Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 16/09/2025

Table of contents:

• Choose your CMS carefully
• Conduct market research
• Why good site structure is important
• Create some excellent, high-quality content marketing
• Add some well written and strong on-page SEO
• Start to earn some super powerful backlinks
• Amplify your content marketing so that it gets further reach
• Set up a Google Business account
• Set up a Google Analytics and Google Search Console account
  Improve, refine and repeat

 

Introduction

There’s absolutely no two ways about it, search engine optimisation can be an absolute power house rocketing your business forward, if the work is done right.

However, that “if” is a massive if, as there are many businesses that get this process wrong.

With that said, focusing on the positive, if you do get it right and you hire the right agency, well, being ranked in the top 3 position on Google can have a transformative effect on any business.

It’s just basic math. In your area, you might have, say, 25 serious competitors; however, a customer is likely to click on the business that’s easiest and most convenient for them.

This is why businesses compete so fiercely on Google, and the companies that rank at the top harvest most of the work.

 

The problem with brand new websites in terms of improving the SEO

Brand new websites present a problem; they are difficult to optimise.

Actually, let us re-word that, they can be extremely challenging to optimise even for the best SEO minds, such as Ryan Walsh.

The reason is simple. Let’s consider a race, such as a marathon, and you’re running it on a lovely, sunny day.

Well, if you give the competition a head start of, say, 30 minutes, catching up those runners is challenging to say the least.

You’re going to have to put in so much effort to catch up with the pack if the main competitors have had such a serious head start ahead of you. For some runners, they may simply give up, as the challenge that lays ahead is so difficult.

And this is the same with your business’s search engine optimisation, imagine how far ahead some of your direct competitors are right now.

Imagine how many backlinks they have built, how much content marketing has been written, and how much knowledge Google has accumulated (Google Analytics) in terms of the dwell times, bounce rates, and pages visited for those websites.

A business might therefore be up against established competitors that are simply miles ahead.

Yet you shouldn’t give up, as long as the marketing budget is set accordingly and is high enough, we have some of the best SEO minds in the country working for us.

Choose your CMS carefully.

The CMS stands for Content Management System; it’s what your company’s website is built on.

There’s a vast range of content management systems to choose from. For example, WordPress is by a country mile one of the most popular and, in our opinion, the best CMS in the whole world.

Now, if you’re at the stage where you’re having your company website designed, and you’re presented with a range of different CMS to choose from, well, take your time- make sure you choose a good CMS option. We would highly recommend that you consider using WordPress.

Carefully consider your options and which CMS you want to choose. The reason is simple: some CMS, or content management systems, are just basic and a bit rubbish, to be honest.

However, some open source, established content management systems, such as WordPress, are the bee’s knees; they are fantastic.
And from an SEO perspective, they allow you to make several changes effortlessly.

 

Choose your domain name carefully.

You might be in a bit of a rush setting up your business and getting it up and running?

Therefore, you might quickly check on your smartphone if a domain name is available, and to your great delight, it might be.
And you might think to yourself, well, I wouldn’t expect that domain name to be available, I thought someone else would have bought it before me.

However, they might have screwed the SEO up so badly, then received a site-wide Google Penalty. Then that business might have dropped the domain, stopped paying for it because they longer want it, that’s why its now available.

Then another business, an unsuspecting business, could then pick up the domain name and inherit the other SEO problems that the other company has caused.

Therefore, do choose your business’s domain name wisely, as the SEO agency that you’re about to hire can conduct some checks, perhaps using a good quality SEO tool, to check the history of the domain name.

They should be inquisitive and ask questions, such as- Has that domain name received a Google Link Penalty for building spam links?

User experience and web design

Something that agencies discuss until they are blue in the face, or until they are exhausted, is the topic of links and content marketing.

These are the fundamental building blocks for any business’s search engine optimisation success.

However, a key part, a key component if you like, in a business’s organic SEO success, is what the user experience is like for that website.

 

For example: –

• How simple is it to use the main menu?
• Is the website fast?
• Is the text easy to read?
• What’s the mobile version of the website like?
• Is the page layout logical? Can you get the right page with the minimal amount of links?

 

Conduct market research, including keyword research.

Here’s the thing: you may know your business inside out, like most established businesses do.

However, what’s not so apparent is how customers find your business.

Sure, there are the obvious keywords; if you are an estate agent, then you would expect customers to find you by that keyword plus the name of the city where you are based.

But what if you use a quality keyword research tool and suddenly discover that many searches are for estate agents that also have in-house mortgage companies?

Well, if you didn’t conduct that keyword research, you could be missing out on a lot of leads.

And this is important to know, because often businesses don’t need to be optimised for just one keyword; most companies need to be optimised for several hundred. This is why keyword research and market research are so crucial for a brand-new website, because, well, you have to get the foundations right.

And that means making sure you have enough pages; these pages are laid out correctly and that you’ve added the proper on-page SEO.

Good content marketing is key.

So, if you’re setting up a brand-new business, it’s likely that you have a lot of work to do in terms of setting up your new business.

You might be running around like a headless chicken trying to get everything organised, from the business premises to hiring staff, through to buying stock.

We get it.

However, there’s one part of your website that you shouldn’t rush, and complete too quickly without giving it a lot of thought and consideration.

That is your business’s content marketing.

The reason is simple: as soon as your website goes live, the work is indexed by Googlebot, and Googlebot will work out how good the content marketing is of good quality or not.
Is it of good quality?

If so, you move to the front of the queue.

Is it rubbish quality? If so, your business might end up on page 10 of Google’s search results.

 

Therefore, when writing content marketing, think about the following:

– Ensuring every page is well-written and of high quality
– Be original, don’t use AI tools
– Carefully write the work to make it helpful for your customers
– Aim to be better than your direct competitors
– Do take your time to write long blocks of text
–

Good on-page SEO is so important.

Here’s the thing: put yourself in your web designer’s shoes for just a second, not the business owner, but the actual web designers.

How much time do they have to consider the SEO?

Often, not long at all, maybe just a few minutes each page, so what happens when Googlebot and Google’s algorithm first look at your brand new company website?

That’s right, they see that the SEO is incredibly weak, or just non-existent.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is simple, yet one which many businesses do not implement. That’s from our experience in Cardiff, working with many new websites.

That is, hold off getting your website live and indexed until you do an excellent job on the on-page SEO.

Make sure that on-page SEO is nothing short of a masterpiece before Googlebot is instructed to index that page.

 

Therefore, think about the following:

• Content marketing
• The page titles
• The page layout
• H1-H6 tags
• The alt text
• The product descriptions
• Eliminating and removing any duplicated text
• Making sure there’s no AI text on the website
• Making sure that each page is unlikely to be deemed as “content thin”
• Making sure that the main site title is well optimised
• Improving the meta title and meta description
• Setting up a Google Analytics account so that you can start receiving SEO data as soon as you are ready

 

Start thinking about your backlinks and your business’s backlink profile

So, at this stage, your website is live, it’s been indexed by Googlebot, and it’s currently ranking on Google.

That’s great, but as the website’s brand new, you’re likely to have a somewhat disappointed look on your face —and why is that?

Why are you likely to be massively disappointed?

Well, the answer is simple: your website is likely to rank very low on Google initially, perhaps page 7 or even lower.

So that phone won’t ring; it’s not going to get any calls at all.

This is when your SEO strategy needs to come into effect, and one of the most critical areas of SEO is backlink building.

Therefore, start to think about how to optimise your main SEO ranking factors, and one of the most important is backlinks.

So, form a good SEO strategy from the outset, and a key part of that is thinking about how your business can earn some quality do-follow backlinks.

 

Come to the best SEO agency in Cardiff.

We have been established for over 10 years, and as a result, we have a robust understanding of how Google works and its algorithms.

This is why Walsh & Partners ranks at the top of Google because we are very good at what we do.

With fixed-priced packages starting from £1k per calendar month, our services are very competitively priced.

Come to the best SEO company in Cardiff, come to Walsh & Partners.