A Is question

Is it worth hiring an SEO company for a new website?

4 min read Cites 2 sources

It can be, if you bring the company in while the site is still being planned and search is one of the main ways you expect customers to find you. Getting the site onto Google is not the part you need to pay for. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says: “You usually don’t need to do anything except publish your site on the web.” It adds that “the vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically as we crawl the web.” The value of hiring early lies in decisions that are cheap before launch and costly after it: which pages the site has, how their addresses are formed, how the launch is handled, and, if the new site replaces an old one, how the old pages are carried over.

Which pages the site should have

The first piece of early work is research into how people search for what you offer, turned into a page list before design starts. A plan drawn up from the design alone can leave out pages people are searching for, or spread one topic across several pages that end up competing for the same searches. Changing the page list costs little while it is still a draft. Once pages are built and published, adding, merging, or renaming them brings redirects and rework.

Addresses, and how much structure matters

Google’s guide recommends descriptive URLs and explains: “Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them.” An address pattern is simple to set at the start. Changing it after launch means redirecting every old address to its new one.

How much the overall structure matters depends on the size of the site. Google writes: “If you have more than a few thousand URLs on your site, how you organize your content may have effects on how Google crawls and indexes your site.” The same guide calls its advice on organizing a site helpful long term “especially if you’re working on a larger website” and says that search engines “will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized.” The larger the planned site, then, the more the structure work is worth before launch. For a small site, the page list and the addresses matter more than the shape of the hierarchy.

The launch itself

Google’s guide to launching an ecommerce website is written for online stores, but its first steps are not specific to selling: verify that you own the site, ask Google to index it (with the URL Inspection tool for a small number of pages or a sitemap for a large number), and track indexing in the Page Indexing report.

The same guide sets out how the timing of a launch affects visibility. A site kept closed until a single launch day is hidden from Google until then, because “requiring a password to access pages on the site will block Google from accessing your site” while still letting testers in. The guide lists the drawback of that approach plainly: “It can take longer for your site to get visibility in Google Search results and the Google Shopping tab.” The alternative it describes is to open only the home page first, which “allows you to register your store, drive awareness of your domain name, and start allowing others to link to your site.” Choosing between these is a decision a company can help with before launch and cannot help with after it.

If the new site replaces an old one

When a new site replaces an old one, the launch is also a site move. The old site’s pages need a plan for where each address will redirect, prepared and tested before the switch, because visitors and search engines start following the old links the moment the new site goes live. Of all the reasons to bring a company in before launch, this one has a fixed deadline: the day the old site is switched off.

When it may not be worth it

If your budget covers either a well-built website or an SEO company but not both, put it into the website first, because SEO work has little to build on in a weak site. If few people search for what you offer, or your customers come mainly through referrals, advertising, or other channels, the return may not justify the cost. If you or someone on your team already understands keyword research and the launch steps Google describes, a short pre-launch review of the page list, the addresses, and the launch plan may be enough instead of an ongoing engagement.

Whichever you choose, ask the company for its own written estimate of when results should become measurable for your new site, and what it will report in the meantime.

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