How does SEO work with my Gather-powered website?
We provide a standard SEO setup to help your website get off to a strong start. While we don’t offer monthly SEO link-building and content-creation services, we ensure your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and built with essential search engine best practices in mind. This gives you a solid foundation for discoverability online.
Additionally, the unique experience you can offer families through Remember Pages will help more families and friends visit your website over time.
What does the standard SEO setup look like for my Gather-powered website?
There are a few different components that go into the standard SEO setup for a Gather-powered website design:
Fast Loading Pages
Rank Math Plugin
robots.txt File Setup
Link Redirect Setup
Mobile-Friendly Design
Image Optimization
Proper Use of Headings
Remember Pages
How Does a Fast Loading Page Help With SEO?
Our website builder (through WordPress) is lightweight and optimized for performance. It helps your site load quickly and maintain a low bounce rate, which can be a key factor for better on-page SEO and user experience.
How Does the Rank Math Plugin Help With SEO?
For your Gather-powered website, our team installs the Rank Math plugin, a trusted SEO plugin that helps optimize your website's pages and content for search engines like Google.
How Does the robots.txt Setup Help With SEO?
A robots.txt file guides search engine crawlers through your website's structure. We include a properly configured robots.txt file to help search engines crawl your site more efficiently and ensure the right pages get indexed.
What is a Link Redirect? How Does it Impact SEO?
The purpose of a link redirect in SEO is to guide both users and search engines from one URL to another, while preserving or transferring the SEO value (also known as "link equity") from the old URL to the new one. Here is why we audit your link redirectors and ensure they're set up correctly:
Preserve Your Google Rankings: If your old URLs were indexed by Google and you don’t redirect them, those pages will return 404 errors — and you could lose all the SEO value you built.
Maintain Backlink Value: External links pointing to your old site will not pass value to your new site unless redirects are in place.
Avoid Broken Links: Users clicking old links (from search results, social media, emails, etc.) will land smoothly on the new site — not on a “Page Not Found” error.
Improves User Experience: Seamless redirects show that the site transitioned professionally, without dead ends.
How Does a Mobile-Friendly Design Help With SEO?
Our team handcrafts all website designs to be responsive in several formats and optimized for mobile devices, which search engines prioritize in search rankings.
How Does Image Optimization Help With SEO?
Images are sized appropriately and include alt text, helping with page speed and accessibility — both helpful for SEO.
Proper Use of Headings (H1, H2, etc.) a
We format your content using proper heading structure to help search engines understand the page hierarchy and improve readability.
Will Gather Write Additional Blog Posts For My Site?
No, Gather does not provide monthly SEO backlink-building or content-creation services. However, if you've written new content (such as a blog post) and would like it added to your Gather-powered website, simply submit a ticket with your content (copy, creative assets, target keywords), and we can work on getting it added to your website for you.
Additional Things You Can Do to Boost SEO
As mentioned above, our website design team can help with the foundational SEO for your Gather-powered website design. However, there are additional investments and tactics that you can take to take your SEO to the next level. Here ae some ideas below:
Review Your Google Search Console
We setup the Google Search Console. If requested, we can add the customer so they can monitor how the website appears in search results and identify issues.
Create and Update Your Local Business Listings
This is crucial for local SEO. Create and set up your Google Business listing and your Yelp Business listing. This will help increase your business visibility through local search engines like Google Maps and Apple Maps. Be sure to maintain your listings with accurate business information, including:
Business Hours
Business Location
Business Contact Information
Business Services
Business Photos (Exterior and Interior)
Business Posts (such as community engagement events, staff photos, etc.)
Collect More Online Reviews
Google favors businesses with consistent, positive reviews. Ask happy customers to leave reviews on Google and other platforms. Plus, you can feature those reviews on your Gather-powered website to build more trust and social proof with your website visitors.
Share Your Website and Earn Reputable Backlinks
Promote your website on social media, email signatures, online forums, chamber of commerce websites, local news websites, directories, and print materials. Asking other reputable websites to link back to your website earns you additional website backlinks and greater domain authority with search engines.
Create Shareable, Relevant Content
Posting blog articles, FAQs, or updates relevant to your business and services can help increase your visibility over time. If these are supplied to Gather, we can add them, no problem!