10 SEO tips

Redwan Hammou — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 23:04:12 +0000

How I Optimized SEO for a Web Agency Without Chasing Keywords

When I started working on SEO for my web agency, I made the same mistake many developers make:

I focused too much on keywords.

I thought ranking was mostly about finding the right keyword, putting it in a title, writing an article around it, and waiting for Google to do its thing.

It wasn't.

For my agency, LeWebsite.fr, I eventually changed the approach completely.

1. I started with the technical side

Before trying to create more content, I cleaned up the websites themselves.

I focused on things that are easy to overlook when you're mainly thinking about design:

Page loading speed
Mobile performance
Semantic HTML
Proper heading structure
Metadata
Internal linking
Image optimization
Clean URLs
Canonical URLs
Indexation
Core Web Vitals

A beautiful website that takes 5 seconds to load isn't a great SEO strategy.

For example, instead of having a page targeting something vague like:

/services

I created much more specific pages based on actual services and search intent.

The goal wasn't to create hundreds of pages.

It was to make every important page genuinely useful.

2. Local SEO became much more important than I expected

For a web agency, ranking for something extremely broad like "web agency" is difficult.

But someone searching for:

"création site internet entreprise"

"agence web Paris"

already has a much stronger commercial intent.

So I worked on the local side as well:

Google Business Profile
Consistent business information
Local landing pages
Customer reviews
Internal links between service pages
Relevant local content

This is especially interesting for agencies working with local businesses.

A florist, taxi company, VTC driver or hairdresser doesn't necessarily need to rank nationally.

They need to be visible where their customers are actually searching.

3. I stopped writing content just to have a blog

This was probably the biggest change.

Instead of publishing generic articles every week, I started asking:

"Would a potential client actually search for this?"

That completely changed the type of content I wanted to create.

For example, a local business owner might search for:

How much does a professional website cost?
How long does it take to create a website?
How to appear on Google Maps?
Why isn't my website ranking on Google?
How to improve the SEO of a local business?
Is a website still useful if I have Instagram?

These questions are much closer to a real customer than another article called:

"What is SEO?"

4. SEO and web development are more connected than people think

As a developer, I actually find SEO much more interesting when it's treated as a technical problem.

You can have excellent content, but if Google struggles to crawl your website, your JavaScript breaks something important, your pages are slow, or your internal linking is poor, you're creating unnecessary problems.

For me, SEO became less about "putting keywords everywhere" and more about building a website that is:

fast + accessible + technically clean + useful + relevant to the search intent.

That's the approach I'm now using when building websites for clients through LeWebsite.fr.

What I learned

The biggest lesson is simple:

SEO isn't something you add to a website at the end.

It should influence how you structure the website from the beginning.

The page architecture, content, performance, internal links, local presence and user intent all need to work together.

I'm still testing different approaches, but moving from "How many keywords can I rank for?" to "How can I make this website the best result for this search?" completely changed the way I approach SEO.

And honestly, that's been much more effective for building websites for real businesses.