If done correctly, SEO can send thousands of targeted visitors to your website each month. This turns your site from an afterthought into an asset that generates leads and sales. This article covers how to do SEO for your new website in digestible steps.
SEO Steps for New Websites
Implementing SEO for a new website involves numerous steps. Some should be implemented before you begin optimizing your website for search engines, and others after optimization.
Both pre- and post-SEO steps are equally important. If these are not implemented correctly, your SEO strategy will fail.
1. Preliminary steps to SEO
The steps prior to SEO focus primarily on conducting keyword research and creating a content strategy.
Conduct keyword research
As you may already know, implementing SEO involves optimizing the pages on your site. This means that you either have existing pages that need optimization or you can create new pages and optimize them so that they rank in search engines and attract traffic to your website.
To optimize existing or new pages, you need to find keywords that your pages can target.
For example, let’s say you’ve started a new website that sells productivity tools. Your tools include a task manager, a calendar app, a habit tracker, and a project management platform, among other things.
You can create pages that target these keywords, such as “online task manager,” “business calendar app,” “digital habit tracker,” and “collaborative project management platform.”
Optimize your pages and wait for the keywords to rank in the search engines. Once they start ranking high in search results, users will visit your website and end up buying your productivity tools.
To reiterate, keyword research is the process of identifying keywords that you can target for the pages of your new website.
Keyword research is a broad topic, but in short, it involves:
- Generate ideas for relevant terms for your website.
- Analyze the competition to find relevant keywords.
- Use keyword research tools like Ahref, SEMrush or Keywords Everywhere to check search volume.
- Select a combination of short-tail keywords (such as “task manager”) and long-tail keywords (such as “how to organize collaborative projects online”).
- Choose target keywords based on how easy they are to rank for on a new site.
Develop a content strategy
Once you have a list of keywords to target, it’s time to create a content strategy, which basically means developing a plan that outlines how you will create, publish, distribute, and manage your content.
There’s a lot involved in creating a content strategy, but for a new website, we suggest keeping it simple and following these guides: How to Create a Content Plan with Ahref and HubSpot.
2. SEO Implementation
There are different types of search engine optimization, namely: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO and multilingual SEO.
Let’s dive into each type of SEO and learn how to implement it on a new website:
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the technique of optimizing individual web pages to improve search engine rankings and attract organic traffic. It involves the following components:
Write high-quality content
Content is the foundation of a website. You need to create valuable, well-researched, engaging content that addresses user needs and interests.
Poorly written, irrelevant or uninformative content with unexpected self-promotion often results in a negative user experience and generally fails to rank in search engines.
Strategic keyword placement
The target keyword (“online task manager”) and keyword variations (“task manager app,” “productivity tools for business,” etc.) should be included naturally throughout the article.
The target keyword should be included in the following places:
- Page title.
- First 100 words.
- Subtitles.
- Meta description.
- URL.
- Image names and alternative text.
Distribute the target keyword
The target keyword should appear frequently throughout the page, organically and without appearing forced.
The ideal frequency varies depending on factors such as content length, context, and competition, but SEO experts recommend an ideal keyword density of between 1-2%.
H tags help structure the content on your pages with the goal of making them easier to consume for both visitors and search engines. There are six H tags, such as the H1 tag, H2, H3, and so on.
Each H tag on a page typically contains the target keyword or variations of it.
Optimizing titles and meta descriptions
The title and meta description are super important components of your page, as they appear in search engines and are responsible for convincing users to click and view the page.
Both should contain target keywords, be unique, catchy, and relevant. They should also adhere to search engine character limits to avoid being cut off from results.
Use internal and external links
Internal links (inbound) are links that connect pages within your website, and external links (outbound) are links that connect to other websites. Internal links make navigation easier, while external links add context and help establish trust.
URL Optimization
Your page URL should be concise, descriptive, and keyword-rich.
For example, the URL for a post titled “3 Best Productivity Tools for Managing Tasks” might look like this: https://example.com/best-productivity-tools/.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the optimization of factors outside of your website, such as acquiring backlinks, social media signals, partnerships, sponsorships, etc., to improve your site’s search engine ranking and overall online presence.
Implementing off-page SEO takes a lot of time and dedication, so we recommend skipping this SEO strategy for now and focusing on on-page, technical, and multilingual SEO.
Learn more about off-page SEO with these guides: What is off-page SEO and everything you need to know about off-page SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing your website’s infrastructure to ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your site correctly.
Key components of technical SEO include:
- Install an SSL certificate: Add “https://” to your domain name and ensure secure, encrypted transfer of data on your pages.
- Optimize site speed for mobile and desktop: Slow sites do not rank well. Optimizing web pages includes compressing images, code, scripts, and content, using lazy loading, web caching, and reducing redirects, among others. This ensures that your site loads faster, which improves its ranking.
- Implement schema markup: Schemas are codes that are added to web pages to help search engines understand the content and present it to users in informative snippets on search results pages.
- Generate XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonical tags: XML sitemaps help search engines crawl and index your site’s content efficiently. The robots.txt file guides search engine bots on which pages to crawl or exclude. Canonical tags are used to indicate the preferred version of a web page when duplicate content is found on the site.
Multilingual SEO
Multilingual SEO adapts your website’s content and structure for multiple languages, helping to expand your reach and attract more traffic.
You only need to implement it when you translate your website into other languages. Implementing multilingual SEO involves finding target keywords in the new language and translating the content, including page URLs, image names, alt text, titles, meta descriptions, multilingual sitemaps, hreflang tags, and more.
Post-SEO Steps
After implementing the SEO steps mentioned above, it is important to determine which tactics are working.
Add your site to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA) are free tools that provide insight into visitor behavior and your website’s performance in search results.
Apply the 80-20 rule
The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, suggests that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. Apply this to your SEO efforts by focusing on what is working and reducing time on what is not bringing desired results.
