Most SEO problems on a new website are not clever ones. They are basics that were skipped at build time and are more expensive to add later. This is the order we work through before a site goes live.
Before launch
- Decide one canonical address — with or without www — and redirect the other permanently.
- Give every page a unique title and description written for a person, not stuffed with keywords.
- Use one clear H1 per page that says what the page is about.
- Publish a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt that allows your real pages and blocks admin and API routes.
- Add structured data: Organization and WebSite site-wide, Service on service pages, FAQPage where the FAQs are actually visible on the page.
- Check the site on a phone: readable text, no horizontal scrolling, tappable buttons, usable forms.
- Compress images and serve modern formats; images are the usual cause of a slow page.
- Make sure every page is reachable by a link — a page only in the sitemap is a weak signal.
- Install analytics before launch, so you have a baseline from day one.
At launch
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
- Do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools — it also feeds several AI answer engines.
- Use URL Inspection to request indexing for your most important pages.
- Create or claim your Google Business Profile if you serve customers in a specific area, and make the name, address and phone match the website exactly.
In the first month
- Write the pages your customers search for, not the ones you wish they searched for. Our SEO services start from this research.
- Answer real questions you get on calls — those answers are what search engines and AI assistants can quote.
- Link related pages to each other in the body text, not only in the footer.
- Watch Search Console for pages excluded from indexing and fix the causes.
What can wait
- Chasing individual keyword rankings before you have content worth ranking.
- Buying links.
- Publishing thin pages for every nearby town — one strong page beats twenty near-duplicates.
- Redesigning the site again before you know what the current one does.
If you already have a website and want to know which of these are missing, request a free website audit and we will tell you what to fix first.