New Website SEO Checklist: 12 Steps Before You Launch

The most common reason a new site does not show up in Google is a handful of simple steps skipped on launch day — and most of them take five minutes to check. The 12-point list below is the short version of the pre-launch process we run on every project.

Which technical checks come first? (1-5)

Technical groundwork (1–5): All four variants of your address — with www, without www, http and https — must redirect to one canonical address; four addresses mean four sites and your strength is split between them. The SSL certificate must be installed and clean, with no "not secure" warning on any page. Check robots.txt: if it contains "Disallow: /" your site is telling Google not to index it — the lock set during development and famously forgotten on launch day. yoursite.com/sitemap.xml should return a current sitemap. And set up Google Search Console: you submit the sitemap there and see indexing problems there. It is free and takes ten minutes.

What to check on the content side (6-9)

Content (6–9): Every page you want indexed needs a single target query — what does someone looking for this page type into Google? If you have no answer, the page has no SEO. The title should stay under 60 characters, carry the target query naturally and differ on every page; the description should stay under 155 characters and invite the click. Each page needs exactly one H1, with subheadings that step down in order. Image filenames should mean something and alt text should be filled in: istanbul-web-design-office.jpg rather than IMG_4821.jpg.

What performance and trust require (10-12)

Performance and trust (10–12): Most traffic arrives on phones and Google judges sites on their mobile version — put your site into PageSpeed Insights, and if the score is low the first suspect is uncompressed images; switching to WebP is on its own the biggest single speed win on most sites. When your site is shared in WhatsApp it should appear with a title, a description and a branded image — WhatsApp is where links get shared most, and an empty card is a card nobody taps. Finally, structured data: Organization on the home page, Article on posts, and one rule — do not add schema for content that is not there. Fake FAQs and fake stars are a penalty risk, not a gain.

What do you watch in the first week?

The work does not end when the list does. Watch three things in the first week: are your pages moving to "indexed" in Search Console? Does your own site come first for your brand name? Have you written down your target queries? Do not despair at the rankings in those first weeks — a new site finding its place on competitive queries is a matter of months, not weeks, and that is normal. The best investment during that period is publishing content that answers the target queries, regularly.

How do we start?

These 12 points are the summary of the pre-launch process suerta.co runs on every project — a site does not go live here until the list is complete. If you want to know how many of them your current site passes, write to suerta.info@gmail.com and we will report back after a short review.