Understanding the Importance of Managed Creative Control in SEO Contracts

At SilverServers, our primary focus is to ensure that our small business clients receive as much value and quality for their SEO and Website services as possible, at a price that is easily accessible. We understand the importance of a well-structured website for SEO success, and we also understand that business owners like to be in control of their website presence. This article aims to shed light on how we balance your needs as a business owner within our work to build and maintain a quality website that has a strong SEO presence.

Our Unique Position in the Web Design Industry

Unlike many web development companies that primarily focus on marketing, SilverServers is fundamentally a technology and software development company. Our expertise extends beyond just web development:

• We do a lot of research and development on software and electronics.
• We operate and maintain our own data center and build our own servers.
• We develop custom software tailored to specific needs.
• We have developed an entire suite of IoT systems that monitor websites, SEO, servers, environmental systems, log files, and more.

This deep-rooted technical knowledge sets us apart in the industry and influences the tools and access we provide to our clients.

The Grassroots SEO Program

The Grassroots program is a managed service with contracts that typically span two years. Instead of merely designing and handing over a website after its creation, we pro-actively work with and collaborate with our clients throughout the contract duration. Our team, applying over 26 years of experience, digs in deep to ensure the technical, content, and user experience of your website are on track to help you with your business and SEO goals.

To ensure the success of the program, we adhere to industry best practices for tech and SEO. Sometimes, this means diving deeper into design and change requests to ensure they align with technical and SEO standards, as well as making sure changes will help you achieve your goals.

Additionally, we keep the website simple at the beginning of a contract term so that it’s easy to make strategic content changes often without engaging in a design change process for every change or addition. As the program progresses and content begins to settle in and prove its effectiveness and value (with pages attracting desired visitors),we start considering locking existing content into more visually sophisticated designs. This aligns with our philosophy that websites are not brochures or posters, they are active members of your team that grow and evolve alongside your business.

Responsive Web Design

Our team is proficient in "responsive website design," ensuring websites adapt seamlessly across various screen sizes. While this offers a superior user experience, it also means that even minor visual changes can have broader implications. Therefore, we engage in thorough discussions with clients to ensure changes are implemented without compromising the site's integrity and growth strategy. Even today, it is surprising how many businesses have websites that break or have elements that don’t work well on mobile devices. Everything we do is checked to ensure that it works on desktop and mobile devices.

Our Custom CMS: Paradigm

While we do offer SEO packages for many platforms - including Wix or Wordpress - we often utilize our custom-built CMS called Paradigm. This system, developed in-house specifically for performance and SEO, offers the flexibility of custom tool integration, providing unique benefits over third-party plugins.

Paradigm vs. Other Platforms

Platforms like Wordpress or Wix are designed to cater to a vast audience - meaning they need to be everything for everyone. This often leads to excessive underlying code. While this means they can offer a lot of creative freedom, the cost can be websites that are not well optimized, are missing key elements that help pages rank in search engines, or have other issues that the owner is not aware of. These issues can slow down site loading times and negatively affect SEO rankings and visitor traffic. Paradigm, on the other hand, is optimized for speed and technical quality, ensuring clients have the best chance to rank higher in search results and that visitors get a consistent and positive user experience.

Client Control and Customization

In our current version of Paradigm, clients have direct control over the main content areas of their pages. For other sections, like headers and footers, our team assists in implementing changes to ensure technical quality. If clients require regular access to specific areas, we can customize access based on their needs.

A great example is when clients want to promote special offers or update messaging about business hours or job postings. We can create a simple tool that allows clients to directly access these areas without having to worry about their changes negatively affecting areas critical for SEO, performance, and responsive design. It’s a win-win!

Font Integration

We understand the aesthetic importance of fonts. Clients can suggest fonts, and we'll integrate them, ensuring they don't adversely affect site performance, accessibility, or SEO. We recommend using fonts from platforms like Google Fonts for compatibility and performance reasons. If your selected font might cause performance issues, we discuss the issues and alternatives with our clients before integrating them.

Dedicated Support for Your Business and SEO Success

The most critical factor of our program is directly related to our motto “We’re here to help!”. We want our clients to be able to focus on their business and know that they have a team of skilled and experienced experts looking out for them and helping them achieve their business goals. If you need a small change, most times we can do that within a day. If you have a question, we’re happy to answer it or point you to one of the many articles we’ve posted. We’re constantly monitoring your website, checking for and fixing errors that come up, and making sure your site is secure and up-to-date. All of these things and more are built into our standard Grassroots SEO program so that our clients don’t have to be website and SEO experts and instead can focus on their business!

In conclusion, our primary goal at SilverServers is to provide clients with a platform that not only grows to look good but also performs exceptionally in search rankings. We invite you to contact us to learn more about our offerings and how we can assist you in your digital journey.

Set Up Your Website for Success

For answers to FAQs about our Grassroots SEO Program, visit the Grassroots FAQ section of our blog! You might also be interested in our series of marketing and SEO tips.