Why SEO strategy should shape your website, not follow it

A successful site starts with SEO. Not as a bolt-on, not as a quick fix later, but as the blueprint for everything that follows. Yet we often see this foundational step overlooked, even by businesses investing heavily in a new website. And while you can implement SEO at a later stage, it’s kind of like building a house without laying the foundations first – without solid groundwork, anything built on top won’t stand strong for long.

By shaping your site with keyword research and keyword mapping, then using it to inform your sitemap, structure, and strategy from day one, you’ll be set up for success that lasts. Here, we share the most important SEO considerations when building a website.

SEO isn’t something you add later

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it’s something you do after a website is built. In reality, the most effective SEO happens before a single line of copy is written or a page is designed.

Why? Because without a keyword-informed structure, your site won’t align with what people are actually searching for – and potential customers can’t easily find you. You might have slick-looking pages and beautiful copy, but if search engines can’t understand your site’s content hierarchy (basically, how your pages are organised and connected) – or users can’t navigate it easily – Google won’t put your business in the spotlight.

While it's tempting to dive straight into the copy, doing so without a foundational SEO plan means you’ll likely spend more time unpicking and retrofitting things later.

The best SEO strategy for new websites

If you want results – traffic, visibility, conversions – start from the ground up. In digital, that ground is made of keywords and search intent, which is why foundational SEO is the best starting point. At The Bigger Boat, we kick off every website build with a solid strategy phase, and keyword research is right at the heart of it. Take a look at our process:

Step one: keyword research

Your customers are already out there, typing problems into the internet. Your job is to figure out what they are, and build a site structure that meets them where they are. We begin by identifying exactly what your audience is searching for – not just individual words, but keyword clusters (groups of related terms and phrases that indicate a user’s intent). Conducting keyword research for a new website can tell us loads of things: what your customers want, how they think, how they search, what gaps they have in their knowledge, and where your opportunities live.

Step two: keyword mapping

Once we’ve gathered this data, it’s time to map out the keywords. But exactly what is keyword mapping? Think of it as your architectural blueprint. We take keywords and map them to specific pages, which helps us define the structure of the site:

• Parent pages – your core services or product categories

• Child pages – supporting pages that go deeper into subtopics

• Sections within each page – that align with what people expect to find (user intent)

By doing this early on, we’re able to optimise URLs for SEO and inform technical strategies, such as metadata and internal linking plans. All this helps set up your designers, developers, and copywriters for success – because now everyone knows the purpose each page serves, and what role it plays in the bigger picture.

Step three: sitemap planning

With sitemap planning, your website plan becomes less of a checklist of ‘what needs to be included’ and more of a strategic hierarchy of how people will find you, move through your site, and take action. At TBB, we call this your website architecture. If we were building a house, this would be your layout – the front door is easy to find, each room has a purpose, and all hallways lead to somewhere logical.

Done well, sitemapping makes it effortless for your customers to navigate your website, and just as easy for Google to crawl and understand. The best sitemaps don’t just focus on SEO, but also consider how real people interact with your site (user experience, or UX) and what encourages them to take action (conversion rate optimisation, or CRO). Get it wrong, and you end up with orphaned pages, weak internal links, duplicate topics, and missed opportunities to rank and convert.

Step four: bringing it all together

With the sitemap agreed, our structure is in place, and our team can bring everything to life – all working from the same blueprint. Designers create intuitive, visually compelling journeys that support conversion, developers build seamless, high-performance functionality, and copywriters use search intent and keyword phrases to craft pages as person-focused and persuasive as they are optimised. They invite your customers in, speaking to real problems in a way that resonates, and framing solutions in terms of tangible, emotion-based benefits. Then, they’ll guide them towards the action you want them to take.

Foundational SEO in action

We’ve seen the impact of starting with SEO for a new website. Take hoomph’s site, for example. When we began building it in 2024, we followed our strategic website process – starting with a Think Big! workshop to get to know the business and its customers inside out. This gave us the insights we needed to conduct thorough keyword research, helping us understand what people were searching for.

From there, we moved into website architecture, making sure those keywords were mapped to the right pages so people (and Google) could easily find what they needed. We also did a design and UX review, along with a look at competitors, to make sure the site was easy to navigate. Once the structure was solid, we wrote content with user intent in mind, ensuring every page answered real questions and provided value. Before launching, we carried out a data review – digging into GA4, Search Console, and any available user data – followed by organic rank benchmarking to track keyword positions before making any changes.

Now, nearly a year since launch – and without any ongoing SEO work – the site is already ranking on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a wide range of relevant terms. The structure we set up from day one is doing all the heavy lifting, proving just how powerful the right SEO foundations can be.

Why foundational SEO matters for your next website build

A new site is an exciting investment – but don’t fall into the trap of beginning without a blueprint. SEO shouldn’t be an optional extra, or a plug in post-launch, but part of your business and marketing strategy. Because that’s exactly what foundational SEO is – a strategic framework that fuels growth, gives you pages that actually rank, content that converts, and a site built to last.

As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all ships. The best results come when SEO is working in harmony with your wider activity – from brand messaging and paid search to email marketing and social campaigns. It’s about making every channel work harder by building from a solid foundation. And if you’re unsure where to start building SEO for your website, we’ll guide you through the whole process.

Need a hand creating a high-performing site from the ground up, or considering a site migration? Let’s talk about how SEO strategy can shape your next build.