Embedding SEO into a website from scratch, even before launch, sets your website up for success from the start. And yet SEO is often an afterthought, even for large companies with big budgets. "We're launching next week so let's check SEO" is certain death.
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| SEO Focused Website Launch |
This data from Gartner on the percentage of marketing budget invested per channel confuses me. Below you can see that most of the budget is spent on things like the website, digital commerce, and mobile marketing. But all along the line, it's SEO, as if it had nothing to do with any of those priorities.
The 4 Steps of a Website Launch with SEO
When launching a website, there are four stages to consider, each with its own tasks and steps. In each of the following phases, the person in charge of SEO must cooperate with the other teams (design, development, UX, strategy, and others):
1. Strategy and planning
3. Launch website
4. Promote the website
Step 1: Strategy and planning
The strategy and planning stage of a web launch is fundamental to its success. This is when you lay the foundation.
In SEO terms, the most important steps in this step are keyword research and content architecture. Before the web design team gets to work on the concepts, the SEO person needs to provide the keyword and architecture strategy. This is because these SEO tips will help shape the way designers and developers build the site.
Keyword research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in any SEO project. As a website publisher, you need to understand who your target audience is and what search queries they use to find your products and services. Then this information serves as the foundation for your website in terms of the design and content you create for it. More on that next.
Read more:
What are keywords? Why are keywords important for SEO?
Keyword research: how to select keywords
Content Architecture
Once the keyword research is done, the SEO person can start theming the website. It involves mapping the structure of the website according to the major keywords important to a website. A sitemap mockup will show the pages to be created, including top navigation and sub-navigation.
Power tools website silo diagram.
Example of a silo diagram of a power tool site
This is what we call here at Bruce Clay Inc. the SEO silo. The SEO silo can make or break a website's perceived expertise, rankings, and even user experience.
Read more:
Silo SEO: What Why How
5 times the SEO silo can make or break your search engine ranking
Silo SEO: How to Create a Silo Website Architecture
Step 2: Develop and Build
The construction stage is usually the longest stage in a website project. During this step, the designers and developers build the site. But from an SEO perspective, there are two key tasks: creating content and working with developers on a technical level.
Content creation
Every silo or category of navigation should be filled with quality content. It means creating quality content that is built with an understanding of Google's quality standards. It also means creating web pages based on real-time SEO data based on the highest-ranked competitors for those target keywords.
You'll want to get this data before you create the pages. This way, the content meets or exceeds what your competition is doing on the first page of search results.
A summary tab of the Bruce Clay SEO WordPress plugin.
Bruce Clay SEO WP plugin summary tab
And anyone can get that data through the right tools, including our WordPress SEO plugin. You can read more about it below.
Read more:
WordPress SEO plugins: Why real-time and personalized data is important
Want personalized SEO advice by keyword? There is a plugin for that!
How a WordPress SEO plugin can help you optimize your content for keywords
EAT and SEO: you can't have one without the other
Technical strategy
SEO is not a core strength of many web designers and developers. So, they often inadvertently build a site that prevents search engines from doing their job of crawling, indexing, and understanding a website and its content. For example, Flash and JavaScript implementations sometimes create barriers for search engines.
But this is just one example of what can go wrong and what needs to be optimized when building for SEO. As Google tweaks its algorithms to reward sites that provide a good user experience, performance issues are also becoming concerns for SEO.
Read more:
SEO Guide: Technical SEO Tips
The always up-to-date SEO checklist
Step 3: Pre-launch and launch
Before launching the site and during the launch, the SEO person should be involved in overseeing some critical things. This step should be fairly smooth if the previous steps have been completed correctly. But you still have to make sure everything is in order.
Pre-launch Exploration and accessibility
The website should be crawled using an SEO tool to see if there are any errors. You can use a crawler like Screaming Frog or our tools in the SEOToolSet for that. As part of this task, you will want to see that the number of pages created and crawled is the same. If there is a difference, the next step is to determine the cause of the problem and resolve it.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
It is important to configure basic SEO scans before launch. This will help you look at the website and access valuable data as soon as the site is published. Without this data, it is impossible to improve website performance through data-driven decisions.
Read more: 7 Google SEO Tools Every Website Builder Should Use
Technical articles
At this point, things like XML sitemap, HTML sitemap, and robots.txt files should be configured correctly. But you'll want to test them. In some cases, web developers or others may forget to remove the Disallow: / directive from the robots.txt file (used to prevent indexing of pages during build and test).
Read more:
What is an XML sitemap and how do I create one?
SEO Guide: How to Create a Sitemap
SEO Guide: How to Submit a Website to Search Engines
To throw
Getting started with SEO tasks involves a lot of tracking. In particular, you monitor errors and indexing.
Errors
Using SEO tools, including Google Search Console, check and fix any technical errors that might arise. Common issues include 404 errors that prevent users from accessing a web page or other issues.
Indexation
Depending on the size of the website, search engines can take a few days or weeks to fully index a site. If it appears that some areas are not indexed, investigate and resolve the issues. Is there an adequate internal mesh to ensure maximum indexing?
Step 4: Post-launch
The work doesn't stop once the website is successfully launched. SEO is an ongoing process - there is always things to test and optimize.
Content
Regularly add new content to the site. Create more supporting content for your silo structure and link the pages appropriately.
Also, update existing content to keep it up to date.
Connections
Maintain your link profile. You want to make sure you have high-quality, relevant links compared to other types.
Read more:
SEO is over when Google stops changing things and all of your competitors die
13 Steps to Web Content Auditing to Increase Visibility in Search Results
50 Ways To Get Quality, "White Hat" Backlinks
Performance
Once the site is live, regularly check the performance of the home page and other important pages that you want to rank. Tools like PageSpeed Insights or Google's Lighthouse help with this. You can increase your ranking by providing a measurable page experience.
Read more:
How fast should my webpage be and why should I care?
What marketing managers need to know about updating the Google page experience
Take away food
SEO is essential to building a website that is not only functional but also capable of competing in search results. If you are part of a website launch team, remember these principles:
1. Involve SEO in the web launch from the start.
2. Make sure SEO strategy and planning are part of every step.
3. Make sure the website is designed in an SEO-friendly way.
4. Continue with a strategic SEO plan after launch.
We have helped many customers with web migrations and new site launches. If you want advice to ensure the success of your strategy, contact us today for a free quote and consultation.
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