When should a business start improving its SEO for a brand-new website?

Table of contents:

• Why is SEO so important for most businesses?
• What’s the difference between a brand-new website and a redesigned website?
• How long does it take to start seeing tangible results from our SEO?
• How to measure progress
• How Digital Tailors can help your business to gain more customers online

What exactly is SEO?

For businesses of all sizes, from harbourside up to the heights of Clifton in Bristol, they undoubtedly want shoppers to find their website easily. For this to happen, your business needs to rank on Google. This means that your website needs to rank high organically and in the Google Business results.

For your business to come up high on Google for relevant searches, you need to improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

This is a gradual process of improving the website’s ranking factors, and there’s no two ways about it; this does take time. You can’t rush the process, and it can take many consecutive months before you start to see tangible benefits from the SEO. However, it has been reported that if your SEO agency works hard, it’s possible in some cases to grow the organic traffic by 28.98%

 

When should we start working on improving our SEO?

This question is a bit like, when should someone start to improve their diet?

The simple answer is as soon as possible; therefore, the SEO process should even start before the website has been built.

Let us explain precisely what we mean by that statement. If you are in the planning and development stage of your web design, you have a fantastic opportunity to incorporate good SEO into the website.

For example, you should discuss with your web development team the following:

 

Page layout
Ensure that each leading service or product category has its own dedicated page.

Lighting fast

Make sure that you make your company website as fast as possible, don’t purchase cheap and low-cost hosting, as it’s often slow, and won’t be fast enough to improve your SEO.

Good design

Pay that bit more for a well-designed website, so that shoppers find it a piece of cake to use the website and navigate it.

Incorporating SEO into the web design

• Keywords
• Content marketing
• Technical SEO
• Links

These are what you would call the “four main pillars of SEO”- therefore, because they are crucial to a business’s search engine optimisation success, it’s a good idea to think about these aspects when having the website designed. For example, how can we better optimise the page titles? How can the content marketing be as well-written and helpful as possible? How can you make the technical SEO work like a Swiss-made watch, meaning it’s working perfectly?

 

Why is there a difference between a website redesign and a brand-new website?

Brand new website

A brand-new website often means that the website will have no SEO applied to it before.

Therefore, this is with the assumption that no one else has bought that domain name in the past.

We say that because another business may have owned a domain name, perhaps they have applied SEO to it in the past.

Therefore, do make sure that when you buy a domain name, no other businesses have used it in the past. The reason is that the previous company, which owns the domain name, may have had the SEO completely wrong; they may have received a Google penalty, for say building spam links.

Therefore, if a business comes along, buys that domain name, and at a later point, they sometimes inherit those SEO problems.

However, let’s say, for example, that nobody has bought that domain name before. Therefore, it’s a brand-new domain name.

This means that there will be no DA, that’s domain authority, no links, no content marketing, no information on dwell times, for example.

This makes the SEO much more complicated, simply because the reason is that you start from scratch.
Bear this in mind when buying a new domain name.
Existing domain, just a website redesign.

A website redesign can mean altering and improving the visual design of the website. Now, what’s important here is that whichever web designer you proceed with, they will redesign and migrate the website with great caution.

The reason is that if you make the mistake of having the website redesigned, and the designers totally change the URL extensions or slugs, as they call them, then this can massively, hugely damage the SEO of the business.

The reason is that the longer you have a website, the longer you work on improving the search engine optimisation. What this does is it builds on that strength, and it becomes like a rolling snowball, building and getting more momentum.

However, what can happen is that the business accrues SEO strength to a URL domain name or a domain name with a URL extension.

So if you go changing those URL extensions, or deleting them, or losing all that hard work that you have been implementing into your SEO.

This is why website redesign is very different from getting a website designed.

When designing our website, what aspects of the design do we need to get right to improve our SEO?

 

Keyword research

Utilise a reliable SEO tool, such as Ahrefs or Moz, which we utilise at our SEO agency. Use keyword research tools to make sure that you are improving the content marketing on each page, and optimising it for the right SEO keywords. This will give your SEO a head start for your brand-new website, provided you follow the Google E-EAT guidance.

 

On-page SEO

Work closely with your web design team to ensure that on-page SEO is done correctly. Add H1 through H6 tags, make good use of internal links, and include alt text, etc.

 

Technical SEO

Again, when you’re having a brand-new website designed, ensure that you have a good mobile version of the website as well. Additionally, invest in top-quality website hosting that’s fast; this will enhance the website’s user experience. Additionally, add an SSL certificate and an XML sitemap to ensure that Googlebot can crawl and index each page.

 

Content marketing

When designing a brand-new website, avoid using AI-generated content marketing.
Instead, what you want to do is to write high-quality text that a copywriter writes. The work should have a high Google E-EAT score. The copywriter that you use should make sure that the text, whether it’s a product description or the homepage, is as helpful as possible.

 

Google indexing

Can Googlebot crawl and index the pages that you want to appear in Google’s results? This is crucial to ensure that the main pages can be indexed.

 

How long does SEO take for a brand-new website?

There’s no two ways about it; SEO will take much longer for a brand-new website. The reason is that there will be no backlinks, no information on website dwell times, and minimal content marketing.

For this reason, it will take longer to see results, and your appointed marketing agency needs to do more work and work harder in the initial months to generate results.

It’s therefore essential to be realistic and to implement high-quality work, measuring the results. Don’t cut corners, many businesses in Bristol have done this, and then there SEO has crashed and burned, because they may have for example built spam links, added to much AI written text, or just over optimised the website for a keyword, such as “dentists in Clifton”- therefore they may have damaged their businesses SEO for a very long period.

Therefore, it’s a bit like the Guinness slogan, ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ meaning that implementing high-quality work takes time.

Good quality search engine optimisation shouldn’t be rushed.

 

Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console

When you launch your brand-new website, ask your web designers to add the tracking code for Google Analytics.

What you will want to see is every month whether the number of visitors is improving. As you build more links, improve on-page SEO, and write content marketing, you should start to see an improvement in the number of organic visitors.

 

Come to the best SEO agency in Bristol.

If you run a business in the South West of England, and you need to drum up more business, we can help.

Whether you have a website that’s been live for an extended period or a brand-new website that’s just been designed by your website designers, we can help you.

With affordable prices, we can help improve businesses’ SEO in the South West of England, starting from £ 1,000 per month.

We have some of the best, most knowledgeable SEO minds in the South West working for us; therefore, do contact Digital Tailors if you want to improve your business’s organic SEO.