About to launch your new website? Have you made sure you’ve checked off all your SEO essentials before pressing ‘go’? Getting all your ducks in a row when it comes to SEO before moving ahead with a website launch can increase your success with your search engine optimisation in the long run and will put you in a good starting position from the get-go.
Mapping content
Before you launch your new website it’s important to take stock of your site build and make sure that you’re targeting important keywords. A great way to do this is by looking at each URL on your new website and creating a list or a ‘map’ of each keyword you are planning on targeting in the beginning.
This both highlights if there are any important keywords that you might have missed on your website, and potentially content gaps and also creates a map that will help you to track what is and isn’t working later on down the road. This will be helpful for on-page optimisation in the future.
Accessibility & User Experience
An important question to ask yourself is how accessible your website is for search engines. You can run checks on how accessible your pages are to crawlers through tools like Google search console, running a scan of your site before official launch will help to highlight any potential accessibility issues, like duplicate content, thin content or pages with no content at all. It will also help to highlight broken links or page, speed issues, and other technical problems that might limit accessibility.
You should also do checks to make sure your website will be accessible for all types of users, devices and browsers. You also need to consider needs like support for blind users.
There are tools that can help you do these checks, or you can test them out on your own devices.
Speed has a significant impact on accessibility, so before launching your website make sure you use a tool like Google Speed Test and establish what speeds are like, don’t forget to consider speeds in other regions as well, especially if you are targeting international audiences.
Make sure you also complete some usability testing to ensure users are going to get a consistently good experience. Good testing is the best way to pick up problems in navigation and experience so make sure you’ve done a thorough job of it before making anything live.
Have you got tracking and tools set up?
A lot of people are excited to get their websites launched and might move ahead before they’ve gotten around to laying the ground work of setting up all the tools and analytics they need – they figure it can always be done later right? This is an early mistake to make. Getting your analytics and tools requirements in place before launch can save you a lot of headaches later on down the road.
A few key things you should set-up are:
Analytics tools- Tools like google analytics are free and can tell you a lot about your website and the users on your site. This is valuable and powerful data for website owners, so it’s a good idea to get this set up from the get-go.
Retargeting and remarketing – You might not be planning to use these tools now or invest in advertising, but it’s a good idea to install your Facebook and Google pixels on your site, so that the audiences are there and accessible if the times comes that you do want to use them.
Google Search Console – This tool is a favourite for SEO specialists, and should definitely be in place before your website launch as it can reveal a lot about you website, including potential issues.
SEO tools – If your committed to optimising search on your website then it’s a good idea to have some type of SEO tool in place ahead of time to help you track your rankings, crawl your site and highlight content gaps or opportunities. These tools are useful for link building, keyword research and discovering technical issues.
