We at FRINGE Digital Marketing Agency receive a lot of questions about when the best time to start a dedicated SEO campaign is. Many companies are confused as to why they would need to start an SEO campaign before their website is even up on the Internet. We understand this line of thinking as many people associate SEO with something that is supposed to occur after a website is already online, but we feel that is important to rectify this common misconception. If you as a business want to get the most out of your SEO campaign, the best practice is to allow your SEO campaign manager to begin your campaign as your site is in the process of being designed and coded. Here is why: below I have laid out a list of optimal strategies that SHOULD be implemented before a website goes online. Hopefully after reading this, businesses will understand why we feel it is so pressing to start an SEO campaign when we advise it. Above all remember, A SOLID, SUCCESSFUL SEO CAMPAIGN TAKES TIME, EFFORT, AND CONSISTENCY!!

Step #1 – Keyword Selection
Preplanning is a major part of the SEO process, and one of the most time-consuming yet important facets of preplanning is developing the best possible keyword selections for your company. If you do not understand what keywords are or how to go through a keyword-selection process, please refer here. Adequate time must be spent on successful keyword selection or your SEO campaign will be dead in the water before it ever starts. Keyword selection is one of the most important elements in guaranteeing a solid ROI for your company, and if this process is rushed or not given the time it deserves, your business and your potential profits will suffer. Keyword selection is part art and part science. You need to give someone who understands this the time to do it effectively right from the start.

Step #2 – Cornerstone Design Implementation
Once the best possible keywords have been selected for a particular campaign. An SEO campaign manager must work with web designers to properly set up and cornerstone important pages of that website in order to deliver these keywords most efficiently not only to consumers and potential clients, but to the scanner bots that search engines use to index web pages. Google and other search engines index PAGES not WEBSITES. Having random keywords scattered throughout your site instead of properly corner stoned to main navigation pages will actually hurt your SEO efforts instead of helping them. There are many philosophies on how to best achieve this for maximum relevance, but one thing remains constant: this process takes time and must be done before a website is finished.

Step #3 – Optimizing Code
Once proper keywords are selected and page designs have been modified for optimum efficiency, then an SEO manager must work with the website coder in order to develop and write the website’s code in a way that is clean, efficient, and laid out PERFECTLY for search-engine specificity. They must work together on every page of code to make sure all meta description, title, and alt tags are written for maximum SEO return. This step is tricky and has many variables. The code must avoid elements that will slow down the website’s overall loading speed. Elements such as render-blocking java scripts, excessive code forms, and oversized image files must be carefully monitored to guarantee optimal page-load efficiency as this is a MAJOR factor that search engines now factor into search rankings.

Step #4 – Content Delivery and Manipulation
After all these prior steps have been taken, the SEO manager must then go into his client’s website’s CMS (content management system) and work on writing or using provided content in a way that is SEO-efficient. Keywords must be placed seamlessly into the web content utilized at specific densities throughout the cornerstone pages of the site. The keywords must not stand out and must read naturally within the text of the site. An appropriate inbound link net must be established for maximum navigation speed and ease, and appropriate anchor texts must be hyperlinked and formatted with appropriate tags so search bots can access them in the fastest possible way.

Final Thoughts:
Once all these steps have been completed, then your website is finally ready to hit the web. Luckily, if you utilize an SEO company that has the proper expertise and houses their own developers and coders, this process can be streamlined and implemented quite quickly. What actually takes far more time is when a company rolls out their website prematurely and then the SEO campaign manager has to go back through the site and revise and rework all content. Not only is this way more time consuming than setting it up beforehand, it also hurts that companies SEO value and search rankings. This happens because Google and the other search engines have already indexed the site once when it was not properly optimized, and they have already penalized the site for that. It is difficult to build back from this penalizing, and it is in a company’s best interest to ensure that the first time their site is indexed, everything is set up and ready to be scanned. So do yourself a favor, start working with your SEO campaign manager as soon as you start working on your website design. Doing so will give you the best possible chance for success and domination of your particular field!