Sunday, 2 August 2026

SEO for a New Website: The Very First Things to Do

Launching a new website is exciting, but getting it to rank in Google doesn't happen automatically. Search engines need help discovering and understanding your content. Whether you built your site with WordPress, an AI tool, or a website builder, these are the first steps to take to ensure it gets found by your audience.

Before You Launch: The Quick Checklist

Before you launch, run through this quick checklist to avoid common SEO pitfalls:

  • Choose a mobile-friendly design: Test it on actual devices or with virtual tests, such as Google Lighthouse.
  • Set up Google Search Console: This free tool helps you monitor indexing and fix errors.
  • Create a sitemap: Submit it to Google to help search engines discover your pages.
  • Check for duplicate content: Ensure no pages have identical titles or meta descriptions.
  • Enable HTTPS: Secure your site with an SSL certificate, which most hosts provide for free.

These steps will save you time later and help your site get indexed faster.

A business owner launched a website and shared it with friends for feedback. Everyone liked the design, but no one could find it on Google—not even by searching the exact domain name.

The first question was: "Does your site have any external links?" The answer was no. After adding a single link from another site, Google indexed the new website within hours.

For any new website, the first SEO step is getting at least one external link. This helps search engines discover and index the site faster.

Why Do You Need an External Link?

Google is a search engine that follows links. If it finds a link to your page on another website, it can follow that link and crawl your page. When Google came around later to crawl that site, it followed that link and crawled that site too. Soon after, that site started to appear in search results.

It is possible to get your site indexed by Google without any external links, but "indexed" is not the same as "ranking." By getting an external link, not only will Google crawl and index your site, but it will also attribute some extra value to it based on the value of the website where it found the link. That value is what will get you ranking.

Aim for quality and relevance: Links from quality sites and articles about related topics are more powerful. Links from low-quality websites, directory pages, and social media have less weight.

What if you use a website builder? If you're using an AI-powered website builder, your site might already be live, but that doesn't mean it's optimized for search engines. Check mobile-friendliness, page speed, and basic SEO settings like title, meta description, and clean URLs.

Check (or Tweak) Your Settings

After securing that first external link, your site should appear in search results within a day or two. If it doesn't, check for common issues:

  • Noindex tags: These tell search engines not to index your page. Remove them unless you're intentionally hiding a page.
  • Robots.txt blocks: This file can prevent search engines from crawling your site. Ensure it's not blocking important pages.

If you're using WordPress, an SEO plugin makes it easy to adjust these settings. For other platforms, look for 'SEO settings' or 'search visibility' in your dashboard.

Do Keyword Research

At this stage, your site likely only ranks for its domain name. To attract more visitors, you'll need to target other relevant search terms. Start with keyword research to understand what your audience is searching for and how they phrase their queries.

If you do your keyword research properly, you'll end up with a long list of search terms you want to be found for. Make sure to search for those terms in Google yourself. What results are there already? Who will be your online competitors for these search terms? What can you do to stand out from these results?

Time for Content SEO

Great content fails if it doesn't align with what your audience is actually searching for, and how they're searching. For example, a local bakery might assume their audience wants "best croissants in Austin," but keyword research could reveal a higher-intent query like "where to buy sourdough starter in Austin." This signals a customer ready to purchase, not just browse.

How to optimize like an SEO expert: Optimization is about removing friction for both search engines and readers. A meta description like "Gardening is fun" wastes precious space. A better version is "Want to grow your own food? Learn 10 easy gardening tips for beginners to start a thriving garden in weeks," which includes the keyword, a benefit, and a call to action.

Similarly, structuring content with semantic headings helps Google understand your content's hierarchy, while internal links to related posts keep readers engaged and signal topical authority. For AI search, add schema markup: a recipe post with Recipe schema or an FAQ with FAQPage schema helps tools like Google's AI Overviews understand your content.

Now, create content around the keywords you've identified. Write about topics that matter to your audience, and use their language. The more high-quality content you publish, the more opportunities you'll have to rank in search results.

Improve Your Visibility

Once your site starts ranking, pay attention to how it appears in search results. These snippets (titles and meta descriptions) determine whether users click on your link. Make them clear, compelling, and relevant to improve your click-through rate. Compare your snippets to competitors'—are theirs more enticing? If so, refine yours to stand out.

Think About Site Structure

Not all content is equally important. Identify your cornerstone content—these are the pages or posts that best represent your site's focus. Link to these from other pages to signal their importance to search engines. A strong internal linking structure helps Google understand your site's hierarchy and prioritize the right content.

Links from other websites signal to Google that your content is valuable. Start building links by reaching out to relevant sites in your industry. The more high-quality links you earn, the more often Google will crawl your site, and the higher you'll rank. Focus on natural, earned links—buying links or using spammy tactics can harm your SEO.

Ways to earn links naturally:

  • Write a guest post for a blog in your industry
  • Get featured in a local business directory if you're a brick-and-mortar store
  • Create shareable content, like infographics, guides, or original research

What's Next?

You've taken the first steps to optimize your new website, but SEO is an ongoing process. Here's what to focus on next:

  • Publish consistently: Aim for at least one high-quality post per week to build authority
  • Monitor your rankings: Use Google Search Console to track progress and adjust your strategy
  • Build relationships: Network with others in your industry to earn more backlinks
  • Adapt to AI search: Keep an eye on how AI is changing search results. Experiment with question-based content and tools like Google's AI Overviews to stay ahead
  • Stay updated: SEO changes frequently. Read industry blogs, sign up for newsletters, and stay current with the latest tips

Expert Perspectives

Industry experts emphasize that the first steps are critical for long-term success:

"Getting a link from another website can help your SEO, but not just any link will do," notes the Yoast team. "Links from quality sites and articles about related topics are more powerful. Links from low-quality websites, directory pages, and social media have less weight."

Final Thoughts

SEO for a new website is not about doing everything at once. It's about taking the right first steps: securing an external link, setting up your site correctly, doing keyword research, creating quality content, and building authority over time. With patience and consistent effort, your new site can grow its visibility and attract the right audience.


Thursday, 30 July 2026

Link Relevance vs. Content Relevance in Link Building: Why One Matters Far More Than the Other

Relevance is talked about a lot in the context of link building. In truth, it's something that no one can really provide a concrete (or even close to concrete) answer to, because none of us knows exactly how Google measures relevance. Even having access to things like the Google Natural Language Processing API and seeing categories doesn't mean that we know how Google measures relevance themselves, because there will be so much more under the hood that isn't visible to the public.

Even if we did know exactly how Google measures relevance, the extent to which they reward or penalize what they find as they crawl the web is also up for debate — like any ranking signal. We know that they use page speed, but they are also free to turn the dial on this up and down however they want.

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This, in part, is why SEO is so fascinating. We're optimizing for something that we can't completely see and testing and refining based on the results we get. We can speculate on what Google may do or what we observe them doing, then a peer may see the exact opposite, and both may be right.

When it comes to link building and, specifically, the part that relevance plays, the potential answers are a lot more complex than we think. This is because relevance isn't binary. We can't just say that a link is relevant or not. We can't say that content is relevant or not. The answers are far more nuanced than this, and we need to split things out a lot more to even begin to comprehend how Google may look at things.

When we talk about link relevance, we're referring to the topic of the page and domain where the link is placed. When building links, we often look for target websites to outreach to and generally, it's a good idea to find "relevant" links, but "relevant" is actually quite tricky to define.

Domain Relevance

If you get a link from Moz.com, then we'd say that the topics are things like SEO, digital marketing, content marketing, etc. These are a few of the broad topics that we'd classify Moz into. Whilst digital marketing in itself is a big topic, it's not that complex or tricky to define the Moz domain and therefore, understand what is and isn't relevant to it.

Page Relevance

Things can get more complicated than this if you think about websites such as The New York Times which has dozens of categories and hundreds of subcategories. Broadly, they would be classified as a news website, but they have categories for pretty much every topic that you can think of.

Anchor Text

Additionally, we can add other elements to link relevance such as anchor text. What if you get super relevant anchor text but the page where the link is placed is about a completely different topic that isn't relevant? Does this make the link more or less relevant? In many cases, you may not even control the anchor text that is being used which means that it can be completely random.

"And this is just touching the surface of what link relevance can include," notes the Moz team.

Content Relevance: You're in Control

We then have content relevance which is more about the page on your website that you get links to. It could be an existing page or it could be a brand new page that you've created to help with link building.

The attributes of content that sits on your website are far more under your control, so if you create something that is designed to get links and starts to go off topic a little, it's perfectly reasonable to expect Google to take a harsher view on this in holding you accountable.

Things get hard when you remember that as SEOs, we often have link targets that we want to meet in order to catch up, overtake, or stay ahead of our competition. We want to get as many quality links as possible in order to increase the amount of traffic that we get from organic search.

To get more links, you can go broader with the topics and themes that you produce content about. This naturally opens up more potential link targets which in turn, increases the chances of you getting more links.

"What all of this comes down to is striking the balance between producing a piece of content that is relevant to your brand, whilst getting as many links as possible," the guide explains.

The Key Argument: Link Relevance Matters Less Than Content Relevance

Having talked about each one, the Moz team's take is that link relevance matters a lot less than content relevance to Google and therefore, to your ability to rank in organic search. Here are a few reasons why.

Literally anyone on the web can link to your website, it's not something that you can actually control. This is partly why link spam is so hard to deal with and why the disavow tool was invented.

Even putting spam to one side, anyone can link to you for any reason they want. For example, a blog post about link building can link to content about movies. Neither website is related to each other in terms of the business they do.

"What if your personal blog about SEO gets a link from NASA? I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining about it!" the guide notes.

The point being, it seems a stretch to think that Google would have a problem with links like these and therefore, shouldn't be anything to worry about.

I do believe that Google cares a lot about how much they can trust a certain website and the links from that website. I'd venture a strong guess that Moz is a trusted domain and that it has the ability to pass value to the websites that it links to.

With that in mind, it would make sense for Google to make an assessment of the website giving the link and using this as a strong indicator to help decide how much value to pass across the link. This would allow them to still pass value even when topical relevance isn't there but they trust the website giving the link.

The Content We Create Is a Stronger Signal to Google

In contrast to the idea that anyone can link to you, you are far more in control of the content that you create. Even if you have a website that has a lot of user generated content, you still have overall editorial control over the processes for publishing that content.

"If you run an online pet store and you create a piece of content about personal finance, few would argue that this isn't relevant," the guide explains. "But the key difference when compare to getting a random link from a personal finance website is that you are accountable for the content because it sits on the website that you run."

Does Google Really Want to Reward Irrelevant Content Campaigns?

This one is key. Let's imagine that you create a bunch of content-led link building campaigns for your online pet store but the topical relevance is very questionable. The quality of the content is great, it's nicely designed and unique and even cites some expert input. This content has generated hundreds of links as a result of how good it is.

Does Google really want to reward you by valuing these links very highly and as a consequence, giving your organic search visibility a boost?

No, they don't. The truth is that in situations like this, it's pretty obvious that the content has been created for the purposes of generating links. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but if you do it over and over again, whilst the content clearly serves no other purpose, it's not exactly a signal that your website is truly link worthy.

When Does Google Start to Care About Irrelevant Content?

This is the big question and one that doesn't have a complete answer. Launching some content pieces that are completely off topic and gets some links isn't likely to get you into trouble. After all, everyone does random stuff from time to time and sometimes, a brand may decide to create some content or launch a campaign that is just a bit of fun.

If I were Google, I'd look for evidence that content is being created just for links. So I may look at a few signals:

Ratio of links to off-topic content vs. the rest of the website: If the majority of links pointing at a domain are to pages of content that is topically irrelevant when compared to the rest of the domain, I'd probably want to take a closer look at why.

The content being a little bit orphaned in terms of internal links: With many content-led link building campaigns, they are published somewhere on a website that is a little hidden away from the result of the pages. The campaign isn't integrated with the rest of the domain and kind of sits on its own.

The content not linking to other pages to continue the user journey: If a piece of content isn't relevant to the rest of the website, then it's quite hard to add internal links or calls to action that make sense. So a clear signal for irrelevant content is a lack of links from the content to other pages.

How to Ensure More Content Relevance

We should accept that content relevance is important and something that Google can (rightly) hold us accountable for. So, how can we ensure that relevance plays a part in producing ideas for link building campaigns and that we don't get sucked into just going after high volumes of links?

Start with Your Customers

More specifically, start with the journey that they take when finding your product or service. When we come up with content ideas, we can fall into the trap of thinking too much about who we're trying to get links from — bloggers, journalists, writers, etc.

We should instead look at the customer journey. This also shows that the journey isn't always linear. Customers may move backwards in their journey as well as forwards and it may take a lot of steps before they commit to a decision. Google calls this the messy middle and is basically the stage when customers ponder their choices and are deliberating what to do next.

Use Keyword Research to Inform Idea Generation

When we produce content ideas for link building, we often don't think about keywords because the goal of the content isn't to rank, it's to get links. However, doing this can be a great way to increase relevance because target keywords for your brand are going to be closely aligned with the pain points that customers have, alongside the solutions that the brand offers to those pain points.

If you have a lofty link target to hit, you are much more likely to produce content ideas that aren't relevant to your brand. This is because in order to hit link targets, you know that you need a good level of link prospects to outreach to. How do you get more link prospects? By widening topics so that you can target different sectors of bloggers and journalists.

Instead, the focus needs to be on link prospects that are closely aligned with your own products, services and customers. This will naturally limit the link volumes that you're likely to achieve, but you can be more sure that you'll produce a piece of content that is highly relevant.

Expert Perspectives

Industry experts agree that the distinction between link relevance and content relevance is critical:

"Relevance is something that no one can really provide a concrete answer to, because none of us knows exactly how Google measures relevance," the Moz team acknowledges. "Even having access to things like the Google Natural Language Processing API doesn't mean that we know how Google measures relevance themselves, because there will be so much more under the hood."

Paddy Moogan, the author of the piece, adds: "The truth is that in situations like this, it's pretty obvious that the content has been created for the purposes of generating links. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but if you do it over and over again, whilst the content clearly serves no other purpose, it's not exactly a signal that your website is truly link worthy."

Practical Implementation

For SEOs and link builders looking to balance relevance with link acquisition:

  1. Map the customer journey — Understand how customers discover, evaluate, and choose your product
  2. Integrate keyword research — Use target keywords to inform content ideation
  3. Reduce focus on link volumes — Prioritize quality and relevance over quantity
  4. Ensure content is integrated — Avoid orphaned content that doesn't link back to your site
  5. Create content for users, not just links — Content that serves customers is more defensible
  6. Monitor your ratio — Keep track of off-topic vs. on-topic content and links
  7. Build internal links — Ensure content connects to the rest of your site architecture
  8. Focus on customers, not journalists — Think about who you're trying to reach, not just who you're trying to get links from

Final Thoughts: Relevance Is Nuanced, Not Binary

To summarize, try to avoid thinking of relevance as something that is binary. There are far more layers to it than this and as we've seen, we've only really scratched the surface here on what Google is likely to be doing.

When you do think about relevance, focus more of your attention on content relevance and ensure that content that you produce is unquestionably relevant to your customers and your brand. By taking this route, you need to acknowledge that it may lead to fewer links, but is also more likely to put you in a position where you're not worried about Google updates that may target relevancy in link building, as well as manual reviews by Googlers.

"The ultimate added bonus here is that you'll be creating content that isn't just for links — it will be far more useful to regular customers, too, adding to the value of your work," the Moz team concludes.


Tuesday, 28 July 2026

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