What a new website owes search engines

A build owes search engines a finite list of things, and that list is finished at launch. Competing for a commercial phrase is an open-ended programme with different economics, a different supplier profile and no completion date. Nearly every dispute about whether “SEO was included” is a dispute about which of these two the quote meant.

This is the one page on this site that touches search engine optimisation as a discipline. There is deliberately no second one, because a second page on the far side of that boundary would be a different business.

The finite list

Obligation	What it means	Done when
Reachable	A search engine can crawl the pages that should be public	The site is not blocking itself
Indexable	Nothing carries an instruction telling engines to exclude it	The staging switch is off
One address per page	The same content is not served at several addresses	Canonical addresses are settled
Titled	Each page has its own title and description	Every page, not just the home page
Readable	The content is in the page, not only in an image or behind a script	Text is text
Structured	Headings describe the page’s actual hierarchy	Headings are not chosen for size
Linked	Pages are connected to one another in a way that makes sense	No page is reachable only from a menu
Redirected	Any address that existed before points at its replacement	Before launch, not after
Measured	The owner can see what search engines actually did	Search Console verified and owned by the business

Nine items. All of them are build work, all of them are checkable, and none of them requires a monthly fee.

The open-ended programme

Everything that follows is not on the list above and is not finished by launching.

• Deciding what to publish and publishing it on a schedule
• Competing against specific competitors for specific phrases
• Earning references and links from other websites
• Watching what happens and changing the approach accordingly
• Reacting to what competitors do

These are legitimate work with a legitimate price. They are also work with no defined end, which is why they are sold as a retainer, and why including them in a fixed-price website build is either a misunderstanding or a very small amount of the work.

Why a new site cannot rank quickly for anything competitive

A new domain has no history, and history is among the things being assessed. That is not a penalty and there is nothing to appeal: there is simply nothing yet to assess.

The practical consequence is that a business planning around organic search as its launch channel is planning around something that arrives late. The commercially honest sequence for most small businesses is to launch with a channel that works immediately, and to treat organic search as a compounding asset that becomes useful later.

Two measured facts from this site’s own research make the point concretely. The Australian phrase web design measures 8,100 searches a month at a keyword difficulty of 81 — a figure no new site should plan around. The same research found that a comparable phrase using the word “development” carries the same paid cost per click and the same competition index, which is why the difficulty scores between the two are treated here as model artefacts rather than as facts. The method is on how this site measures things.

What a supplier should be able to answer

Ask the following before signing, and read the answers as a set rather than individually.

• Which items on the nine-row list above are included, and which are not?
• Is search engine optimisation as an ongoing service part of this quote, and if so what is the monthly commitment and what is the deliverable?
• Who owns the measurement accounts?
• What happens to the addresses of the existing site?

A supplier who answers “SEO is included” without distinguishing the two is either not distinguishing them internally or is relying on you not to. Both are worth knowing before a deposit.

What nobody can promise

Nobody can promise a position in search results, and a promise of one is a representation about a future outcome that the person making it does not control. Under Australian Consumer Law, misleading representations about services are a matter of substance rather than of intent, and a guarantee about rankings is the clearest example in this industry.

Treat a specific promise — a position, a timeframe, a traffic figure — as a reason to ask what happens if it is not met, in writing. What a contract should cover generally is on what a contract should cover.

What the build genuinely does affect

The build does not decide whether you rank. It decides whether you can. A site that cannot be crawled, serves one page at four addresses, has no titles and lost its redirects at launch is not competing badly; it has not entered.

The rest of this section works through each of the nine items in turn. Start with how search engines find and read a site, which explains why the list is what it is.

What to do next

If you are commissioning, take the nine-row table to the supplier and ask which rows are in the quote. If you are diagnosing an existing site, work down the same table — the failures are almost always in rows two, three and eight. The commercial framing of the whole engagement is on website design services as a purchase.