The setup work worth doing when a site launches, before any content or link building, so nothing has to be redone later.
Search results are not won in the first month. What the first month decides is whether the foundations are right, because fixing them later means redoing work.
Launch week
- Verify the site in Google Search Console. Everything else depends on this.
- Submit a sitemap and confirm Google can fetch it.
- Check robots.txt allows crawling, and that no noindex tag survived from staging.
- Set up analytics with goal tracking on your contact form, not just pageviews.
- Choose one canonical domain. With or without www, but pick one and redirect the other.
Per page fundamentals
- A unique title tag under about 60 characters, with the term you want first
- A meta description that reads like an advert, not a summary. It does not affect ranking but it affects clicks.
- One H1 per page, describing what the page is about
- URLs that are readable: /website-design-auckland beats /page?id=47
- Internal links between related pages, with descriptive link text
Structured data worth adding
Structured data helps search engines understand what your pages describe. For a local business the useful ones are LocalBusiness, and FAQPage if you have a genuine FAQ section. Both can produce richer results.
The rule is that structured data must match what is visible on the page. Marking up FAQs that a visitor cannot see is a policy violation, not a shortcut.
What not to bother with early
- Buying links. It ranges from ineffective to actively harmful.
- Keyword density. Not a thing search engines measure.
- Submitting to hundreds of directories. A handful of relevant local ones is useful, the rest is noise.
- Obsessing over one tool's score. It is a proxy, not the goal.