If you just launched a new website or your about to, there are some basic things you really need to have in place if you want Google to actually find you and rank you. This isn’t the deepest dive in the world but these are the fundamentals that a lot of people skip and then wonder why nobody can find their site.
First thing, build your site on a platform that plays well with Google. If you don’t know where to start just use WordPress. It’s open source, flexible, and Google has historically responded well to it. Squarespace is fine for a lot of things but it tends to perform a little worse from an SEO standpoint than more open platforms even though you’d think otherwise. The main thing you want is a platform that doesn’t put walls around what you can do technically. Some website builders lock you out of the things you need to actually optimize properly.
Next up is page speed and mobile optimization. This is a big one that alot of people ignore. Most of your traffic is gonna come from mobile, like 70 to 80 percent of it depending on your industry. So even if your desktop version looks amazing, if the mobile version is slow and clunky your in trouble. Make sure your images aren’t massive files that take forever to load. Make sure your animations aren’t going crazy. Make sure content flows in a way that makes sense on a small screen.
Once your site is built you need to set up Google Search Console. It’s free and it’s pretty self guided. The main thing you want to do in there is go to the Sitemaps section and submit your sitemap. That tells Google exactly what pages you have and what you want crawled. Without that your kind of just hoping Google finds everything on its own which doesn’t always go well.
Schema markup is another thing that trips people up because it sounds more complicated than it is. Basically its a way of telling Google how your site is structured. You want Google to have a roadmap of your site rather then just guessing. If it’s guessing it probably isn’t crawling things correctly. Check out schema.org if you want to get into it.
For on-page stuff, every single page on your site should have an H1 tag that describes what that page is about. Then your content should be wrapped in the right heading tags below that. And in the background you should have SEO titles and meta descriptions for every page. These are the things that show up in search results. If you don’t set them Google will just pull whatever it wants from your page which is usually not ideal. There are free SEO plugins for WordPress that make all of this pretty easy to manage in one place. You don’t need to pay for the premium versions to get the basics done right.
One thing people seriously underestimate is just having enough content on their site. A lot of people want a clean minimalist look and end up with like 40 words on their homepage. That’s not enough for Google to understand what your site is about or who it should show it to. You need actual keywords, actual sentences, actual content that a search engine can read and categorize.
Blogs help with this too even though nobody really reads them the way they used to. Back in the day people would actually follow bloggers and read their stuff regularly. Now people mostly land on blog posts from search results and skim them. But the content is still valuable because it gives Google more to index, more keywords to associate with your site, and more reasons to send people your way. Just make sure your blogs have the same on-page setup as the rest of your site. H tags, meta descriptions, SEO titles, images with alt tags, all of it.
Set it up right from the beginning and you’ll save yourself alot of headaches later on.
