Developing a new website is just half of the battle you own. The next important thing you need to do is to plan search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, as #1 in Google SERPs gains overall 27.6% more clicks. Besides, organic results get approximately 94% of overall clicks. But it becomes possible only when your website appears at the top of the search engine results. So, the question is: how do you plan SEO for a new website?
For an effective search engine optimization of your newly developed website, you need to work with a strategic and holistic approach. It works as a primary gateway for a large number of potential customers. A proven strategic SEO plan boosts your business growth by letting your website gain early authority and traction.
Right from technical setup to content creation and keyword optimization, every step contributes equally to making your SEO effort successful. In this post, we will discuss a complete 90-day plan to build credibility, craft impactful pages, and navigate the emerging search landscape. Let’s explore more detailed information.
What is SEO for a New Website?
SEO for any new website reflects the best practices and strategies that are useful for this website to be discovered by search engines. It indeed maximizes visibility to users. Unlike popular websites, new websites begin with limited backlinks, zero authority, no indexed pages, and more. These make it tough to appear in search results.
A highly effective SEO is necessary to make your website indexed, crawled, and also rank for the targeted keywords. It involves optimization of several technical elements such as mobile-friendliness, website speed, creating valuable content, etc., for targeted search terms or keywords.
Besides, it’s also helpful in building trust signals as well with the help of backlinks. Search engine optimization for any new website is all about laying a great foundation to help your brand boost organic traffic, gain site’s presence, and compete in your niche.
Reasons Why You Need to Do SEO for a New Website
Doing SEO for your newly developed website is necessary to ensure it indexes fast with increased organic traffic. It also works effectively in building trust, lure potential customers, and thus helps you stay ahead of your competitors even from day one.
- Boost Potential Customers to your Website
One of the major challenges for a newly developed website is that it faces huge difficulty when it comes to attracting new audiences. Search engine optimization is the most effective way to target the appropriate keywords that your potential customers actively search for.
SEO plays an indispensable role when it comes to bringing qualified customers who have higher potential to convert into leads and thus boost your sales. For instance, when your website appears top of the search results with your targeted keywords, it lures more potential customers to your website.
Besides, when you optimize your website for industry-specific queries, you not only lure random visitors, but also reach people who need your products and services.
- Maximize Search Engine Visibility of your Site
SEO works effectively to ensure your website appears when potential customers look for keywords that are based on your business in terms of products and services. More importantly, your website appears for target keywords, the more people can discover it easily. When your website appears in the top results, it helps in increasing brand awareness as well, apart from increasing traffic.
- Improve Other Market Activities
You need to understand that SEO is not only meant to work in isolation but also strengthens and complements your other marketing efforts as well. For instance, properly optimized landing pages boost the performance of email and social media campaigns by offering an improved user experience and relevance.
A properly structured website with superior quality content can be repurposed across multiple channels to increase the impact of your entire marketing strategy. SEO serves as a backbone that improves your overall digital activities.
- Minimize Dependence on Paid Ads
The fact can’t be denied that SEO is completely different from a paid ad in terms of generating traffic without spending anything. And thus it helps you create webpages that continue to improve their search engine ranking in search results and thus boost traffic to your website for months.
For any new website, this is specifically highly important since it enables your website to grow with a higher consistency even without relying overly on paid campaigns.
Tips to Do SEO For a New Website
Whether it’s unique keyword strategies, developing authoritative backlinks, or avoiding any duplicate content, you need to perform everything to managing and improving SEO for any new website. Let’s explore some more tips that will help you take your SEO strategy to the next level.
- Do Keyword Research
While talking about various important tips to do SEO for a new website, it’s wise to start with keyword research. It’s a fact that keyword research is the backbone of search engine optimization and thus determines its overall success.
Proper keyword research is necessary to find the most appropriate and important topics. You can create the content around the same time to maximize your chance of appearing in search results.
How to Find the Relevant Keywords?
Well, this is an important question that may have come to your mind, right? To do this, you need to start the entire process by using the right tool. It not only saves your valuable time but also lets you find the right keyword related to your business.
And while talking about the best keyword research tool, you will find no other tool is as good as Google’s Keyword Planner. It’s indeed a free and robust keyword research tool. Though the tool is designed mainly for Google Ads, it’s still a good option for SEO keyword research. You need to enter a seed keyword first to get a complete list of keyword ideas.
For every important keyword, you will find average monthly searches along with other important details, such as Low, Medium, and High. Besides, you can also see certain ad-related metrics, including top-of-page bid estimates.
The above image shows the suggested keyword based on your input. Apart from the suggested keywords, it also displays various other details like average monthly searches, competition, bidding price, etc.
Apart from Google Keyword Planner, you can also leverage Keyword Magic Tool (by SEMrush), Keyword Generator Tool (by Aherfs), and many others to search for the right keywords to target. These tools also help you choose the right keywords based on the following important factors;
- Search volume
- Search intent
- Personal keyword difficulty (PKD%)
PKD reflects how tough it would be for your website to rank for an individual keyword.
For any new website, it’s indeed good to select those keywords that are less competitive, as it maximizes your chance of search engine ranking. Make sure the selected keywords have impressive search volumes.
Pro Tip: It’s advisable to always focus on using any specific queries or long-tail keywords. They are less difficult and also have higher search volume. Users often leave long queries when they leverage AI platforms to search.
So, it’s indeed a great idea to target mainly long-tail keywords. They maximize your chance to be visible in both AI-generated results and traditional search results. To find any search keyword, you can leverage popular tools like “Answer The Public”.
- Set Up Necessary Essentials
Make sure search engines are capable of accessing your web pages smoothly, since it’s necessary, and ensure your website’s appearance in search results. Apart from accessing your website, search engines also store it in a database.
Things You Need to Focus on
Let’s find out some crucial things you need to focus on;
- Creation of a Robots.txt File
It’s an important file that allows search engines to crawl and also instructs pages to avoid. You need to ensure that the robots.txt file doesn’t block any important pages of your website, which you wish to rank.
- Google Search Console
Google Search Console gives you complete information regarding the performance of your website in Google Search. You can leverage this tool to analyze issues and also keep an eye on various important keywords that boost traffic.
- Submit an XML Sitemap
A sitemap gives you a complete list of those pages you wish search engines to index. You can generate the sitemap and then submit it with the help of Google Search Console.
- Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
GA4 enables you to grasp the way users interact with your website in terms of the elements they click. Apart from this, it also gives you details like pages that perform best, the source from where they come, and more.
- Create an AI Visibility Monitoring Tool
A large number of people leverage AI platforms to search for necessary information. These tools mainly include Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more. Apart from this, SEMrush AI Toolkit lets you keep an eye on your website’s visibility in these important platforms.
Besides, you can also use the Site Audit tool of SEMrush to detect any issues that may prevent your pages from getting indexed.
You need to just open the tool and put your website’s URL in the search box and hit the button “Start SEO Audit”. And you will get the final results.
You need to check whether your important website pages are indexed and also qualified to be visible in search results.
- Create Quality Content
Quality content is one of the important factors that ensures the success of SEO of your new website. Apart from quality, you also need to ensure your content is people-first, reliable, and helpful for your target audience. It maximizes the chance of search engine ranking your content in search when it delivers value and also offers completely original content.
Besides, Google also confirms that developing quality content helps it be visible in AI-driven experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews.
How to Write Quality Content
You need to implement the following important tips and tricks to create top-quality content for your new website.
- Match Search Intent
It’s crucial to ensure your content answers directly in terms of what users look for. Align your content with the actual purpose behind any search query, be it learning, purchasing, comparing, or solving any issues.
- Use Real Expertise and Experience
The next important thing you can do is to share valuable insights from an in-depth subject experience. You need to reference client work, actual projects, and more.
- Use Attractive Visuals
Visuals are highly important to tantalize the senses of users. So, you should never leave any stone unturned when it comes to luring visuals on your website. It also helps users understand concepts in-depth. You need to always use visuals such as comparison tables, annotated screenshots, and short video snippets.
- Include Insights or Original Research
It’s highly important to add a new thing to your conversation to get a competitive advantage. This is indeed highly important data from your experiments, surveys, or even your personal results.
Meanwhile, the most important thing you need to always keep in mind is that original research for content writing matters a lot, especially for a new site. It also gives Google a compelling reason to crawl your website. This is something that many industry experts believe.
Doing proper research lets your content rank on the first page of Google search results as well. For instance, we have written well-researched content with the targeted keywords “SEO for Recruiters,” and it appears in the top 10 of Google search results.
- Boost the Technical SEO of your Website
A proper technical SEO is essential to make it convenient for search engines to crawl, index, and grasp your content properly. In the case of a new website, getting the basic details early on is indeed highly important. The reason is that avoiding even small technical errors boosts the odds of your website pages being found, stored, and ranked.
Many industry experts have a common belief that getting a proper URL structure is specifically quite important. So, it’s pivotal to ensure the architecture of your website is developed to last by making a proper decision in terms of what your folders and subfolders will be.
You need to be clear about whether your blog post will be live inside any topical folders, such as “/topic/post-name”? Or live at “/blog/post-name”. Apart from this, you also need to decide whether your product pages come under “/use-cases/” or “/product/”.
Apart from the above activities, you also need to focus on many other activities as well;
- Use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)
HTTPS is a highly secure protocol that ensures better encryption of data transfer between the server and the browser of users. And it acts as a good running signal.
- Make your Website Mobile-Friendly
Google uses mobile-first indexing. Therefore, your website should work perfectly on mobile. Besides, you also need to use responsive design and test performance for different screen sizes. Don’t forget to resolve layout issues that affect usability.
- Boost Core Web Vitals
These are indeed important metrics that are useful in determining the user-friendliness of your website. They indeed affect the site ranking as well.
- Improve Website Speed
Websites that load fast ensure a higher engagement of visitors. You need to minimize JavaScript, compress large pictures, and use browser caching to improve loading time.
- Use of Structured Data
Also known as Schema markup, structured data allows Google to get complete details about your content and understand it properly. The only thing you can do is to implement schema markup properly. Besides, you need to ensure that the information in your structured data is also visible on your website page.
To check or fix any issues related to structured data, you can leverage SEMrush’s site audit tool
You just need to put the URL of your website in the above search box and then press the “Start SEO Audit”. And the final result appears just like below;
- On-Page SEO
When it comes to on-page SEO, it’s an important process that involves optimizing website pages for search engines and also for users. It allows web pages to rank high and boost more organic traffic. Here’s an important thing you need to focus on;
- Adding Internal Links
Internal links are basically hyperlinks that take visitors to other pages of your website. It allows users to explore the important and relevant and high-quality content and thus enables search engines to crawl your website with higher efficiency.
- Optimize Title Tag
Being an HTML title, a title tag appears mainly in browser tabs and also appears as a clickable headline in search results. Make sure you keep it fully relevant and clear. You need to include your target keyword to let search engines and users understand your page better.
- Writing Eye-Catchy Meta Description
A meta description is basically a brief HTML summary that is visible just below your page title in SERPs. Though it doesn’t impact SEO ranking directly, a good meta description is necessary to maximize its click-through rates.
- Use Clear URL Slugs
A slug is the last but a highly important part of any URL. It’s crucial to keep slugs, descriptive, short, keyword-focused, and more. Be it special characters, numbers, or unnecessary words, you need to avoid using all these properly.
- Add Alt Text to Images
Alt text serves its actual purpose to describe images. It lets search engines grasp the image content and also maximize its accessibility for users who rely fully on many screen readers.
It’s advisable not to overoptimize your website pages. The reason is overoptimizing harms more. You need to leverage the “On-Page SEO Checker” by SEMrush to get actionable and smart recommendations for optimization of your website for search engines.
- Create Quality Backlinks
Building top-quality backlinks is essential to increasing your website’s ranking in search engines. Backlinks also play a vital role in creating authority.
Tips to Create Quality Backlinks
Let’s explore some practical tips on building top-quality backlinks for your website. It helps you improve the ranking of your website in search engines.
- Write Guest Posts
You need to contribute top-quality content to many authoritative websites in your related niche. In return, you earn a quality backlink to your website. You need to be aware that links are not guaranteed, and that several blogs use link attributes that can’t pass link equity.
- Post Original Research
Always create material that naturally generates connections, such as research papers based on survey data and thought leadership derived from your many viewpoints.
- Reverse-Engineer Backlinks of your Competitors
You need to discover websites that link to your competitors. Always pitch those websites with content worth linking to.
For instance, we use the Ahrefs backlink analysis tool, and the result appears as follows.
- Maximize Brand Mention
One thing you need to keep in mind is that the more your brand gets mentioned online, the more it gets a chance to become visible in AI-based answers. Once your website gets included in answers, it maximizes its visibility. Tools developed on several platforms, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others, gather information from across the website.
When your brand appears consistently across many reputable sources, LLM can recognize and include your website in most relevant answers as well. The following are important tips you can consider implementing to get more brand mentions.
- Publish research-based content
- Make your presence on forums
You need to leverage the “AI Toolkit” by SEMrush to determine your visibility on multiple platforms, including Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and more. This toolkit reflects how you are visible, especially when compared to your competitors. It enables you to analyze your sentiment and also the way to discover relevant content topics too.
The tool displays results just like below
Wrap Up
Your newly developed website deserves to get more attention with a world-class and impeccable SEO strategy. After a proper implementation, you have a higher probability of seeing various positive changes in your SEO performance as well.
To find exactly the visibility you gain, you need to leverage Position Tracking by SEMrush or several other tools. Implementing the aforementioned tool effectively allows you to analyze your visibility in traditional search engines. Getting assistance from a professional SEO company will help you get the desired outcomes by ensuring the appearance of your website in the top 10 search results.
