Should I Start SEO Before or After I Build My Website?

An SEO Agency can help you master your website SEO, providing you with a range of services depending on the juncture of your online strategy, from an SEO Audit, SEO Copywriting, to the fundamental SEO Keyword Research! What we’ll reveal next is worth a read!

• Start SEO before building or redesigning your website. SEO should inform the structure, content, and design from the beginning.
• An SEO Audit is essential before launching or redesigning to safeguard existing rankings and improve visibility.
• Pre-launch SEO strategies like keyword research, content planning, and social media setup build authority and awareness early.
• Failing to do SEO early can result in lost traffic, poor indexing, and missed opportunities to target high-converting keywords.
• Collaborating with an SEO Agency ensures strategic keyword mapping, content development, and a search-friendly site architecture from the ground up.

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. The SEO Confusion During a Website Redesign
3. Benefits of SEO Before Your Website Launches
4. How to Execute Pre-Launch SEO
   • Build a Social Media Presence
   • Create and Optimise Blog Content
   • Develop SEO-Friendly Web Pages
   • Submit to Key Online Directories
5. Why Partner with an SEO Agency?
6. Conclusion: Future-Proof Your Website With SEO
7. FAQs

Many business owners wonder whether it’s necessary to engage an SEO agency when redesigning their website. After all, if you’ve done SEO before and you’re only updating the look and feel, you might think, “Why do it again?” Or worse—”We’ll worry about SEO after the new website goes live.”

That’s a costly mistake.

Why SEO Is Critical Before a Redesign

Leading agencies like TopRankings strongly recommend conducting an SEO audit before your redesigned website launches. An SEO audit evaluates your current performance and ensures no valuable SEO groundwork is lost in the redesign process.

A professional SEO agency can help you:

• Identify which keywords and pages currently drive high-quality traffic and leads.
• Determine whether your business goals or service priorities have shifted.
• Uncover new keyword opportunities, including localised and trending phrases.
• Align your new sitemap and content structure with SEO best practices.

These insights shape the new design, content layout, and navigation—ensuring the redesigned site not only looks great but performs better in search engines.

A Real-World Example: Protecting What Already Works

Imagine you have a web page that ranks well on Google and drives most of your sales. If that page is not properly handled during a redesign, you risk losing that visibility and revenue. Migrating the content without SEO planning can cause your site to lose rankings—fast.

To protect your top-performing pages, a host of SEO tasks must be executed, such as URL mapping, redirect planning, and content optimisation—all of which should happen before and during the redesign.

Don’t Let Technical Changes Tank Your Rankings

Redesigns often include changes like new hosting, updated layouts, new images, and deleted or merged pages. While exciting, these shifts can disrupt your organic presence if SEO isn’t considered.

An SEO agency will ensure your redesign doesn’t just look modern—it retains your existing visibility and sets the foundation to grow it further.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of optimising your newbie website for SEO prior to its launch, let’s give you a brief rundown of the benefits of developing an SEO Strategy before it graces search engines:

• SEO Keyword Research offers you an insight on the minds of users and the type of content they typically search for on Google. Considering the data of how users search for your business dictates the entire planning and design of your website if you wish to have a new website that is ready for SEO or a new version of your currently ranked website to protect and accelerate its organic presence.
• It enables you to design your website in a manner that considers users and the goals they are trying to achieve with it
• It allows you to avoid fads that do more harm than good such as the current, single page website page scroll fad, especially if it will intervene with your attempts to optimise your website for SEO
• It helps you follow the webmaster guidelines and practice policies during website design
• It helps you consider other marketing requirements, such as creating a landing page for social media campaigns and Pay-Per-Click campaigns (PPC) during website design.

Now for the part you’ve been waiting for anxiously! Your website is underway, but not live. No problem. You can create awareness about your website before its launch to attract your target market. It does not have to be built or be live yet.

What we’re suggesting here is that you do a pre-launch SEO. Most businesses tend to ignore that, assuming they can’t do SEO for their website until they launch it. This SEO Melbourne agency begs to differ and tells you exactly why pre-launch SEO is so important!

Failing to do pre-launch SEO will result in a poor index of your website. To put it simply, Google will ignore you, burying you deep in the search results, and then climbing back up to the top will be a long and tiring journey!

Hey, in today’s time, building a social media presence has become ever more important. If you are not active on social media, you’re missing out on a large part of the community that makes it up. Before you launch your website, you need to launch your social media profiles.

Create a profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. We mentioned YouTube because even big celebs like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Will Smith, Jack Black, and many more have an account there. Hence, it makes sense to be active on the video platform as well, especially as these channels can help position your business with useful content for your audience.

You can use the other social media platforms if applicable to your business. Through your social media platforms, you can promote your content such as behind the scenes footage or a quick intro to you and your staff. Next, just use these channels to promote your up and coming new website.  

For this one, you need the expertise of an SEO Melbourne Agency for SEO Copywriting and keyword search. They can guide you on the best practices of SEO optimised blogs for your website. Consider writing the blogs well ahead of time. Why wait to write them after your website’s launch when you can do them before?

The purpose of the blogs is to bring traffic through organic searches. The content needs to be high quality, as mediocre content won’t compete with what’s out there. When you have blogs up, web crawlers will visit your website, indexing it straight away. You want to greet web crawlers with information-rich and long format content.

You need to create several pages for SEO. The pages you create should be long-form with high authority content to target users to visit each page of your website. Do not add pages to your website for the sake of adding pages, but ensure each page is useful to the user.

You need to use keywords, especially long-tail keywords, but with the help of an SEO specialist, you’ll have high ranking keywords. Google will index the pages and give you some edge over other websites in the search engine rankings. Importantly an SEO Agency will ensure the page titles and meta descriptions are written within the guidelines of Google.

List your website in key directories before launching it. It will help you build authority before your website goes live. The directory needs to be well-known and used by several people in your area.  Perform some research to identify the most used directories by the users you’re targeting.

Make things easier for yourself. Leave the SEO to a reputable and experienced SEO Agency. Let them take over the SEO aspect for you. Engage the agency for SEO Copywriting, SEO Audit, Keyword Research, Sitemap Planning and more. Let the SEO Experts develop the right SEO strategy that will protect your rankings and accelerate your organic presence ahead of your industry competitors.  

TopRankings and its sister brand Digital Rescue has been assisting businesses considering a redesign, protect their rankings and plan out their entire website content strategy to help accelerate their organic presence and increase their site conversions.

If you’re considering a redesign get in touch with our SEO Experts for an obligation free consultation by calling today on 1300 881 911.

1. Should I do SEO before or after building my website?

Before—SEO should be a foundational part of your web strategy. Pre-launch SEO ensures your site is designed to rank from day one and avoids costly mistakes like missing keyword opportunities or poorly structured pages.

2. Do I still need SEO if I’m just redesigning my website?

Yes. A redesign can disrupt your rankings if SEO is not properly integrated. An SEO audit ensures valuable pages and keywords are preserved, and new content opportunities are leveraged.

3. What is pre-launch SEO and why is it important?

Pre-launch SEO involves keyword research, content planning, social media setup, and technical preparations. It helps Google index your site properly and gives you a head start in organic rankings once your website goes live.

4. How does SEO influence website design and content?

SEO informs your site structure, page hierarchy, URL naming, content strategy, and internal linking—all of which affect how search engines and users experience your site.

5. Can I do SEO on my own or should I hire an agency?

While you can attempt DIY SEO, hiring an experienced SEO agency ensures expert strategy, implementation, and monitoring. Agencies provide services like SEO copywriting, audits, keyword research, and sitemap planning that are crucial for long-term success.