3 stepping stones to plan your website for SEO success

If you are working on a DIY project or hiring a website design or SEO company, you should start here.

These three stepping stones are the pillars to start building any sucessful business website.

Before we move forward to hire a web design company, make clear the purpose of your project.
If your main incentive to have a website published is to follow other business owners’ steps, your website project will have very few chances of dominating search results.

If the last option identified your purpose, and you need a website to help your business to be found organically by people searching for your products or services, then you need to check the following factors.

1 Competitor Research

Competitor research is crucial in any business venture, and if you didn’t use your competitor research to set building parameters of your site’s presence, then you have to seriously think about modifications from the ground up.
Let me show you a quick way to research your real online competitors

1.1 Name your competitors

Start by naming those companies that you think or know are your biggest competitors. Write them down and check if they have a business website.

1.2 Filter your real online competence

Now take the business’s website of those companies and figure out if they are local or global. As we are talking here about small business companies, I would tell you to start by discarding from your list those global businesses or big corporations, as they will be very hard to bit, at least at the beginning.

Narrow down your list to three competitors. If you have a unique product or service, your competitors might be located anywhere in your country, but if you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of competitors, you might have to start at the city level and focus on those local area businesses matching the size of yours.

1.3 Choose your Local Competitors first

If your website is not ranking and/or if you are just starting, I might focus on the smallest and local competitors to start in order to set parameters of the new website; later, after gaining positions, the strategy can shift to beat bigger competitors.

1.4 How to Research an Online Competitor

After narrowing down your competitors, choose three of them doing the same line of business and operating or showing up in search results in the area where you are expecting to rank. For that you will have to jump for the next step, keyword research.

2 Keyword Research

There are dozens of free and paid online tools to research a competitor, and what to choose will depend on your level of expertise, time, and budget. The simplest way to find keywords is to use the tools already built into search engines:

2.1 Leverage Direct Search Engine Features

• Google Autocomplete and Related Searches: Start typing your niche into Google to see the autocomplete suggestions. You should also check the “People also ask” and “Related searches” sections at the bottom of the results page to find long-tail variations.

• The Asterisk (*) Operator: If you have access to Google Keyword Planner, you can use an asterisk as a wildcard (e.g., “how to * exercise bike”) to find various question-based queries people are searching for.

• Analyze the SERP: Simply searching for a keyword on Google reveals its search intent. If you see sponsored ads, the keyword has commercial value; if you see featured snippets, it has informational intent.

If those keywords you found are not the dominating ones in your site’s content, you will have to start from the ground up to build new content or a new website that would align with your prospect’s search intent.

3 Indexing

If the results of the keyword research are aligned with your plans or the content structure of your existing website, you can go to the indexing step.

Search engines have official portals for website owners. The most important one is Google Search Console. You need to create a free Google account there. Think of this as registering your business license with the internet’s biggest directory.

3.1 Prove ownership (Verification)

Google needs to know you actually own the site before they talk to you about it. They will provide a few ways to verify this—usually by adding a small piece of code to your site’s header or logging into your domain provider. Once verified, you unlock the dashboard where you can control how Google sees your site.

3.2 Submit your site’s “Blueprint” (The Sitemap)

Search engine bots are smart, but they prefer clear directions. A “sitemap” is a simple file that lists every page on your website that you want people to find. Inside your new Google Search Console dashboard, there is a section to submit this sitemap URL. Once submitted, you are effectively handing Google the map and saying, “Here is everything; please start exploring.”

Conclusion: Whether auditing or building a new site, following these three steps will change the success story of your business online.

First, make sure that you have a clear purpose to build your site. Most small business owners fall into the trap of the cheap overseas web design companies that won’t even ask you questions to understand your business.

If you want your site to be a source of organic leads, these three stepping stones will help you succeed. Either building your site, or following up the company you hire gives your business the right start.

If you have an existing site, that won’t show up on Google Search results..