Explained: When Should I Start SEO For My New Business Website?

The answer to the question, “When should I start SEO for my new Business Website?” is a concise one: Before you launch it. When it comes to SEO, you should use the same approach as the Chinese take when planting trees:

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.

This means it’s never too early to begin SEO on your website. SEO begins even before the website is launched. Ignoring SEO aspects that are unique to website launching will have serious repercussions. It won’t be an exaggeration to suggest that doing so can put you out of business. Imagine investing thousands of dollars into a new ecommerce website that no one will be able to find on the internet.

Failure to apply the best SEO practices from the beginning means no clicks, visitors, and zero sales. Let’s look at some of the SEO tactics that need to be employed at various stages early on in website development.

Choice of Domain Name

Even though the approach has changed, domain names still have a significant impact on SEO. Your domain name has to give search engines an idea of what your website is about. In other terms, it has to be keyword-rich.

Wherever possible, it’s best to choose a domain name that is related in some way to what the website is about. It should also be easy to remember, and it would be a plus if it contains the main keyword that a business aims to rank for.

You should note, however, that it’s not advisable to force domain names. For instance, if you need a website for a pizza business called John’s Deli, and the domain name johns-deli is available, it would be better to go for that rather than registering something like the-best-pizza-ever.com. That would probably be hard to remember, and it might end up confusing customers.

Include SEO in UX (user experience) or web design

SEO should start as early as when the process of web design begins. It affects decisions like what content you should place on the homepage of your website. This means that you can not separate UX, design, and SEO. Others even suggest that UX is a form of SEO. Therefore, it would be disastrous to think that you can finish a website and then start thinking about SEO later.

If it so happens that a company designs a website and finishes without considering SEO, the best that can be done would be to go back to square one and start afresh. While this would seem like a loss or waste of money, it all can be avoided by starting with SEO right from the beginning.

SEO and Website Structure

How you build a website has a huge impact on its ranking potential. To rank higher in search results, you should structure it in a manner that is SEO-friendly. Each page should target a selected set of related and highly relevant keywords.

For instance, if you are crafting a website for a business that sells women’s clothing. It would be best to have each category of the clothes rank for specific target keywords. On such a website, you can have the homepage targeting the main keyword, women’s clothes, and then have subpages targeting related groups of secondary keywords like dresses and their types, shoes, and lingerie.

Bottomline

It’s impossible to rewind time and plant a tree; the same way it’s impossible to undo what’s already been done wrong when it comes to SEO. Try as much as possible to keep SEO in mind when thinking about the website, even before everything else has been done.

Read why SEO is important for your business – Click Here!