right now and aligned with what your audience is actually searching for.

Doing this research and mapping out your keywords before you start writing copy is essential. You need your keywords woven into your content in order to rank for them. And here is the important part: having a keyword on your page does not guarantee you will rank for it. Strategy and consistency matter.

For a deeper dive into keyword research, these two resources are worth bookmarking: Semrush’s Keyword Mapping Guide and Ahrefs’ Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research. Both are trusted names in the SEO and digital marketing space.

SEO During Your Design

Once you move into the design phase, there are several on-page SEO best practices you (or your designer) should be implementing.

Writing meta titles and descriptions for every page is a must. These should include the target keyword for that specific page. Optimizing your images is equally important and covers a few things: resizing and compressing images for faster load speed, renaming image files before uploading them (descriptive file names matter), and adding image alt text to every image. Alt text supports both SEO and accessibility, so it is not optional.

If you are working with a designer, have a conversation upfront about what is and is not included in their process. Some designers handle meta titles and descriptions for your key pages only. Some do all pages. Some do not include it at all. The same goes for image optimization. Some will resize and compress images as part of their workflow, others will not. Knowing this before your project starts saves a lot of back and forth.

Other SEO best practices that happen on page during your design include heading structure. Your headings need to have the correct text property assigned to them so Google knows what to look at first (this is also an accessibility requirement). Your heading structure should naturally include your keywords, so again, this should be written out before you design.

One more thing worth mentioning: if you have an existing website and you are migrating to a new design or template, you will want to set up URL redirects. For example, if your old website had a page called “about-me” and your new site just calls it “about,” anyone who clicks an old link will land on a broken page unless you tell Showit to redirect it. Showit has a helpful doc on how to set this up, and it is worth doing before your new site goes live.

Wrapping It Up

Good SEO is not something you bolt on at the end. It starts before you ever open a design tool.

When you take the time to do your keyword research upfront, map those keywords to the right pages, and then carry those best practices through the design phase, you are building a website that is not just beautiful but actually findable (that’s the goal right???). Every piece works together: the research, the copy, the image optimization, the metadata. None of it lives in a vacuum.

If you are starting from scratch or doing a full redesign, use this as your checklist. Do the pre-work. Have a conversation with your designer. Set up your redirects. And know that SEO is a long game, not a one-time fix. The work you put in now builds the foundation for everything that comes after.