How to Build an SEO-Friendly Website from the Start

It is far easier to build SEO into a website from the start than to fix it after launch. Search engines such as Google and Bing crawl your pages, try to understand what each one is about and decide which searches to show it for. Decisions made during planning and development, such as the page structure, URLs, templates and how fast the site loads, affect all of this for years.

This guide covers SEO for a new website step by step: research, structure, content, technical basics and measurement. It is meant for business owners who are planning a new website or a rebuild and want to brief their developers properly. The same SEO basics also help if you are improving a site you already have.

Start with the people you want to reach. Decide what the website should achieve, who your customers are and which products or services matter most. Then find out how those customers search: the words and phrases they type into Google when they need what you offer. These keywords shape the list of pages you need, their headings (H1, H2, H3), titles and text. Tools that help:

• Google Keyword Planner, for search volumes and related phrases;
• Ahrefs or Semrush, for keyword ideas and the pages that rank for them;
• Google Trends, for seasonal patterns and rising topics;
• Google Search Console, for searches that already bring visitors if you are rebuilding an existing site.

Our keyword research guide for beginners explains how to collect and group keywords before the site is built.

Plan short, readable URLs that describe the page, for example example.co.uk/services/boiler-servicing. Use lowercase words separated by hyphens and keep the address structure in line with the menu, so it shows where the page sits on the site. Keywords in a URL help people see what the page is about, but Google’s SEO Starter Guide says keywords in the domain name or URL path on their own have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs. Choose addresses you will not need to change: if URLs change later, every old address needs a 301 redirect.

Meta tags sit in the page code and are not visible on the page itself, but search engines, browsers and social networks read them. The ones that matter most:

• Title. Usually shown as the clickable headline in search results. Write a unique, descriptive title for every page, with the main keyword near the start and your brand name at the end. Google sets no character limit, but it truncates long titles to fit the device width;
• Meta description. A short summary that Google may use as the snippet under the title. It mainly affects whether people click, so make it specific to the page and mention the main phrase once;
• Viewport. Tells mobile browsers to fit the page to the screen width, which responsive design needs;
• Open Graph tags. Control the title, description and image shown when a page is shared on social media.

Google ignores the old keywords meta tag, so there is no need to fill it in. Make sure your CMS lets you edit titles and descriptions for every page before the site goes live.

Plan the structure before design and development begin. A clear hierarchy, from the home page to sections and then to individual pages, helps visitors find what they need and helps search engines understand how your pages relate to each other. Each important service, product category or topic should have its own page, and every key page should be reachable in a few clicks through simple website navigation. Agreeing this map early is part of good web development. To draw the structure, you can use:

• Miro;
• MindMeister;
• Lucidchart.

Design tools such as Figma let you turn the map into page prototypes. To see how competitors organise their sites, look at their menus and footers, or crawl them with a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which can show a site’s structure as a diagram.

The text on your pages is what search engines rank and what persuades visitors. Keywords help Google match a page to searches, but they are only part of it. What else matters:

• Original content. Do not copy descriptions or articles from competitors or suppliers. Write about your own products, services, prices, process and experience. A plagiarism checker such as Copyscape helps if several people write for you;
• Content for your customers. Answer the questions they ask before buying, address their doubts and explain things in plain English. Google says its systems aim to reward helpful content created for people;
• Careful use of AI. Google does not ban AI-assisted writing, but pages produced in bulk without adding value can breach its spam policy on scaled content abuse. Treat any AI draft as a starting point, check the facts and add your own knowledge.

Plan the content together with the structure, so every page has a clear purpose and a main keyword from the start.

Links between pages in your text, known as internal linking, help both visitors and SEO:

• search engines find new pages through links and learn which pages you consider most important;
• visitors can move from an article to the related service or from one product to a similar one;
• descriptive anchor text tells readers and Google what the linked page is about.

Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on the site. Plan the main links in your templates, such as related services, breadcrumbs and links from the blog to service pages, so they appear automatically as the site grows.

Use images that are relevant to the page, ideally your own photos. To make them work for SEO:

• Keep files small. Large images often slow pages down. Resize them to the size they are displayed at and compress them with tools such as Squoosh, TinyPNG or ImageOptim. Modern formats such as WebP and AVIF give smaller files at the same quality;
• Use descriptive file names. For example, oak-dining-table.jpg says more than IMG_1234.jpg;
• Add alt text. A short description of the image helps people who use screen readers and helps search engines understand the image, which can bring visitors from Google Images.

Your website has to load quickly and work properly on phones. Google uses mobile-first indexing: it crawls, indexes and ranks the mobile version of your pages. Two common ways to build for mobile:

• a separate mobile site on its own URLs, which means maintaining two versions and keeping their content the same;
• responsive design, where the same page adapts to any screen. Google recommends it as the easiest option to build and maintain.

Whichever you choose, the mobile version needs the same content, headings, images and structured data as the desktop one, and it should load quickly on a mobile connection.

SEO brings visitors, and a call to action (CTA) turns them into enquiries, sales or subscribers. Every page should make the next step obvious. CTAs can be text links, for example:

• “Ask us a question”;
• “Read our guide to choosing a boiler”;
• “Subscribe to our monthly newsletter”.

Or they can be buttons and banners in your brand colours, such as “Book a visit”, “Download the brochure” or “Read more about our SEO services“. Place the main CTA near the top of the page, where it is visible without scrolling, and repeat it at the end.

Links from other reputable websites help Google judge that your site is trustworthy, and they bring visitors directly. Quality matters far more than quantity: a few links from relevant, respected sites are worth more than many from unrelated ones. Ways to earn them once the site is live:

• write guest articles or expert comments for respected websites in your field;
• work with partners, suppliers and trade associations that can list or mention you;
• publish useful guides, research or tools that others want to cite;
• take part in industry and local communities, where genuine contributions lead to mentions.

If you pay for a placement, the link must be marked with rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”: buying links that pass ranking credit breaks Google’s spam policies.

Your website should open quickly on any device. Speed depends on decisions made during development: hosting, the theme or framework, plugins, image handling and caching. Test pages with Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse in Chrome or GTmetrix. Google measures the experience of real visitors with three Core Web Vitals, and a page is considered good when:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time to show the main content, is 2.5 seconds or less;
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP), the delay after a click or tap, is 200 milliseconds or less;
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), how much the layout jumps while loading, is 0.1 or less.

Include these targets in the brief for your developers. For a site that already has speed or indexing problems, our technical SEO service covers the fixes.

Pages are easier to rank and easier to read when each one covers a single topic. For example, a plumbing business does better with separate pages for boiler servicing, boiler installation and bathroom fitting than with one page that lists everything. When several pages target the same search, they compete with each other and none of them ranks well. Give each page one main topic and link to related pages for the rest.

Set up measurement before launch, so you can see from the first day how people find and use the site. The main free and paid tools:

• Google Analytics 4. Shows where visitors come from, which pages they open, how engaged they are and which pages lead to enquiries or sales;
• Google Search Console. Shows the searches your pages appear for, clicks, impressions, average position, indexing problems and Core Web Vitals;
• Moz Pro, Ahrefs or Semrush. Paid tools that track rankings and backlinks and highlight strong and weak pages.

Check the reports regularly and use them to decide which pages to improve next.

VOLL Digital Agency has built websites and worked on SEO since 2008 and is a Google Partner agency. If you are planning a new website or a rebuild, tell us about your project.