Doing SEO for a new website is not about tricks. In the first weeks it is almost entirely about one thing: making it as easy as possible for Google to discover, crawl, and index your pages — and then measuring that it actually happened. Here is the new website SEO checklist we run on every launch.
Before launch
- Remove the
noindex. Development sites are usually set to noindex. The number one launch mistake is forgetting to remove it. Check every template. - Set canonical URLs. Pick one hostname (with or without
www), force HTTPS, and make every page declare a self-referencing canonical. - Write real titles and meta descriptions. Every page needs a unique
<title>that contains the term it targets, and a meta description that earns the click. - Plan your URL structure. Short, readable, keyword-bearing slugs. Decide it now — changing URLs later costs you rankings.
At launch
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
- Generate and submit a sitemap. If it is a sitemap index, submit the child sitemaps individually — Google does not always step down into an index on its own.
- Check robots.txt. Make sure it allows crawling and points to your sitemap.
- Request indexing for your homepage and your 5–10 most important pages via URL Inspection.
- Set up analytics so you have a traffic baseline from day one.
The first 30 days: measure, do not panic
New sites do not rank overnight, and the waiting is where people make bad decisions. Watch these signals in order:
- Discovery — does the Sitemaps report show your pages discovered?
- Crawl — is Googlebot actually fetching pages? Check Crawl Stats in Search Console.
- Indexing — use URL Inspection on a sample of pages to see how many are indexed.
- Impressions — the Performance report shows the first queries you appear for.
These stages happen in sequence and can lag each other by days or weeks. On a new domain with no links, expect crawling to be slow — that is normal, not a fault. See how long Google actually takes to index a new site for real timing data from our launches.
Authority is the slow part
Technical setup is fast; authority is not. A new domain has no trust, and that is usually the real ceiling on how fast a new site ranks. Earn a few relevant inbound links, publish genuinely useful content, and give it time. On our own sites the difference between one that flew and one that stalled came down to referring domains, not technical setup.
If you want your launch measured properly — discovery, crawl, indexing and serving, each tracked separately — our website audit gives you a 30-day baseline instead of a guess.
