Every new website launch has a glamorous half and a boring half. The glamorous half is the design, the copy and the launch-day post. The boring half is the technical SEO groundwork, and it's the half that quietly decides whether any of the glamorous stuff ever gets seen. This is the setup we run on every site, before and just after it goes live. None of it is clever. All of it matters.
Why this still matters in 2026
Search has changed a lot lately: AI overviews, zero-click results, all of it. What hasn't changed is the foundation. Google still has to crawl your pages, understand what they're about, and decide they're worth showing. If it can't do the first two, the third never happens, no matter how good your content is.
Google doesn't reward clever. It rewards findable, fast and unambiguous.Our rule of thumb on every build
The businesses that win locally usually aren't the ones with the biggest content teams. They're the ones whose sites are clean, fast and unambiguous, so Google can file them correctly on the very first pass.
Sitemaps and the redirect map
Two documents do most of the heavy lifting on a new build: your XML sitemap and your redirect map. The sitemap tells Google every page you want indexed. The redirect map makes sure every old URL, every link anyone has ever shared, lands somewhere sensible instead of a dead end.
On a rebuild, the redirect map is where projects quietly go wrong. Miss a batch of old URLs and you can watch years of accumulated ranking evaporate inside a week.
A redirect you didn't test is a 404 you haven't met yet.
How we actually test a redirect map
We don't trust a spreadsheet. We pull the full list of old URLs, then check each one resolves with a single 301 to the right new page: no chains, no 302s, no surprise 404s.
$ curl -sI https://oldsite.ie/old-page HTTP/2 301 location: https://newsite.ie/new-page $ curl -sI https://newsite.ie/new-page HTTP/2 200 # clean single hop, no chain
A redirect map is dull to build and brutal to skip. One row per old URL, checked, not assumed.
Schema markup that actually helps
Structured data is how you tell Google what a page is, not just what words are on it. Done right, it earns richer result listings and clearer understanding. Done wrong, or overdone, it does nothing at all, or worse, invites a manual penalty.
Here's the short list we actually implement, in roughly this order of value:
- Organisation or LocalBusiness, so Google knows who you are and where.
- BreadcrumbList, for cleaner, more clickable result listings.
- Article, on every blog post and guide.
- Product and Offer, if you sell anything at all.
- FAQPage, but only where you genuinely answer real questions.
Validate every type in Google's Rich Results test before launch. If it doesn't validate, it doesn't ship. A broken schema block is worse than no schema at all.
Page speed budgets, set early
Speed is easiest to protect when you decide the limit before you build, not after. A performance budget is just an agreed ceiling, on page weight, on JavaScript, on how long the main content takes to appear, that everyone commits to at the start.
Set the budget as a hard number in your build, then let the build fail when you break it. A budget nobody enforces isn't a budget, it's a wish.
Retrofitting speed onto a finished site is miserable and expensive. Agreeing a budget on day one costs nothing and saves the day-ninety panic.
Crawl errors and the index gap
There's always a gap between the pages you think are indexed and the pages that actually are. Search Console's coverage report is where you find it. After launch, we watch it like a hawk for the first fortnight.
The coverage report is where the truth lives. If it isn't here, it isn't indexed.
The usual culprits: a stray noindex left over from staging, a robots.txt rule that's too aggressive, or orphan pages nothing links to. All boring. All fixable in minutes, once you can actually see them.
The boring 2-week checklist
Here's the rhythm we run. Week one, pre-launch: sitemap built, redirect map tested, schema validated, speed budget met, staging noindex removed. Week two, post-launch: Search Console verified, sitemap submitted, coverage report clean, Core Web Vitals green on real traffic, and key pages confirmed indexed.
That's it. No secrets, no growth hacks. Just the unglamorous groundwork that lets everything else you do actually count. We've put the whole thing into a printable checklist, take it, it's free.