So you have just got a brand new website for your business or planning to get one soon. Naturally, you would want to get as many visitors as possible to your new website. But how can you do that? Stay with us to learn more about your brand new website SEO.
Your website is the face of your business. It represents what you offer to the world. But none of that is going to matter if you don’t get a sizable amount of visitors to your website. Simply put, SEO makes or breaks the deal.
According to HubSpot, 70,000 queries are searched every second on Google. To get visitors, your website needs to rank on top for some of these queries. This can be complex, but very possible and affordable as well. And it certainly helps a lot if you get certain things right – right from the get-go.
SEO starts long before a single word or image – but how?
You might think that SEO starts with keyword research, optimisation and creating backlinks. But SEO begins long before that and is known as Technical SEO.
For SEO, the structure and the core mechanics of your website are as important as the keywords, content and backlinks. This means, your website needs to be correctly set up for bot crawling, indexing and site visibility.
Some of the technical factors that influence SEO are –
- Domain name: Make sure your domain name accurately represents your business. Changing your name at a later stage can be cumbersome and can negatively affect your SEO.
- URLs: Google prefers short URLs. So it’s a good idea to keep them precise with one or two keywords included.
- Site structure: Follow widely used website structures so it is intuitive to the users. A typical website structure is like a pyramid – where the homepage is on the top and then next comes below are the most important pages where each of these pages will lead to a few more pages beneath them.
- Mobile-friendliness: The increasing popularity of mobile devices has a deep influence on Google’s search algorithm. That’s why your website’s mobile responsiveness is a big factor in its Google search ranking.
- Robots.txt: Robots.txt determines which parts of your website can be crawled by Google’s spider bots, and vice versa. If not set up properly, it can accidentally prevent important parts of your website from being indexed on Google.
- Sitemap: Sitemap contains the URLs of your website which helps Google crawl and index the pages. To get discovered faster, be sure to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
- Google Analytics goals: It is important to set up goals on Google Analytics for page visits, activities, conversions and other metrics right from the beginning so the data that will be collected later on can be utilised with utmost efficiency.
DIY or hire experts for your new website SEO?
A website gets at least 53% of its visitors from organic search, if not more. This makes SEO mandatory and something to be taken quite seriously. Because without these visitors, you are missing out on a huge proportion of your potential customers.
We previously mentioned that SEO can be complex – because it is very easy to do bad SEO. Negative SEO will do more harm than good by hampering your website’s reputation with Google, which can get your website blacklisted from the search engine. And once you get on the wrong foot with Google, it’s quite difficult to recover.
So unless you really know what you’re doing, and are prepared to invest hundreds of hours, it’s best to hire professional marketing agencies to handle the job. By hiring dedicated experts, you will definitely get your money’s worth.