Why technical SEO should be integral to your website launch process

When migrating, updating or relaunching a website, analysing your existing SEO data will give you essential insights into your customer behaviours and site content. These can be used to inform your plans around website structure, content, functionality and user experience. Review which pages perform well for organic search, where conversions occur, and what user behavioural trends can be seen to ensure you are protecting the most important content when you launch. 

Even if you’re starting from scratch and launching a brand new website, there is plenty of relevant SEO data available that will help you to plan. This should be understood and considered as early in the design process as possible, as it will feed into your site structure and functionality requirements. For example, keyword research and intent modelling not only helps you create a content strategy that will work for organic search, but provides incredibly helpful insights into customer behaviours and attitudes. Your keyword research may uncover common questions asked by potential customers as part of their product research process, which you can ensure are answered within FAQs on your new product pages. Or you may see seasonal trends associated with your keywords which will help inform your marketing plans for the upcoming year. Likewise, competitor and market analysis focused on the organic search market will help you to understand what is happening within your industry, and reveal opportunities to help get ahead of the competition.

There are ways of building your new website which are quite simply better for SEO. However, even the best development agencies or teams won’t necessarily consider these – after all, the job of a developer is to create the design and functionality that have been briefed to them. Technical SEO considerations need to be explicitly included in that brief if you want them to be incorporated in your new website!

When it comes to launching a new site, there are many technical requirements that may need to be considered to achieve great organic search results. We encourage you to ask questions like: 

• Is JavaScript used in a way that allows search engine and AI search bots to crawl and understand all your content?
• Where does schema markup need to be included to add context?
• Have fundamental SEO items like mobile responsiveness, an xml sitemap, and a robots.txt file been thought about?
• Are page templates structured to reflect best practices around H headings, metadata, internal linking, and imagery?
• How will Google Search Console, GA4 and GTM be used to allow ongoing tracking on the site?

Don’t forget, making amends to the code after launch will generally be much more disruptive (and potentially costly) than building in these SEO-friendly features as part of the initial plan. 

Whilst it is often easier to tweak the content on a website compared to its technical set up or functionality, it is still best to get this right from the outset. The structure of the content on your website plays a big role in both the user experience and organic search success, so it is important to give this plenty of thought. The way that content is organised, and the hierarchy or relationships between pages (called the Information Architecture) informs how search engines navigate and understand your website. Getting this right early on is again much easier than trying to reorganise the whole site down the line, which could involve completely redesigning your header navigation as well as time-consuming updates to internal linking. 

When creating a new website, many marketing strategies initially rely on promotional channels which will have an immediate impact on traffic, like PPC or email marketing. This can be a great way to launch your site with a bang. SEO, on the other hand, can take a while to start to have an impact – it will take some time for Google and other search engines to discover, categorise and begin to rank your pages. This is another reason that it is important to incorporate SEO tactics on your website as early as possible; if your content has been planned, written and created with organic search in mind from the very beginning you can expect to start receiving organic search traffic within a few months – or even weeks – of your launch, rather than having to wait for half a year or more.

No website will be entirely perfect at launch – and every website will naturally need additional tweaks, iterations and updates throughout its lifetime. It is common practice to launch a simple version of your site containing only the most essential, key content and functionality, with a plan to add to this over the following weeks and months. In fact, having a content plan that involves adding new blog posts or new pages every few weeks is a great way to keep your site fresh and up to date. However, this should be done in accordance with a data-lead and thoughtful strategy, incorporating SEO tactics where possible. 

We recommend putting together an ongoing content and offpage SEO strategy before you even launch your website. This strategy will allow you to identify and own the gaps that will exist when the site initially launches, and the areas you would like to fill in over time, providing a practical plan for filling these gaps. You can use this to build up topical authority for the website over time, as you create new content to flesh out your initial site. Some of your planned content may be keyword-optimised SEO landing pages, some may be unique research or thought-leadership which can be used to gather high-quality backlinks, whilst some may be creative multimedia (videos or infographics) which can be enhanced with schema markup to target key SERP real estate. Content of this type takes a bit of time to create, but can be hugely impactful for the longer-term organic search success of your website. Rather than needing to create this all in advance of your website launch, a watertight 6 or 12 month content strategy will help you plan your resources to build it up over time. 

Need help incorporating SEO principles into your upcoming website launch? We can help! Reach out to the friendly Varn team to find out more.