What Is the First Thing to Do Before Doing SEO? (Start Here, Not With Keywords)

The first thing to do before doing SEO is define exactly who you're trying to reach and what they type into Google — because every other SEO decision (keywords, content, site structure, links) flows from that answer, and getting it wrong means optimizing efficiently in the wrong direction. In practical terms, the pre-SEO sequence is: know your audience, research the actual words they search, set up measurement so you have a baseline, and fix anything that would stop Google from indexing you. Then — and only then — start optimizing.

Most people skip straight to step three or four of that list. Here's why the order matters and what each step actually looks like.

Step 1: Decide who you're for (and what winning means)

SEO without a target audience is just publishing. Before you touch a keyword tool, you should be able to answer two questions in one sentence each:

Who is this site for? Not "everyone interested in fitness" — something like "home lifters who train in a garage with limited equipment."
What action counts as a win? A sale, a signup, a booked call, an ad impression? Your keyword choices differ enormously depending on whether you need buyers or readers.

This feels like it isn't SEO. It is. The single most common way sites waste their first year is ranking for traffic that never converts because nobody decided what the traffic was for.

Step 2: Find the words your audience actually uses

Now keyword research — but grounded in step 1. The goal isn't a list of high-volume terms; it's a map of what your specific audience searches at each stage: the questions they ask early, the comparisons they run later, and the buying phrases they use at the end.

The free route is genuinely enough to start: type your topics into Google and harvest the autocomplete suggestions and "People Also Ask" boxes, then use a free keyword tool tier to check rough volumes. Prioritize specific, lower-competition phrases over broad head terms — a new site can win "link exchange for ecommerce" long before it can win "SEO." How to do SEO as a beginner covers the research process in full.

Step 3: Set up measurement before you change anything

Before your first optimization, install the instruments — because if you can't see the baseline, you'll never know whether your SEO worked:

Google Search Console — verify your site. This is where Google tells you what you rank for, what's indexed, and what's broken. It's free and non-negotiable.
Google Analytics 4 — so you know what visitors do after arriving.
Submit a sitemap in Search Console so Google can find everything you publish.

Take a screenshot of your starting numbers, even if they're zeros. Three months in, that baseline is how you'll prove (to yourself or a client) that the effort is compounding.

Step 4: Clear the technical road

You don't need a deep technical audit on day one — you need to confirm nothing is blocking Google:

The site loads over HTTPS and reasonably fast on mobile.
Pages you care about are indexable (no stray noindex tags, no robots.txt accidentally blocking everything — it happens more than you'd think, especially on sites launched from a staging environment).
One page targets one topic, with a real title tag and meta description.

That's the whole technical bar for starting. Perfectionism here is procrastination; a technically ordinary site with great content outranks a technically perfect empty one.

Step 5: Know how you'll build authority before you need it

Here's the pre-SEO step almost everyone omits from the checklist: deciding where your backlinks will come from. Content gets you into the game; links are usually what decides rankings between comparable pages, and they take the longest to accumulate — so the plan should exist before you publish, not after you plateau.

For a brand-new site the realistic early options are guest posts, genuinely useful content that earns citations over time, and 1-for-1 link exchanges with relevant real sites. Backlinkster handles that last one systematically: it pairs you with relevant partner sites, each side places an in-content link, and the platform verifies every link stays live — five swaps a month on the free plan. Starting exchanges in month one means that by the time your content matures, it isn't sitting at zero authority. How to get backlinks for a new website maps out the full early-links playbook.

The pre-SEO checklist, in order

Define your audience and what a conversion is — one sentence each
Build a keyword map from real searches (autocomplete, PAA, free tools)
Install Search Console + GA4, submit a sitemap, record your baseline
Confirm nothing blocks indexing: HTTPS, no noindex, one topic per page
Pick your first link-building channel and start it alongside your content

Do those five, in that order, and "doing SEO" stops being a vague project and becomes a sequence: publish pages that match the map, earn links that build authority, and check Search Console monthly to see which bets are paying. If you want the longer horizon laid out week by week, the 90-day SEO plan picks up exactly where this checklist ends.

The first thing to do before SEO isn't technical at all. It's deciding who you're for — everything else is execution.