About to launch a brand new website for your company? Don’t rush in.

The power of SEO for a new website is among the most important considerations for startups, small businesses and anyone looking to boost their digital presence. 

The right SEO strategy can bring you and your brand right to the top of search results and you can start benefitting from online traffic. When it comes to SEO for new website,

As you embark on the adventure of running a company and getting your name out there, learning the ins and outs of search engine optimization is paramount. Your SEO strategy is as important as your paid advertising strategies.

So let’s dive into the details of setting your new website up to be both user and SEO-friendly. 

SEO Tips for a New Website

We’ll start from the beginning, and guide you through every step of the SEO process to make sure your website is set up for success.

Search engine algorithms have a big impact on your rankings, so you need a website that plays nicely with how search engine bots categorize information

The more you optimize your site to appeal to search engines, the higher you'll likely show up in search results — and the more people will see your site.

Let’s dive in. 

Choose a domain name 

Your domain name is a key part of who you are. Don’t be fooled into keyword stuffing and over-complicating your URL. The best domain names are short memorable, and directly applicable to the business. 

In most cases, the best way forward is to choose a domain name that matches your brand’s name. All that you're aiming for is an appealing name that pops up in search engines.

Top-level Domains (TLDs) are the final sections of domain names. According to Google, top-level domains do not play a role in SEO, and there’s no need to overthink it. In most cases, using .com is a perfectly fine choice. 

When you’ve made your choice, head over to Google Domains (which has since been acquired by SquareSpace) to review its availability. 

Since there are millions of different websites that exist, you may have to repeat this process until you find a suitable and available option. 

Decide on a website platform 

A website platform makes it easy for you to easily create and manage a website. There are hosted platforms and self-hosted platforms. 

Choosing the right platform is a key step in the process of search engine optimization.

A hosted platform hosts the site provides you with preset designs and lets you add and edit content without the need to use code. Popular examples of hosted platforms include Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and Shopify.

A self-hosted platform lets you edit and add content with or without code, depending on your preference. You will, however, need to host and install the platforms yourself. Some popular examples of self-hosted platforms are WordPress and Ghost. 

One of the greatest advantages of the 21st century is you no longer have to be a technical genius to set up a website. With drag-and-drop design features and loads of installable plugins, it’s never been easier to launch an SEO-friendly website that pops up organically in search engines.

Design your site architecture 

Your site’s architecture is how you set up and link your web pages; a key component of user-friendly site navigation. An intuitive and easy-to-navigate site also works in your favour for SEO. 

A solid site structure helps Google find and index pages on your site, helps website visitors find what they need and helps you avoid potential duplicate content issues. 

A simple sketch of your site structure makes it easy to identify what pages you need and where. For instance, you know you’ll need a home page, but what should that page link to? Most likely an about page, services/products page, contact page, and blog page. 

Every page will then have subpages that relate to it. Your services/products page will link to pages for each of your offerings, while your blog page will link to different articles you’ve uploaded. 

‍

The above sketch then essentially serves as your guide for setting up the site. You’ll know exactly where to link to what. 

As soon as everything is up and running, you can use one of the many available SEO tools to seek out any potential crawlability issues. 

Set up Google Search Console and other webmaster tools

Google Search Console is going to be among the most important tools you use for your new website. As one of the leading SEO tools on the market, it helps you find technical errors, submit sitemaps, optimise on-page issues, assess performances, and more. The best part? It’s free! 

The setup process for Google Search Console is quick and easy. You sign in with your Google account, choose your domain hit enter, and then verify your domain. 

You’re given step-by-step instructions on how to achieve this, so don’t stress about getting lost in the technicalities. 

As soon as you’ve followed the step-by-step instructions and wrapped up your verification, you can use Google Search Console to review and examine your web analytics. 

Don’t expect to see valuable data from the get-go. Remember, your website was just launched, and you’ll only start getting data once you start generating traffic. 

Once you've been operating for a while, you'll start to get the Google analytics of where you're popping up in search engines.

A few of the main features of Google Search Console are: 

• Performance reports: Provide data on how your website performs in Google Search results, including Google analytics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position.
• URL inspection tool: Allows you to inspect a specific URL on your website to see how Google indexes it. You can check if a page is indexed, view any indexing issues, and request indexing for new or updated pages.
• Coverage report: Shows information about indexed pages on your site, including errors and warnings encountered during the indexing process. It helps identify and resolve issues preventing Google from crawling and indexing your content.
• Sitemap submission: This lets you submit XML sitemaps to Google, which helps Google discover and crawl your website's pages more efficiently. Developing a sitemap helps search engines discover your content and display it to customers for whom it might be relevant.
• Links Report: This shows which external sites link to your website, as well as the pages on your site with the most inbound links. This data can help you assess your site's backlink profile and identify opportunities for link building.

Review Mobile Friendliness 

In the age of the smartphone, having a mobile-friendly website is absolutely essential. Google incentivises sites that are logically structured and formatted for mobile screens. 

Remember, in 2024 most web traffic comes from mobile phones and not desktops. The tide has been fully turned. 

Google Lighthouse has a tool which allows you to test your site’s mobile friendliness known as the Mobile-Friendly Test. Just enter the URL you’d like to review and hit “Test URL” - you’ll then see results advising if the page is usable on mobile. 

Some key tips to guarantee your website stays mobile-friendly are: 

• Use a responsive design for your website theme. 
• Optimise title tags and meta descriptions. 
• Avoid large pop-ups that cover the screen. 

Perform a competitor analysis 

Diving deep into your competitor’s processes, SEO strategies, strengths and weaknesses is a pivotal part of executing a successful website launch. 

There are many tools to assist you when it comes to competitor analysis such as: 

• Semrush 
• Ahrefs 
• Similarweb
• MozBar
• Serpstat 

For our sake, we’ll use Semrush to run you through the process of checking what your competitors are doing. 

First and foremost, you need to identify who your competitors are. Open up the Organic Research tab and type in your domain name. Hit Search, go to the Competitors tab and scroll down to see who your organic competitors are. Simple as that. 

You can then use the keyword gap tool to identify keywords your competitors are using to help inform your strategy going forward. A helpful form of keyword research in itself.

Just scroll down, select “missing” and you’ll instantly be given a list of keywords you’re not yet utilising. You should look at “missing” keywords as opportunities for new content or page ideas - whatever helps bring in more organic traffic. 

Conduct keyword research 

Reviewing competitors can give you great insight into what keywords to use, but you’ll still need to dive a little deeper to get the most out of your SEO. 

Keyword research is vital to the success of your new website. Finding and utilising the right keywords is the most reliable method of driving traffic to your newly launched website and improving your SEO performance.

A few of the main benefits of keyword research are: 

• Improved Search Engine Ranking
• Better Understanding of Audience Intent
• Content Planning and Creation
• Competitive Analysis
• Increased ROI
• Optimised Ad Campaigns
• Long-Term Strategy Development

There are many ways to conduct keyword research. The most reliable method is to use one of the many keyword research tools available as part of your SEO efforts.

The free keyword generator that Ahrefs offers is a good place to start.

For instance, let’s say you’re launching a website for your new seafood restaurant. We can use the keyword explorer for keyword research related to seafood restaurants that you may be able to use to drive traffic. 

We’ll use “seafood restaurant” as our primary keyword to work with. 

We can tell from this that people tend to add the location to searches for seafood restaurants. So if your restaurant is in Manchester, “seafood restaurant in Manchester” is a powerful keyword to use. You can also use the tool to find keywords related to the different meals you have on offer. 

When you’re deciding on which keywords to use for your new website, consider the following: 

• Relevance: Keywords should be directly related to the content, products, or services you offer. Ensure they accurately reflect what your target audience is searching for.
• Keyword difficulty: Assess the level of competition for each keyword. High-difficulty keywords may be more challenging to rank for, especially if you're a new website or business. Consider a mix of high and low-competition keywords to balance your strategy.
• Search volume: Evaluate the average monthly search volume for each keyword using various SEO tools. Aim for keywords with a significant search volume to maximise your visibility.
• Search intent: Understand the intent behind the keyword in your SEO efforts. Are users looking for information, products, or services? Tailor your keyword selection to match user intent and align with your content or offerings.
• Localisation: If your business serves specific geographic locations, incorporate local keywords to target users in those areas. This can include city names, neighbourhood names, or regional terms relevant to your audience.

Create optimised content and web pages 

When creating your brand new website, you need to optimise the content and pages to be SEO-friendly. This is a crucial component of generating natural traffic. 

Review search intent 

Search intent is the reason behind users’ queries. To understand search intent, you need to ask yourself why particular queries has been searched. 

Search intent can be divided into four categories: 

Informational Intent: Informational intent refers to users seeking information or answers to their questions. This may be explanations, instructions, definitions, or research on a particular topic. For example, a search query like "how to drive a car" or "what is global warming" indicates informational intent.

Navigational Intent: Navigational intent refers to users searching for a specific website or webpage. They already have a destination in mind and use search engines to find it efficiently. Most navigational queries often include brand names or specific URLs, such as searching for "Instagram login" or "HBO Max."

Transactional Intent: Transactional intent refers to users who intend to complete a transaction, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or downloading a file. These queries often involve commercial terms or action-oriented language, like "buy iPhone 134 Pro” or "book a flight to Cape Town."

Commercial Intent: Commercial intent refers to users conducting research intending to eventually make a purchase. They're comparing products, reading reviews, or checking recommendations before making a final decision. Search queries may include terms like "Dell laptop reviews" or "best budget guitars."

When you understand intent, you can create content that matches it to improve the SEO for your new website. 

An easy way to find keyword intent is to run it through the Semrush Keyword Overview tool. 

From this, we can see that “seafood near me” has transactional intent while “fish and chips manchester” and “seafood restaurant Manchester” have commercial intent. 

Optimise On-Page SEO 

On-page SEO optimisation refers to the process of optimising individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings and attract more organic traffic.

Search engines review on-page SEO factors when ranking pages. 

The following list covers some of the most valuable on-page SEO best practices. 

• Keyword Research and Targeting: The keywords you’ve chosen as your primary keywords should be strategically incorporated into the on-page SEO content, headings, meta tag, and URLs.
• Content Quality and Relevance: Creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your audience, while also incorporating targeted keywords naturally.
• Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: You should always optimise title tag and meta description to accurately describe the content of your new website while incorporating keywords to drive users to click through from search engine results pages (SERPs). The title and meta description are a super important component of your page because they appear on search engines and are responsible for convincing users to click through and view the page.
• URL Structure: Your new on-page SEO should have clean, descriptive, and user-friendly URLs that contain relevant keywords and accurately reflect the content of the webpage.
• Heading Tags (H1, H2, etc.): Using heading tags (e.g., H1, H2, H3) to structure the content and provide hierarchy, and including keywords where relevant, is a key part of search engine optimisation and on-page SEO.
• Optimized Images: Optimise your images by using descriptive filenames, alt attributes, and captions. This helps improve accessibility, enhances the user experience, and provides additional opportunities for keyword optimisation.
• Internal Linking: Adding internal links within your content to connect related pages and distribute link equity throughout the website is a key part of SEO. Internal links are crucial for your website because: This is how Google and other search engines find new pages. This is also how Google and other search engines understand what your page is about.
• Page Speed and Loading Times: Don’t underestimate the importance of page speed. Optimising your page speed and loading times by minimising server response times, compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and reducing unnecessary code or scripts can lead to a much more user-friendly experience.
• Schema Markup: Implementing schema markup to provide search engines with additional context about the content of the webpage helps your content rank. Schema markup can enhance rich snippets in SERPs, improve visibility, and increase click-through rates. 

If the process of SEO seems like too much, perhaps it’s time to consider reaching out to an SEO agency for assistance. 

Share, Promote, Campaign 

Unfortunately, SEO is not the be-all and end-all of getting some traction on your website. You’ll still have to do the groundwork of letting people know that you exist. 

We’ve covered how SEO can help, so let’s run through some other powerful ways to promote your website. 

Content marketing

• Create high-quality, valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.
• Publish blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and other types of SEO-driven content to attract visitors and establish your expertise in your niche.
• Share your content on social media platforms, forums and online communities to reach a wider audience.

Social media marketing

• Create profiles on relevant social media platforms where your target audience is active and utilise the platforms to your advantage. 
• Share updates, engage with your audience, and promote your content to increase visibility and drive traffic to your new website.
• Use social media advertising options, such as Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Instagram Ads or Sponsored content on Twitter to target specific demographics and promote your website to a broader audience.

Email marketing

• Create an email list of subscribers who are interested in the products or services that you have on offer. 
• You can then send regular newsletters, updates, promotions, and personalised content to your subscribers to keep them interested and drive traffic to your website.
• Use one of the various email automation tools to streamline your process and deliver targeted messages based on user behaviour and preferences.

Influencer marketing

• Identify influencers in your industry or niche who have a significant following and engage with your target audience. You can effortlessly find influencers to work with through the ttagz search tool. 
• Collaborate with influencers to promote your website, products, or services through sponsored content, reviews, endorsements, or partnerships.
• Leverage the reach and credibility of influencers (nano, micro, macro, and mega) to increase brand awareness and attract new visitors to your website.

Paid advertising

• Use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms like Google Ads to bid on relevant keywords and display ads to targeted audiences.
• Experiment with different ad formats, targeting options, and ad creatives to optimise your campaigns and maximise your ROI.
• Monitor your ad performance regularly and adjust your strategies based on the results to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

Partnerships and collaborations

• Form partnerships with complementary businesses, organisations, or influencers to cross-promote each other's products or services.
• Collaborate on joint marketing campaigns, events, or content initiatives to reach a broader audience and drive traffic to your website.
• Use link-building strategies to insert links to your website on the sites of collaborators and partners. 

Monitor and Track Your Performance 

SEO is not a quick fix for anything. You may not even begin to see the benefits of your SEO strategy until much further down the line, hence the importance of tracking the important data. 

You can perform a site audit to quickly identify any website issues. The Semrush site audit tool does a full analysis of your site to detect any issues and show you exactly how to fix them. 

You can also use Google Search Console to review and compare your search performance over time - giving you insight into whether your existing strategy is working. 

Reviewing your SEO results can help you determine the next step in your  SEO efforts.

You’re also told exactly which search queries and which pages are leading to impressions and clicks.

SEO for a new website is about testing, tracking, and trying again until it works. The process of improving your domain authority and driving more organic traffic to your website can take a few months.

Patience is key, provided you’re staying ahead of the curve and tracking your new website’s performance. 

In conclusion 

When it comes to your website's SEO, the work never stops. Getting your search engine optimisation strategy right for the launch of your new website is only the first step of a long journey. 

You can only begin to drive more organic traffic to your website by trying, testing, and reviewing the data. 

SEO is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring, adaptation, and refinement to stay ahead of the curve. 

Implementing SEO for a new website shouldn't present barriers to your site going live, but it is critical that you do a few things before launching.

By staying informed about the latest trends and best practices in SEO, you can position your new site for long-term growth and success in the age of the Internet.

From choosing the right domain name to optimising every element of your on-page SEO, each step is as important as the next when it comes to your SEO performance.

At SEO Rocket, we help startups and scaleups achieve SEO success. As an SEO agency, we do the work and you reap the benefits. To learn more about what we do, feel free to book a call today.