You can be the most talented designer in the world, but it’s not going to bring clients to your door. Even with an amazing website, you’re going to have to put in the work.

SEO techniques are one of the best ways to make sure you have organic traffic pouring in.

Properly implementing them can make all the difference.

If you’re looking for search engine optimization techniques you can begin to use today, then you’re in the right place. Read on and we’ll help you bring in the clients you deserve.

1. Run a Regular Blog

Content is the basis of all on-page SEO and the easiest way to keep adding content is through putting up blog posts. Depending on the focus of your business you might offer tutorials, case studies, examples of good and bad design, or whatever else suits your fancy.

The blog isn’t the be-all end-all of your SEO but it can provide a solid basis for you to begin to work your way up the SERPs.

Make a regular update schedule and do your best to stick to it. Once or twice a week is fine for newer websites, those which have been around for a good bit of time can often maintain rankings with just a couple of articles a month.

2. Reach Out to Other Websites

Outreach is one of the easiest ways to begin garnering high-quality backlinks. Without them, you’re not going to rank.

It may take a few dozen e-mails before you get even a single hit but offering to write a guest post in exchange for a backlink on the website you’re targetting can help immensely.

Try to reach out to others who are tangentially related to the industry, rather than your direct competitors.

3. Find Broken Links

Another great way to get backlinks to boost your SERP is to find broken links within older content. Use a program like Dead Link Checker on a site and you’ll get a list of all 404 redirects contained within.

If you have a similar post you can reach out fairly casually. Make sure not to boilerplate the e-mails, most webmasters are quite savvy to the whole affair and if you seem genuinely interested in helping out you’ll get better results.

If you find a particularly sweet broken link but don’t have relevant content you can also produce something relevant and inquire about it.

4. Focus on Site Structure

There are a number of ways to structure a website so that it’s easier for the ever-growing legion of Google spiders to easily figure out what’s relevant.

Each person takes well to a different strategy, but for many people the cluster method is easiest to understand. Find a good, high traffic keyword such as “graphic design” and then create a large post covering the basics.

From there, you’ll create smaller pages dedicated to specific questions like “how much does a graphic designer make” or “what does a graphic designer do.” Spinning things off this way can help immensely and also makes the site easier to navigate for your users.

5. Be Mobile Friendly

Your page should be designed with both mobiles and desktops in mind.

The percentage of searches made from smartphones is insane, it’s estimated to be over half of all queries. If your page isn’t compatible with mobile then you’re losing customers.

You’ll also need to make sure that your web page appears properly on mobile, so whip out your tablet or phone and give it a look over.

Some things which are fine on a desktop can be a pain on mobile. Font sizes are the best example, to remain mobile friendly it’s recommended you use at least a 14 point font since the display is smaller.

6. Keep Your Page Fast

Your page needs to be fast, otherwise, you’re not only going to have more people leaving before things load but also hurt your rankings.

Site speed is a known factor when it comes to search engine optimization. You can help by making sure you’re using a fast server in the first place.

Site design should be kept as minimalist as possible. Using fewer plug-ins, animations, and other memory heavy components will help you to keep speed up.

This is, of course, something of a hurdle for those involved in design. You want to show off your best work, after all, and that’s likely to be high-resolution images, large animations, and other large pieces.

Don’t avoid using those, you want to showcase your skills, but optimize them properly outside of a portfolio. Speaking of which…

7. Optimize Your Images for SEO

The images which you use on your page can be further optimized.

The technical side of things is easy, you can simply resize your images so that they’re of an appropriate resolution for the page. While you can jam an enormous file in a 250×205 pixel spot, the whole thing still needs to download to display for the user.

If you’re using WordPress there’s in-built size reduction software, otherwise, you can find resizing programs online.

You’ll also want to include a clear plain-text for the image. This simply describes what’s in it and helps with accessibility for the visually impaired, it’s not a place to start jamming keywords.

If they fit naturally, good, but otherwise this is a rather indirect way of producing SEO power. Google’s focus is on the end-user, so accessibility measures can help immensely.

You may also appear in the Google Images results, which is another way to get organic traffic. As a designer, your images are your work so it’s even more important than in many fields.

SEO Techniques Can Make the Difference

We’d all like to have clients materialize out of thin air on sheer virtue of our talent.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. Instead, careful application of SEO techniques can help you reach a wider audience and begin to draw in the clients you need to keep your business running.

Enjoy our little guide? If so, check out our Business Resources section to help you learn to make the difference in your business.