When it comes to launching a new website for your business, considering SEO first and foremost is essential. Everything you do, from picking a website platform to building your web pages, should be guided by SEO. This will allow you to rake in organic traffic from Google as soon as possible. Take a look at our list of 7 tips to make your new website search engine friendly.
7 Tips for SEO for a New Website:
Use an SEO-Friendly Platform
Have a Target Keyword for Every Page
Write at Least 500 Words on Every Page, Often Even More
Fill Out Your Meta Information
Set Up Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Consider Hiring a Professional
Use an SEO-Friendly Platform
When shopping around for a platform to build your website on, the choices can be overwhelming. From Squarespace, to WIX, to WordPress, to GoDaddy – who do you choose?
The most SEO friendly website platform is WordPress. Not only does WordPress literally power 35% of all existing websites, but time and time again studies find that it is the best overall builder and platform for SEO.
In order to set your new website up for success SEO wise, it’s crucial to begin with a platform that makes it possible. Many website builders do not give you any control over features crucial to SEO, like editing your meta information, or have such bad clunky code that search engines have trouble crawling them at all. Some websites don’t even work on mobile devices, which today is a death sentence for good search engine optimization. Don’t get behind before you even begin; pick a website platform with good SEO capabilities!
Have a Target Keyword for Every Page
For every page you create on your website, whether it’s a page explaining a service you provide, a product you sell, or even a blog post, you need to have a target keyword in mind.
A target keyword is the word or phrase that you want that page to rank for in Google. So this might be “tree trimming in Austin TX,” or “custom shirt printing” or whatever that blog post is on. By picking just one target keyword per page, Google will more easily be able to tell what that page is about. Your chances of getting a page that is all about one thing to rank well are much higher than grouping lots of information all together on one page. That will confuse Google.
Having a target keyword will help guide what you write on the page as well. You will want to use that keyword multiple times throughout your page’s content, so make sure you address all angles of that topic. And stay on topic! Don’t wander into the territory of another target keyword; instead, make a separate page for that keyword too.
If this all seems a little too confusing, don’t worry, an Ecommerce SEO Agency could also be hired to assist.
Write at Least 500 Words on Every Page, Often Even More
The bare minimum number of words you should have on every page is around 500 for good SEO. For stellar SEO though, you should have over 1,000. A majority of pages on the first page of Google have well over 1,000 words, but 500 is a good place to start.
This word count recommendation holds for every page that you would like to rank on Google. This includes everything from your home page to every blog post. Unless it is a simple page like a contact form submission or your return policy, write as much as you can about that target keyword. Search engines like to see lengthy, comprehensive pages. Prove to Google that your page is worthy of the first page by creating a lot of content.
Fill Out Your Meta Information
For those who don’t know, the most important pieces of your meta information are your meta title and your meta description. These are the snippets of information that you see displayed in a google search results page, and this information is very important to Google.
Every page needs a designated meta title and meta description. In most website builders you can manually set what these are. In WordPress, you can use the Yoast SEO plug in to do this. You will want to use your target keyword in your meta title and name your page something that will entice Google searchers to click on your search result. Your meta description is also very important, so give people a sneak preview of what they can expect if they click on your page.
Set Up Google Analytics and Google Search Console
In order to properly track how traffic is behaving on your website, set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console. When you sign up, these platforms will give you some code to input in your website. In most website builders there is a designated spot to add this code.
The reason it is so important to set up Google Analytics and Search Console on your website is that you need to know what is working SEO-wise, and what is not. Some important things that GA (Google Analytics) will tell you is how many people are finding your website every day using a search engine, what pages these people are visiting, how long they stay on each page, what cities they live in, and much more.
Google Search Console will give you very specific information about what people are googling in order to see your website, how often your website is clicked on in comparison to others, and if you have any technical issues on your website. Google Search Console is a little more advanced than GA, but getting both of these services set up at the beginning will allow you collect data that you can look back on for years to come.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Nearly 60% of all Google searches happen on mobile devices. Do you know what that means? Google gives priority to websites that function well on mobile. Google’s goal is to give their users the best results possible, so if they see that all of the traffic on mobile devices that they send to your website immediately leaves, they will stop sending traffic to your website.
Many website platforms will help you with mobile compatibility. You can often purchase “themes,” or website templates, that are mobile friendly and will automatically resize text and images for those on mobile devices. This is such a crucial part of SEO that you should pick your website’s look and feel largely based on how well it works on mobile, too.
Consider Hiring a Professional
Most business owners want to do their own SEO, but when you add up the time it takes to learn with the time it takes to implement it on a regular basis, it often makes more sense financially to hire an agency to help with eCommerce SEO services. It is not so much a matter of if you could do it yourself, but more of if you should do it yourself. A good SEO specialist has SEO strategy down to a science and can identify what course of action to take on your website in a fraction of the time it might take someone less experienced.
SEO for New Websites
It can take time for a brand new website to rank on search engines. To give yourself a fighting chance of showing up on the first page of Google, start work on SEO as early as possible. Pick a website design and platform based on its SEO capabilities, and build every page with SEO in mind. Organic traffic is so essential to success that every new business should prioritize SEO as a main factor in their website.
Author | Emily Forbes
An Entrepreneur, Mother & A passionate tech writer in the technology industry!
Email:- EmilyForbes69@gmail.com
