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How to Enhance Your SEO Efforts Before and After Launching Your New Website? (With 2 Exhaustive Checklists)


If you are a business owner looking forward to launching a new website, you will surely think about branding and advertising strategies. Besides that, you must also think about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Many marketers believe that they have to consider SEO only after launching the website. That’s not the case. You must start thinking about the SEO parameters before launching your website.
Many marketers simply focus on hiring a content specialist, social media manager, and web developer for their website. They must also consider hiring a Search Engine Optimization expert who can assist SEO efforts and rank the search engines' website.

So, why should you consider SEO before launching a new website?

Focusing on SEO before launching the new website will help you generate organic traffic right from the outset.
Google or any other search engine needs time to crawl all your pages and index them. By paying enough attention to SEO before launching the new website, you will cut down the waiting time and start getting traffic and leads immediately.
Here are the top tips to bear in mind before launching your website.

1. Make Sure Your URLs Include the Relevant Keywords

Your URL is the first identification parameter for your search engines, which helps them to understand what your website is about.
For example : If you have a real estate agency, it is important that your domain name and all the internal URLs have the relevant keywords related to the industry. This will ensure that the search engines can figure out what kind of products or services you offer to people.
In case you create random URLs that do not make sense for the search engines or readers, you might face a hard time ranking your brand. I have seen so many websites with numbers or other irrelevant phrases in the URLs that do not contribute anything to SEO
Business owners must be wary of such links and do away with them.

2. Have a “Website Under Construction” page

After choosing the right domain name and basic URLs, you must build a well-designed “Under Construction” page for your website.
Here’s why you must do it:

1. Sites Created Earlier Stand a Better Chance of Ranking Well

Older sites are more credible in the eyes of search engines. Since search engines take time to rank websites, it is good to have a “Website Under Construction” page. By doing so, you will be able to get ranked without waiting too much.
The search engine crawlers and spiders will not mind that you have an “Under Construction” page as long as your website is live. Their top priority is high-quality content, relevant keywords, seamless experience that gives the users the information they are looking for.
To get noticed by search engines, make sure that you include the keywords and suitable visuals on the “Under Construction” page.

2. You Can Start Building a Rapport with the Customers Before the Launch of Your Website

The industry stalwarts would certainly agree that you can start creating awareness about your brand with the help of an “Under Construction page.”
Include the links to your social media handles on this page so that your prospective customers can interact with you. Create tempting posts on your social media platforms to pique the user’s curiosity and make them look forward to your website launch.
You can even add a contact form on the page if you want to start generating leads for your business before the final launch. Just make sure you offer an exciting giveaway or valuable resource in exchange for their contact details.
You can then employ drip email campaigns to keep in touch with these leads and prompt them to take action whenever you launch your business.

Related : Tips to Improve Your Ecommerce Email Marketing

3. Invite the Press to Get in Touch with You Through This Page

You can use the “Under Construction” page to invite the media professionals to contact you. To do so, you will need to add a media kit on this page that features the following information:

  • Different versions of your logo that the press can use
  • Your company vision and mission statement
  • The date of the final launch
  • iv. “About us” section that talks about your story
  • FAQs that will answer all the major questions that the reader might be having
  • vi. Featured press releases with up-to-date information about your business

Did you know? This practice is also supported by the head of the Google Webmaster team.

3. Keep a List of Citation Websites Ready

Before launching your website, you must do the groundwork and be ready with a list of citation websites to feature yourself.
Let’s take an example: If you are starting an online training institute for IELTS or PTE, you should be ready with relevant citation websites like directory.edugorilla.com, nearbycoaching.com, and learnpick.in to name a few.
On the other hand, if you are launching an online retail shop, you can consider listings like justdial.com, sulekha.com, or yelp.com
This will allow you to get backlinks and build your domain authority. Eventually, this will contribute to better SEO.

4. Be Prepared with All the Social Media Profiles

As important as your website is, your social media profiles are equally important to grow your business and get ranked on search engines. Like citation websites, social media profiles can also be used to manufacture backlinks for your business.
You must have an active presence on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. This will facilitate user engagement and help you get traffic to your website after your website is live.
Encourage people to interact with you on these channels by sharing regular updates about your website launch. You can have a countdown button to make people wait for the big day. As mentioned earlier, connect these pages with the “Under Construction” page.

5. Have Content on Hand Before the Launch

Content is still the king, and without well-researched and informative content on your website, you will not be able to drive traffic to your website as desired.
By content, what I mean to say is you must have around 10 - 12 blog posts ready, a gated content resource or lead magnet to collect leads, and long-form content like infographics, whitepapers, or eBook.
The primary objective of doing this is that search engine crawlers will visit your website to index it. If you have enough content for them, your website and the blog posts will start getting indexed immediately after you have launched the website.
A gated content resource will help you bring more traffic to the website, which will, in turn, contribute to a better search engine ranking. The same applies to other long-form resources like whitepapers, eBooks, and infographics.
Alternatively, you can also have a blog ready before the launch of the website. You can use it to create excitement among the users by making announcements at regular intervals. After all, content is the best way to “attract” visitors according to inbound marketing methodology.

6. Optimize Every Page on Your Website for Search Engines

You must indeed write for your customers rather than search engines. However, you must know what your customers are searching for. This is possible with the help of keyword research.
Many marketers simply search for the primary keywords and then stuff them in the website content or blogs. I strongly recommend that you must also check the secondary keywords and the long-tail keywords that have a higher purchase intent in addition to the primary keyword.
Rather than writing five articles of 1000 words each, write long-form articles of more than 2500 words packed with useful information. Such articles stand a brighter chance to get ranked on search engines.
Take a look at this SEO checklist to help you take your content strategy to the next level.

Primary keyword is included in the title
Primary keyword is at the beginning of the title
Primary keyword is in the meta description
URL includes primary keyword
URL has no stop words like to, of, and, etc.
Primary keyword appears in the first 10% of the content
Subheadings are written in H2
H2 has the primary keyword
H2 includes the secondary keyword
Secondary and LSI keywords are used contextually
Your content is rich in visuals (images or videos)
Primary keyword is used in the alt-tag
LSI keywords are used in the alt-tag
The image file name includes the primary, secondary, or LSI keywords as relevant

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7. Install Relevant SEO Plugins to Amplify Your Efforts

While most businesses rely on the Yoast SEO plugin for their WordPress websites, I think the Rankmath Pro plugin is a more effective option.
Be open to investing in such plugins that would help you get better results. Rankmath Pro plugin comes with a feature that allows you to track every keyword's ranking that you add to the list.
Here’s a snapshot of their dashboard showing the keyword tracker:
Source: Phillipstemann
Besides, you must also install WP plugins like WProcket that allow you to optimize your website's speed. As speed is a critical factor that influences your SEO ranking, it becomes imperative to make sure that you have a fast-loading website.

8. Make a List of Guest Blogging Platforms

Guest blogging or off-page SEO has become a standard for all businesses as it is the number one way to generate backlinks.
By guest blogging, you can expedite the process of generating traffic and leads from your website by building high-quality backlinks. Essentially, you have to look for the best guest blogging platforms in your niche and then approach them for the same.
For example: If you are in the marketing field, you can consider approaching platforms like Smashing Magazine, HubSpot, and ConversionXL to publish your articles. These are just some of the examples to give you an idea.
You can look for more websites that offer guest blogging opportunities and have a high domain authority with a good domain rating. Stay away from ‘buying’ backlinks because you might have to pay the penalty for that.

9. Check the Uptime Stats of Your Web Host

Before I get into the details, let me explain to you something about ‘uptime.’ Uptime is the duration of time in which the server that is hosting your website is up and running. This means that the site will be visible to end-users at this time.
The stronger the hosting provider's uptime rates, the better will be the performance of the servers.
Quicksprout has revealed in one of the recent posts that Bluehost and DreamHost are the best web hosting providers. If you are looking for a scalable option, you can go for Nexcess Hosting Provider.
Whenever you plan to invest in a web host, you must go through the customer reviews and their uptime stats
. Do not go for an uptime that is less than 99%. In case you have purchased a web, host but are not too happy with its performance, you must consider changing it immediately.

10. Take Care of All the Website Security Standards

Google and all the other search engines look for the security certificate before ranking any website. Make sure that you buy an SSL certificate for your website. A padlock identifies secure websites in the address bar.
The URL starts with https:// and not just http://. With the help of this security certificate, you can encrypt the data transfer and make sure that no third party or unauthorized sources can access any sensitive information.
If you own an eCommerce website, purchasing an SSL certificate is of paramount importance as you will have to integrate payment gateways for the customers. You might also have to store sensitive bank account or card details in the database.
If your site does not have an SSL certificate, your customers might be skeptical about buying from you because of trust issues.

11. Activate Site Caching and Compression on Your Website

Two important measures that enhance the loading speed of your website are caching and compression.
The process of creating a static version of your website is known as caching. Such pages load instantly in web browsers. So, the website performs considerably well.
Caching also reduces the load on the hosting server. As a result, you can save server memory and I/O operations. This becomes especially important when you have limited hosting plans.
Cached websites help to impart a pleasant user experience and also saves on their Internet bandwidth. WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Fastest Cache are the best plugins for caching.
Compression is how data files are compressed before being sent to the user’s web browser. After receiving the compressed data, the browsers display the compressed files by unzipping them.
Using GZIP compression is one of the most effective ways of compressing data and quickly delivering it to the browser.
You can use GZIP on all the major web browsers, server software, and popular WordPress hosting companies. This technology uses compression algorithms that work on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and all the website files.
On receiving a request for a page from any website, the algorithm compresses the output and sends it back. According to the data size, the file size can get reduced by up to 70%.
Google Pagespeed Insights will instantly let you know if this technology is not enabled for your website.

Source : https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-enable-gzip-compression-in-wordpress/

You can use an online tool to see how much bandwidth is saved with the help of GZIP.

12. Always Use a Favicon for Your Website

A tiny 16x16 pixel icon created to brand your website is known as a favicon. With this icon's help, visitors can easily recognize your page even when there are multiple tabs open in the browser.
Favicons and logos are different, but some brands use the same favicon as their logo. Having a favicon is important because it helps to build your website’s credibility and trust. Favicons do not impact SEO directly.
The Google Chrome web browser deducts some search ranking signals for websites that are bookmarked on the web.
In case your website does not have a favicon, you might lose the opportunity to get bookmarked. Just make sure that your favicon is easily recognizable for the reader and instantly lets them know what your business is all about.
Keep it simple. After all, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

13. Create Responsive Designs

Search engines consider mobile responsiveness as an important ranking factor. So, whenever you think of launching your website, you must pay special attention to creating responsive websites.
Hire a website developer who is adept at designing visually attractive and responsive websites. They must also be abreast with technologies like AMP and other advanced coding tactics.
Your website must be developed so that it renders well across different devices with varying screen sizes.

14. Create Crawlable Link Structures

While creating internal links for your new website, you must make sure that they have a crawlable structure. This means that the link should be such that search engine spiders can browse through a website's pathways.
Take a look at this diagrammatic representation of a website. Here, the big dot on the top stands for the website homepage.
Source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
Such structures are easily crawlable because they do not have too many links between the homepage and any other page
By adhering to a structure like this, the ranking potential increases significantly. Websites like Amazon and eBay have nailed this concept by using category and subcategory systems.
To make things easier for you, I would like to mention some instances where your page will become non-indexable.

  • Links in the submission forms
  • Links accessible exclusively through internal search boxes
  • Links in un-parseable JavaScript
  • Links in plugins like Flash or Java
  • Links that point to pages that are blocked by Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag
  • Links that have more than hundreds of links
  • 7. Links embedded in Frames or I-frames

Make sure that you give the spiders easy access to the website pages and avoid these scenarios.

15. Optimize the Visual Elements on Your Website

Visual marketing is slowly gaining immense momentum. So, you must include relevant imagery on all the website pages, including the blog posts.
A message becomes more impactful when it is conveyed through visuals than long paragraphs of text. It also facilitates effective usage of the limited space.
SEO aspects to keep in mind while adding images to the website are:-

  • Always have a suitable Alt-text for all the images. This will make the content more accessible for the readers. Also, it will help the search engines to understand what the image is about. It will be great if you include the keywords in your alt-tag. Doing so will add to your SEO efforts.
  • Maintain the image size to 100KB so that it does not slow down your website's loading
  • If you have included animated images (GIFs) on your website, make sure it does not make the website too slow to load.

Related : Image Optimization Tips

That brings us to the end of points to keep in mind before launching a new website. Now, let’s switch to the SEO actions you must take after the website launch.

1. Create Your Google Search Console (GSC) Account

Setting up a Google Search Console account is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO as soon as you have launched your new website.
The best part of this tool is that it is free. With the help of GSC, you can get enormous information like the keywords for which your website is ranking, the position at which your website is ranking, the frequency at which your visitors are clicking on your website, and the websites that have linked to your content.
You will also get insights into crawl errors and violations of any guidelines set by Google. It will also let you know whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. <
br> Connect your Google Search Console account with your website so that you can get easy access to all the information gathered through GSC.

2. Sign up for a Google Analytics Account

Google Analytics account will give you a holistic view of how your website is performing. It will let you track SEO metrics, namely:

  • Number of visits on a particular page
  • Time spent on the page
  • Site speed
  • Dwell time
  • Bounce rate
  • Mobile traffic
  • Return on investment
  • Organic conversion rate

It will also inform you about your website's active users and the number of new users you have acquired on your website. All in all, it is one of the must-have tools to kickstart your SEO efforts whenever you have launched a new website.

3. Work on the Title Tags

Your title tag or SEO title, as they call it, is defined as the text displayed by Google as the page title for each search result.
The user will see the same text in their browser whenever they come to your page. Your title tag must include the focus keyword or primary keyword at the beginning itself for the best SEO results.
For example: If your focus keyword is email marketing trends, draft your SEO title like “Email Marketing Trends to Look Forward to” rather than “10 Exciting Email Marketing Trends”.

Related : Benefits of Email Marketing for Ecommerce

This will also draw the reader’s attention and let them know that they will have the relevant information they are looking for. The title tag should have fewer than 60 characters, otherwise, Google will truncate it.
According to my personal experience, adding a number in the title works pretty well for boosting SEO ranking.

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4. Craft Catchy SEO Optimized Meta Descriptions

As the name suggests, the meta description sheds more light on what the page is about. It will be displayed below the website title and URL in the Google search engine results.
Make sure it is interesting, relevant, and action-focused. The more engaging your meta description is, the better will be the click-through rate of your page.
Keep it detailed enough to generate the user’s interest and get them curious to read more. As mentioned in the SEO title, you must include the primary keyword in the meta description too.

5. Insert Keywords Tactfully in Your Content

Inserting keywords in your content helps to boost your search engine rankings. This becomes even more effective when the keywords are contextually added and grammatically correct.
Do not stuff keywords more than necessary. Make sure you add the primary keyword in the first 10% of the content.
For example, if you work on 1000 words, add the primary keyword in the first 100 words.
Spread it consistently throughout the article in such a way that its frequency is around 0.50%. Moreover, you must also include the secondary and long-tail keywords in the article.
If you plan to include any visuals in the content, it is a great idea to have the primary keyword in the image file name and Alt-tag.

6. Consider Investing in a Heatmap Tool

One of the most extensively used tools for heatmaps is Hotjar. It is a great idea to invest in such a tool so that you can measure user behavior. It will let you understand how the users are interacting with your website.
Heatmaps have a scale from red to blue, where the highest level of engagement is indicated by the warmest color (red), and the lowest engagement is represented by the coolest color (sky blue).
With a tool like Hotjar, you will get three types of data:

  • Scroll maps will help you track how far people are reading your content.
  • Click maps will give you an idea about the most frequently clicked areas. These can either be CTA buttons, images, logos, navigation bar links, or internal links added to the content. Based on this data, you can execute an effective CRO strategy too.
  • Hover maps will let you track how the users are moving the cursor around the page.

Such tools will help you understand user intent and the kind of content or information they are looking for. According to these insights, you can then up the SEO game by serving the subscribers what interests them the most.

7. Create a Google My Business Profile for Local SEO

After you launch your new website, you must create a Google My Business (GMB) listing to get listed on Google. This is especially true for local SEO. If you are a small business targeting people based in a specific geographical location, you should have a Google My Business profile.
GMB is one of the most cost-effective ways to get your business listed on the most popular search engine on the web. It will help your potential clients get easy access to the operation hours, website, phone number, and directions without any cost.
You can also ask your customers to leave a review on the GMB profile to build brand credibility and get more people to purchase from you.
GMB profile will also help you build visibility on Google Search and Maps. You can even publish posts and updates on your Google My Business profile. Just add the relevant UTM codes to the posts as Google Post will not integrate into Google Analytics.

8. Install the Site Kit Plugin If You Have a WordPress Website

For all those new websites created on WordPress, you must install the Site Kit plugin.

  • It will enable you to connect your GSC and Google Analytics accounts and view all the metrics from your WP dashboard itself.
  • It will help you save a lot of time by giving quick settings while eliminating the need to make any changes to the website source code.
  • o It will also allow you to add other Google services like Ads, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights. This plugin is very useful to keep track of your SEO performance.

9. Monitor Your Website Performance Regularly

As you have all the analytics accessible from a single place, that is, your WordPress dashboard, you can easily analyze your website's performance and understand whether your SEO efforts bring results.
Whether it is the traffic, ranking, or duration of their visit, you must keep an eye on all these vital metrics.
Without doing so, you will not be able to optimize your website for search engine rankings. Consequently, all your hard work for SEO will go down the drain.

10. Use the Screaming Frog Tool for Auditing Your Website at Regular Intervals

Once you have published your new website and are half a year old, you can start auditing your website through the Screaming Frog tool. It is a free software program that will let you figure out all the SEO problems in your website.
It will give you an insight into the following:

  • Non-indexable pages
  • 301 redirections
  • Missing SEO title or meta description
  • Heavy images
  • Visuals without any Alt-text
  • Pages with a low word count
  • Any underscores or upper case in the URLs
  • Problems in crawl depth

In case you find any of these issues on your website, you must fix them at the earliest so that your SEO is not negatively impacted.

11. Take Help of Snippet Optimizer Tools like Seomofo

At the outset, when your website is new, you must resort to snippet optimizer tools to write your SEO title and meta description.
It will help you to write engaging titles and descriptions without exceeding their respective character counts. This is important so that the search engines do not truncate your title or description.
Take a look at this screenshot to see how this tool works.

12. Keep a Tab on the Website Speed

As your website speed is an important ranking factor for search engines, you must always ensure that your website does not take too much time to load.
When you have just launched a new website, it is natural that the website will be loading fast. But, as you add more content and pages to your website, it might take longer to load. You must use tools like GTMetrix to check the loading speed of your website.
In case your website is slow to load, you must optimize the website elements. Use WordPress plugins like WPRocket that allow you to optimize the image size, minify the CSS and JavaScript, and enable lazy loading of the visuals.

Wrapping Up

Whenever you think of launching a new website, you must not overlook the SEO strategy.
Whether it is selecting the domain name, URL, or the topics to write about, SEO is the number one thing you must remember. It might not give you instant results like many amateur SEO professionals claim, but it will surely give you long-term business benefits.
Get a printout of these checklists and execute it; you will always be ahead of your competitors as far as SEO is concerned. Get in touch with us if you need more help.

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