How To Prepare Your SEO for a New Website Build
Building an entire new website takes time and dedication to get right. Aside from liaising with developers and designers, or even setting up the website yourself, it can be a lengthy process.
If your site has been needing a bit of TLC for a while then you’ll soon reap the rewards of the upgrade, but there’s also a big consideration to have: the site’s SEO.
In this guide we explore how you can be prepared for when your website goes live and what you can do to improve your performance on day one.
What will happen when my new site goes live?
The important thing to consider first is whether this website is entirely brand new, or is a migration from an existing site you own. You may be rebranding the site and going by a new brand name, but still providing the same or similar services as before. Alternatively you’re setting up a website for the first time and are looking to improve your SEO from the get go.
Either way your site is set up, you’re going to see a lot of low stats. In a migration, you tend to see your keywords improve again after a few weeks or months of fluctuations but it won’t be instant.
If you have hundreds of backlinks you’re going to have to go through the process of setting up redirects or asking these sites to amend their links. Keywords will often drop in rankings and your site may well be out of the competitor rankings for a while. It’s important to factor that in to your SEO plans.
In an entirely brand new website you’re starting from scratch. You will need backlinks, keywords and content to succeed in the key pillars of SEO. In time this will translate to successful gains once search engines know a bit more about you and your site’s aims.
For search engines it’s all about getting to know your website and what they can do to develop an understanding of what your site does and why it’s important. This takes time, but having the right things in place will help your site in its early moments of development.
Preparing your website
Here are some key things that will help your website grow in effective ways.
1 – Having a good website host
A good website host will have a high quality support system in place and a lot of resources to keep your site speedy and efficient. It will have factored in downtimes, if there are errors occurring on site and much more.
2 – Set your site up in Google Search Console
You’re going to be able to see your performance straight away if you have everything set up in Search Console. Verify it onto your web domain as soon as possible so that you can see important search data being collected straight away.
3 – Plan ahead with keyword research
A site won’t be able to grow without regular optimising of content and keywords. Have a look at what your business’ aims are, and build your strategy. Content, title tags, meta descriptions and a heap of other things will give your site the boost it needs in its early stages.
4 – Build a content calendar
Having regular blogs to read on site will give readers a reason to come back. If you have a budding collection of users that want to know what you’re up to, then it’s time to keep that hype high. Build your next few weeks of content in advance and have that ready for your viewers to see and look forward to. It also develops your keyword profile, making it easier for search engines to find you and what your site’s aims are.
5 – Make it accessible for everyone
Your site may not be entirely accessible at first, which is why it will go through a few stages of optimisation. Keep changing your website to make sure it’s user friendly and accessible. A good way to gauge how your site is doing is through regular reviews of the site and getting feedback from customers or other users.
The bottom line
It will take a while for your site to see results. It’s okay to look at your website and think it may take a while to see genuine growth. SEO is unfortunately a marathon and not a sprint.
But at the same time it’s a great chance to see how you can make effective changes to help see growth over a longer period of time. A new website can afford to make some website mistakes here and there to make way for more developed and refined ideas. You can work on your keywords, develop content ideas and build your brand in other ways in the meantime – like using social media or paid ads for instance.
There’s a lot to discover in looking after a website, be it completely new or having to handle a website migration. But through continued changes you can see a wealth of improvements in time.
If you’re looking for some support in your next website migration, and SEO support, take a look at our services today to see how we can help you with your digital strategy.
