From planning your SEO, choosing a domain name and choosing your CMS, we will jump forward in time to the day that you launch your first website. Congratulations! Your first website is online and everyone in the World can visit it by typing the domain name into their browser. But hang on, you cannot find your site when you search for it in Google, even when searching for the domain name. This is normal in the minutes after you launch your site, but don’t expect the problem to be resolved by itself. Weeks and maybe months may pass before a new site shows up on Google. If you don’t do some important jobs now, it may never be indexed and therefore never be found on Google.
As we mentioned in the introduction, launching your website is not the end, but the beginning. There are jobs to do so that Google indexes and ranks your site when it is launched and there will be jobs to do over time to improve your ranking in Google.
According to Siteefy.com, 175 new sites are created every minute. That is over 200,000 new sites every day. Google is not informed when a new website is launched, and it can be very wary about indexing so many new sites every day because many are mass-produced by spammers. You need to send signals to Google to prove that your site is not spam and is very worthy of Google’s attention. Here are some of the very first SEO jobs to do immediately after launching your website.
Create Your Google Search Console account
We covered setting up Google Search console in our article Getting started with Google Search Console in January 2023. Here are some extracts from that article to help you set up your account.
Previously known as Webmaster Tools, Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to website owners to give insights into how Google crawls, indexes and ranks a particular website. It is a valuable tool for WordPress users and is probably the best free SEO tool for WordPress sites after SEOPress! In fact, you may obtain the best results by combining both, using SEOPress PRO to import Search Console data to the WordPress dashboard.
You will need a Google Account to use Google Search Console. This can be the same account you use for Google Analytics or other Google tools like GMail. To create your Search Console account and add your first property go to https://search.google.com/search-console/about and on the welcome screen, click Start now.
To start using Search Console, you need to add a property and prove that you have rights to administer the website. You can use the account linked to your domain name (for example seopress.org) to add DNS records to create a property linked to a domain.
To add a specific website (for example https://www.seopress.org/), you can use various methods to prove that you are the owner or creator of the website. These include copying a meta tag from Google Search Console and pasting into the home page of your website.
You can use SEOPress to paste the tag. From the WordPress admin menu choose SEO > Advanced and the click on the Advanced tab. You can paste the tag in the “Google site verification” field and then save the changes. You can see this in more detail in our guide Add your site to Google (Search Console).
Ensure that there is no manual action against your domain
The first, quick job to do once you have access to Google Search Console is to check that there is no manual action against your domain. A manual action will mean that part or all of, your site is blacklisted from Google.
Hopefully your report shows “No issues detected”. This means that there is no manual action penalizing your site in Google. Phew!
If there is a manual action, then you have a problem to fix. We won’t go into everything you need to do here but note that in the help document on the Manual Action Report Google advises:
If you recently bought a site that violated our guidelines before you owned it, fix the issues listed in this report, then let us know in your reconsideration request that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.
Inspect your home page and request indexing
The next step is to make sure that Google can read and index your home page.
At the top of the Google Search Console, where it is written “Inspect any URL in …” you can paste the URL of your home page (for example “https://example.com”) and hit Enter, to access the URL Inspection Report.
If you have just launched your website, you should see that the main block informs you that the “URL is not on Google”. You can request that Google indexes your site by clicking on the REQUEST INDEXING link on this page. But, first of all, we suggest that you make sure that Google can read your page by clicking on the TEST LIVE URL button at the top of the page.
The live test will take a few minutes to complete. If everything went OK, the URL Inspection report should come back with the message “URL is available to Google” next to a green tick. You should also have green ticks next to the various tests that Google performed such as Mobile Usability and Breadcrumbs. If either of these tests show red crosses then you should try and correct the issues even though they may not prevent your page from being indexed.
You can click on the VIEW TESTED PAGE link and then SCREENSHOT to see your page as Google sees it. If everything looks OK, then you can click on REQUEST INDEXING. Google will add your home page to a queue of pages to index.
Google warns that having green lights here does not guarantee that a page will be indexed, but creating a Google Search Console account and submitting a request should be a big help. As long as there is no manual action against your site and your home page has at least 300 words of unique text, you should find your site in Google very shortly (with 72 hours).
Declare Your sitemap in Google Search Console
You don’t need to request indexing for every page in your site, you can submit all the pages using a sitemap. SEOPress writes your sitemap to file named sitemaps.xml that you will find at the root of your site. The full address will be something like https://example.com/sitemaps.xml.
In the left-hand menu of Google Search Console, click on Sitemaps and paste “sitemaps.xml” and then click SUBMIT. This should successfully submit all the pages of your website and it will help Google find all the pages quicker.
Note: You can also go even further than sitemaps in ensuring that search engines find new content by using instant indexing features included in SEOPress PRO. See the tutorial Use Google Instant Indexing API with SEOPress if you want to set this up now.
Set up Google Analytics (or Matomo)
If this hasn’t been prepared before, make sure that you set up a web analytics solution quickly after launching the site to get reports on how many people are visiting your new site, what pages they are interacting with and where they are coming from. Using a free service like Google Analytics, you will be able to analyze visitors’ comportment and get important insights on sources of traffic – including Google and other search engines – and follow conversions like leads or purchases. It is important to have these tools to make sure that you are hitting the objectives you set out to achieve.
You can use SEOPress to integrate the tracking codes for Google Analytics, Matomo and Microsoft Clarity. This means that you don’t need to add another plugin to WordPress to add Google Analytics, Matomo or Clarity to your WordPress site.
Add Rank tracking -> SEOPress Insights
Google Analytics will show you how many visitors arrive from Google search but it will not give you details of the search terms they used. This information is in Google Search Console, but it is not a good solution for tracking ranking for keywords.
If you want to work seriously on improving your ranking for specific keywords in the coming weeks, we strongly recommend you install the SEOPress Insights plugin. This will help track ranking for keywords you defined and it also give you important information on backlinks your site acquires over time.
Make your first natural backlinks
Google uses links from other sites (called backlinks) to measure the importance of your site and it uses backlinks as part of ranking algorithms. Without links it can be very difficult to rank for competitive keywords.
As soon as your new site is launched, you can start work towards getting the first backlinks to your site. The first jobs to do – ideally on the day you launch your site – are to add a link to your site to popular directories and social networks.
Google Business Profile (previously known as Google My Business) is the first and most important example of a link from a directory that will help your SEO. If as a business, you do not have a Google Business Profile you should create one and verify your business listing.
For businesses we also recommend that you go onto your local Yellow Pages site to try and add your new website to your business listing. In many countries you can do this for free simply by creating an account. This is especially important if you are in a business (like electricians, plumbers or hairdressers) where customers still trust the Yellow Pages more than Google to find local businesses.
You should also go to social network accounts you run like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn to add a link to your new website. If you do not have pages or accounts on social networks that correspond to the subject of your new website, we suggest that you create them now. Use the main name in your domain to create your page or profile name. If you have a business website, you should create pages in Facebook and LinkedIn and only use profiles for your personal accounts.
Set aside time in Your agenda to do SEO tasks
Now is also the time to plan when you will work on your SEO over the next weeks and months. We have produced a free SEO plan you can follow to improve ranking in Google by setting aside just 2 hours a week.
This regular 2-hour-per-week SEO routine is organized around 4 routines that deal with the different types of SEO job. Once you have completed week 4, you come back to week 1.
- Week 1: Checking progress and finding issues
- Week 2: Creating SEO optimized content
- Week 3: On-page SEO optimizations
- Week 4: Off-page SEO optimizations
