SEO Checklist for a New Website Launch

If you're launching a brand new site, or launching a refresh of an existing site, it is absolutely essential that you include your SEO early in the planning process so you can avoid common SEO pitfalls in your site launch.

We recently hosted an HubSpot User Group event that was focused entirely on this topic: SEO Site Launch Checklist. We have a recording of the event for you below, as well as the checklist itself.

Watch the Recap: Your SEO Will Thank You

SEO Site Launch Checklist

To get the real value of the SEO Site Launch Checklist, you'll want to watch the video where we dig into our most frequently asked questions and discuss different use cases that we've seen work well (and those that didn't!).

If you'd like the nitty-gritty, here's the list!

Pre-Launch Planning

Document Current Pages & SEO Elements

Crawl the old site and the new site currently in development (ex. ScreamingFrog).
Document all SEO elements and status codes from old site.
Create a redirect map from the old site to the new site.
Migrate SEO elements and page content for all pages to the new pages in staging.

Baseline SEO Metrics

Measure baseline data for all pages:

Keywords
Traffic
Conversions
Other key metrics

Tracking & Triggers

If new domain, set up properties in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console
Google Analytics/Tag Manager goals and events & tags should be documented

Identifying Opportunities for Improvement

Internal redirects
www/non-www & http/https versions
Canonical tags
XML sitemap & robots.txt files
Noindex, nofollow tags
404 errors
Core Web Vitals

Further reading: Are you looking to improve Core Web Vitals on your HubSpot site?

Just Before Launch

Apply redirects from redirect map
Update XML sitemap to match new site
Be sure to include images, PDFs and videos in new sitemap
Add the sitemap to the robots.txt file
Remove any rules in the robots.txt file blocking site from being crawled

Post-Launch

Review technical items including:
- robots.txt to ensure content is not being blocked
- Test canonical tags and redirects
Check all tracking is working properly
Submit new XML sitemap to Google Search Console to re-crawl all pages
Crawl new site to identify any missing SEO elements or errors
Check load times to optimize post-launch
- FREE HubSpot CMS Site Grader Tool
Add in additional redirects that show in Google Search Console or in the crawl