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Did you catch last week’s episode about how to launch your brand strategically? Today’s episode is a follow-up to what Court taught, so if you haven’t listened yet, go ahead and do that now! We’re sharing five things you need to do for your SEO if you’re launching a website soon.
Now, we can all agree that there are WAY more than five things to do (we can think of at least ten off the top of our heads!), but these are some things that are commonly forgotten or ignored. But they are important for your website to be set up for success right off the bat!
#1 Think About Your Website’s Structure
This means having clear navigation, organizing pages logically, and using URLs that include keywords. When launching a website, you aren’t just checking off a box and saying, “Cool, now I have a website and will have enough clients to be a millionaire.” That would be nice, but it’s not realistic! You want to consider the long-term growth of your business.
Abbey always helps to map this out in two different ways for our SEO clients:
- Competitive research
- Keyword research
Once you have a solid map, you can start to think about keywords even deeper. We are visual people so we love building this in Canva. Steal our template here.
#2 Avoid pages with little content
Search engines need at least 300 words to understand a web page’s content accurately. We often make recommendations to combine pages that don’t have enough words on them on their own. Here are some common examples:
- FAQs
- Contact page
- Location
- Bookings
Combine one or more of these into one page with more information. One of our favorite tips is to put the FAQ section on the contact page—if people have last-minute questions before filling out your contact form, they are right there! It all goes back to having clear and easy navigation to improve the user experience.
#3 Optimize images before adding them to your media gallery
Why do we recommend optimizing before adding? Big images slow down your site (Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor!), and missing alt text means missed SEO opportunities.
A recent example from Abbey: I found a bunch of related keywords for an Italian tourist company on “maps” of certain areas where they are in Italy. This was likely something people were searching for in Google images. It’s a great opportunity to speak to the unique locations in Italy where they specialize in tours. Because they are building a new website, we had the opportunity to do keyword research before (which is my favorite), and now we can influence the design a bit with a strong search strategy.
So, what does that look like in action? Follow our image process:
- Download web-size images
- Compress with tools like TinyJPG or CompressPNG
- Drag into a folder on your desktop
- Change the file names to the alt text with keywords
- Drag into the media library
The best part is you don’t have to upload images one at a time. You can batch a whole bucket of photos to play with while launching a website.
#4 Write SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions for every page
We can’t stress this enough. It’s so important! If we could only do one thing on a website, this would be it! If you don’t know where to find the spot to write your metadata, just Google “SEO Title for Squarespace.”
People can get really hung up on this. Luckily, it’s easier than you think! These are some quick SEO Title tips to help you write unique metadata across all your pages:
- We usually only use brand names in the home page SEO Title and lead with keywords everywhere else.
- We love to use location-based keywords in About or Contact Pages.
- Remove the template that adds your brand name to the end of every page’s SEO Title. (This is usually found in your SEO settings / SEO appearance.)
- If you hover over your tab in the browser, you can see your current SEO titles.
- Make sure each is different so Google doesn’t think it’s duplicate content (which can hurt your rankings) and true to the content on this page.
Honestly, if you are paralyzed by keywords and don’t have time for research and writing, just fill these out with your imagination. Guess what your audience is searching for and put that in. It’s better to fill these out now, then do the research and update them later.
#5 Submit Your Sitemap To Google Search Console
We saved the best for last! Once your site is live, submit your sitemap to let Google know it exists. This speeds up the indexing process, helping your site appear in search results faster. Tip #29 in this blog walks you through how to do it!
Bonus Tip (If You Have Time): Start a Blog Before Launch
If you have time while launching a website, create 2-3 blog posts to launch with. It gives you a jump start on how many keywords you rank for and starts to show Google that you’re here to play! Brainstorm topic ideas, use AI to help you create an outline, then start writing!
Don’t overcomplicate launching a website! Let’s make this easy…
- Spend 1 hour researching your competition by typing in keywords you think your audience would search for to find you. Browse their website and write down notes of things you like and don’t like.
- Grab a notebook and lay out the map of your website.
- Use blocks to outline pages and write sub-pages underneath.
- Use our process to batch your images before you start designing so they are ready and optimized in your media library.
- Spend another 30 minutes to an hour writing those SEO Titles per page.
- Once you hit publish, spend a few minutes manually crawling each page. Watch this video to learn how!
In total, we are talking about maybe 2-4 hours of additional work on your website to ensure it has a solid foundation for being found on search engines. We’d say that’s worth every minute!
If you liked today’s episode on The Duo On Air Marketing Podcast, don’t forget to leave us a review & subscribe!
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Abbey Oslin and Courtney Petersen are Minnesota-based marketing experts, educators, and co-founders of boutique marketing agency Duo Collective, which specializes in SEO, social media strategy, and branding for small business owners and creative entrepreneurs. To learn more about Duo Collective, or to inquire about working with our team, head over to www.duocollective.com.
To inquire about being a guest on Duo On Air, please fill out this application form.
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