Beginner’s Guide to Building A New Website – From Hosting to SEO

Here’s what to expect when you’ve finally realised making money online isn’t as easy as you thought.

Learn how to reduce the cost quotation of building a website, and understand exactly what processes are required to build a website. This is a beginner’s step-by-step guide, it’s not always a one-off job to rank in Google in 1 month with a 30 Day SEO Booster, depending on your industry and target location (Local or UK nationwide/international SEO). Most of my clients have been working with me for 5 years – some 15 – and we joke that it’s like marrying your SEO freelancer. Whether you’re a geographically targeted local carpet cleaning company, or a prolific personalised cards brand like Funky Pigeon, you need to understand what you’re buying before you hire an SEO.

“Oh, all I need to do is ask ChatGPT to write my landing pages, and boom, job done!”

Mate, you might as well ask ChatGPT to fix the tap while you’re at it. Because, you know, just asking an AI to write your plumbing page is going to give you the same unique, high-ranking content that every other person who types the same question gets. It’s like putting the same ingredients into a blender and expecting a Michelin star meal to pop out. What you’re going to get is the content equivalent of soggy toast; mass-produced, bland, and about as original as a tribute band at a Butlin’s holiday camp. Except Stephen Mulhern, he’s great.

Honestly, I’d love to smack some sense into people with a wet fish. “Oh, sure, Mr. ChatGPT, just give me a one-size-fits-all page on plumbing!” Yeah, because that’s exactly how SEO works.

While you’re busy copying and pasting, Google’s over there thinking, “Another one bites the dust.” Duplicate content, generic as hell, and probably ranking somewhere between the Terms & Conditions page and 404 Error. Well done, genius.

Here’s the kicker, my matey – SEO isn’t just about writing words. It’s about strategy, structure, user intent, keywords that actually work—you know, stuff that requires more brainpower than a 5 word prompt. I bet you’re great in between the sheets. It’s like hiring someone to paint your house, and they show up with a spray can saying, “I’ve got this, I watched a YouTube video!” Absolutely no clue about the layers, the details, the craft, the human touch.

If you want cookie-cutter content, mate, go ahead and ask ChatGPT. But if you actually want to rank, and not end up in the SEO graveyard with all the other ‘plumbing tap’ pages, maybe hire someone who knows what they’re doing. Like the SEO Lady who has spoken about Video SEO at Brighton SEO.

And for good measure, I’d smush a wet fish right across your face when you hit the enter key.

Website Building Start to Finish – What’s Involved?

We can compare your mobile phone to a website when learning the process.

• A domain name is the Internet address of a website e.g. www.seolady.co.uk (This is your mobile number)
• Website hosting is your mobile service provider (like O2) pay monthly or annually
• Website design (This is like Apple iOS, and mobile apps)

The global platform WordPress is the system I recommend to design and manage your site. It’s a very popular online cloud system that lets you easily build a professional website without any technical IT skills. There are millions of free and paid templates to choose from.

In WordPress, you don’t design a layout you can’t edit these templates, but you can very easily change major features, like the background colour and header image. WordPress is generally considered the world leader in SEO Plugins, the most popular being Yoast. When choosing an SEO Freelancer to hire, you’ll be researching their SEO Case studies with ‘before and after’ Google ranking results. Agency case studies usually display pretty graphs of a traffic increase without showing your the domain. All of my SEO Case Studies display the domain, feel free to contact all of them, as well as the brand names you see in my SEO Lady Reviews since 2008.

Read my About Me and reviews  – or get in touch for a FREE GOOGLE AUDIT if you currently have a website and need to learn the basics.

But let’s not run before we can walk.

It’s like having a baby, only this one won’t cry, but it will cost you a fortune in ‘development’ and the experience will smell of shit. And look, I get it – you’ve been told all the basic SEO tips already: ‘Add your site to Google Search Console, links GA together ra ra ra’. Wow, groundbreaking stuff. What’s next? Put a giant neon sign on the internet that says ‘Google, pick me! I’m special!’

But here’s a mistake so common it’s basically the IKEA flat-pack of SEO errors. You launch your site, and what do you put up? A holding page! Great. Now, to Google, your website looks like the internet version of an empty shop with a ‘coming soon’ sign in the window. Yeah, Google’s really going to rush to index that, isn’t it? Good luck!

GO AWAY GOOGLE – This is your holding page

So, here’s the deal: don’t use a generic holding page. It’s like telling Google, ‘Don’t bother coming back for a while. There’s nothing to see here!’ Instead, either keep the DNS turned off—so Google doesn’t even know your site exists yet—or set up a custom page that actually looks like a real site. You want Google to think, ‘Ooh, there’s something shiny here!’ rather than ‘Oh, another parked domain, we’ll index it after we’ve done our taxes.’

DNS—you know what that stands for, right? It’s basically the phone book of the internet. Google’s not crawling domain names—it’s crawling the actual content, which lives on an IP address. By keeping the DNS off, you’re telling Google, ‘Nothing to see here, move along!’ until you’re actually ready to launch. It’s SEO foreplay, people—don’t rush in too soon.

So, next time you launch a site, remember this: no generic holding page. Google won’t like it, and you’ll be stuck at the back of the queue. And believe me, Google has a long queue. They’re basically the bouncers of the internet. You don’t want to be the guy outside the club shouting, ‘Let me in, I’m ready!’, when all they see is a blank page.”

How long will SEO get me to Google Page 1?

There is no SEO company that can promise or predict any rankings. Find an honest SEO and he or she will discuss your keywords and your competition sites (you did this research earlier in Tip 1) for a local business like a Plumber in Bristol this will be easier than ranking throughout the UK for the search term “Buy [product] Online UK”

SEO results are directly correlated to investment. Underhand tactics that try to trick Google no longer work (mass linkbuilding) ineffective timewasting (changing meta tags every month) are still available from overseas SEO who promise you Google page 1 for a few $Dollars. Please ignore these sales calls.

Agency SEO price versus a Freelance SEO

Historically website design companies and website development companies offer SEO services as a bolt-on package after your website is launched. Proceed with caution and ask for a bullet point list of exactly what tasks they will do for you. Some agencies say that they will ‘Optimise meta tags’ and charge you a monthly fee when this is a one-time task. Avoid buying bulk backlinks, or articles published to multiple websites as duplicate content, or even the dreaded ‘article spinning’.

Web design companies specialise in building websites, and frequently outsource their SEO website marketing to overseas companies rather than hiring a specialist in-house.

Additionally, when you ask for a list of tasks it’s unfortunately common they will refuse to tell you exactly what they have done, often spouting technical jargon to confuse you so you stop asking questions.

Research freelancers and agencies online to read past reviews of their work.

Avoid buying backlinks because someone told you that is SEO

Any SEO worth their salt knows how important getting links to a website is, so whether you’ve been doing your own SEO or hired someone to do it for you, it’s likely the topic of building links has cropped up.

In the not-so-distant past, paying for links from relevant (and often irrelevant) websites was rife in the SEO world, despite Google saying this was against their guidelines. After warning webmasters for several years to avoid this practice, Google finally put their money where their mouth is in 2012 with a major algorithm update called ‘Penguin‘. It aimed to de-value poor quality, paid links and increase the value of links from authoritative sources.

(Note: This was in 2015, in 2025 I have an unchanged view) Nowadays, the quantity of backlinks is nowhere near as important as it was back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s so never buy backlinks, even if they are for $5 as these will damage your website reputation and it will hurt your pocket to pay to recover.

Introductory £70 Google Audit, Business and Website Mentoring Consultation

Ever wondered how I deliver my SEO sessions? Here’s a Zoom Google consultation from June 2020

How Much Will A Website Cost for Local Google Services or UK Nationwide eCommerce?

Every website is unique, so you’ll need 20-30 images, banners, a logo, written content for 20+ pages and a colour scheme in mind. Avoid cheap websites under £1,000, if you can’t afford a professional web developer, a cheap SEO won’t be able to rank your domain in Google, let alone an expert in Search Engine Marketing. Even a self professed “SEO Guru” can’t polish a turd.

Adding an Ecommerce functionality (online store) and / or more than 15 pages will increase the cost. Lauching a business in the AI landscape means you’re a late starter from 2023 – now we are in 2025 – and with each passing year it’s going to get harder to make money online as there are billions of other companies doing the same thing as you do.. especially if you make fundamental SEO Mistakes when your eCommerce website is launched.

The there’s updates with eCommerce sites. Magento retired support for it’s platform and released Magento 2. Businesses on the ball immediately implemented a platform migration, others I know pulled the trigger by changing the domain and the platform at the same time. There’s many SEO considerations with every domain migration or moving away from Wix to WordPress like my case study.

You can’t get a cheap website without putting in the effort.

If you have little or no written content prepared, hardly any images, no logo, no banners, if you  don’t know what design styles you want, this will result in many changes over the project timescale – more hours means an increased cost.

How to get the cheapest price for a website built from scratch

If you go through this list of tasks and complete them all to save development time and you money by hiring copywriters or DIY content writing blogs yourself. Less hours that someone has to spend on creating your website means less cost. Learn AI prompt engineering with a day’s LLM content production workshop in a city near you. I’ll come to your office or hire a space, and deliver a tailored ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini on-page SEO coaching session for yourself or a marketing team with multiple employees. I’ll even train website developers on how to adopt SEO strategies at source; when the client is in the planning stage. If you need a Digital Project Manager, you know who to call.

Writing content for a website is the most time consuming. This is one of the most important factors that raises the cost of building a website. Be wary of buying generic pre-recorded video courses online, social media or YouTube. Nothing compares to one hour of 121 tailored strategy in my SEO consultations. I cover YouTube SEO as well as on-page SEO basics that I’ve been using for nearly 20 years. “What’s new SEO this year” erm, same as last year mate. And the decade before that.

So, this guy attends one Google Garage meeting in 2015, and now he thinks he’s ready to sell an SEO video course? Brilliant! That’s like someone going to a single gym class eight years ago and deciding they’re qualified to train Olympic athletes.

Sure, the internet hasn’t changed at all since 2015! Everything’s exactly the same! No AI, no zero-click SERPs, and no massive algorithm updates that completely altered how SEO works… Nope, it’s all just like the good ol’ days where you could stuff keywords into your page like you’re packing a suitcase for a holiday and hope for the best!

Imagine this guy’s course: “Welcome to SEO 101. Step 1: Add ‘plumber’ to your site 250 times. Step 2: Sit back and watch the cash roll in.” Yeah, because that’s how it works, right? “Forget about user experience, search intent, or structured data! Just load your page up like a spam sandwich, and you’ll be number one by next week.”

Here’s the reality: since 2015, we’ve had AI overviews, featured snippets, people also ask boxes, and zero-click SERPs—Google’s handing out answers like free samples in a supermarket, and half the time, users don’t even click through to your website! But nah, according to this guy, SEO’s exactly the same as it was when we were all still using Flash websites and thinking MySpace was the future.

If this guy’s selling a course, I hope the only video lesson is: “What not to do.” Because teaching SEO with 2015 knowledge is like giving someone directions with an outdated map and wondering why they end up in a field instead of their destination. He should rename the course: “SEO for Dinosaurs: The Jurassic Guide to Ranking Nowhere!”

Honestly, if someone’s selling an SEO course with knowledge from 2015, they might as well sell it in VHS format and throw in a pager for good measure

To get the best price for a website and to succeed in Google for SEO you must write 300 words for each priority page (Home page / About / Services / Products).

There’s no one better to write content for Search Engines (Google / Bing / Yahoo) than an SEO Freelancer, primarily this content will be specifically sculpted and unique to your site and written by hand and crafted to reflect your keywords for your business, but this is not cheap so make the effort and invest your time in writing down as much information as possible. Once you have this written wish list, copy and paste into ChatGPT and have a conversation about some topic clusters and semantic keywords for your website copywriting.

1. Buy your domain and hosting ideally from a UK Host like 34SP
2. Browse Free WordPress themes online or pay for a theme if you like
3. Employ a designer to design a logo and a promotional banner
4. Collate a Free online Dropbox folder and store all company images in one place in the cloud, so your website developer and SEO can pop in online at any time to upload and use
5. If you don’t have one, create a free Gmail account for your Google Analytics
6. Once you have this, create FREE Google Cloud Drive documents online
7. Make a list of all your website pages in a Google Drive Document
8. Write content for all your pages – between 300-400 words for each page minimum on another Google Drive Document
9. Note social media URLs, Twitter, Facebook logins on your Google Drive Document
10. Think of the keywords you would search in Google for that you want people to find your website, then add your geographical areas to research your competitors – write these down using the online FREE Google Cloud Drive service to share easily with your SEO

Why will my SEO person NOT write content for the website build price?

As a business owner, there is no one that knows your client base or industry better than YOU. Asking your SEO or website development company to write your content can be tricky as research must be taken to provide the perfect content in an industry that’s new. This takes time, about an hour per page.

If you are happy for your SEO freelancer to use AI, ask for case studies and for them to write an example 500 word blog post for you to review. I offer a free 500-word LLM-generated article to all prospective clients – Contact me to claim yours today (and please don’t share on the bloody internet, there’s only 7 days in a week).

If you can’t write content yourself, or simply don’t have the time then jot down 5 or 6 paragraphs for a page, a skilled SEO freelancer will be able to transform your text to 100% fully optimised textual content for Google and other search engines.

If you can’t think of what to write I will send over a list of questions for you to answer so I can write content based on your response!

SEO’s are quite happy to rewrite content for your site but be prepared to pay at least £70-£150 per page SEO coding and optimal wordcount which will include the essential HTML coding for H1 and H2 headings, internal linking and sales style to entice people to buy, book, or to call you on the telephone.

Tip 2 – How many pages do I need on my website for SEO?

The more pages the better!

There are several sources that say Google trusts websites that exceed 20 pages so my recommendation for a website that needs SEO to make money would be to have 10 pages plus many blog posts, here is some inspiration:

• Home page
• About Us
• Contact
• Products / Services – minimum 5 – no maximum
• Testimonials
• Gallery (if required)
• Blog posts about your products and/or services
  

WordPress has a superb blog functionality and fresh content updated regularly is a sure fire winner for search engine optimisation. I strongly recommend having a blog to share your news.

How long will it take to deliver a website from design to launch?

For this we work in 5 simple steps and dates:

1. Agree content delivery date – will the business owner provide content, will this be outsourced to a blogger, or written by an SEO?
2. Agree Site Design and Architecture Date – WordPress template choice, colours, menus (top/side). Artwork for Banners, banner and images, content, gallery etc
3. Agree Site Functionality Freeze Date – Import plugins like a Contact Form, Yoast SEO, perhaps eCommerce plugins, and bespoke HTML side widgets etc
4. Important: Agree Design Freeze date – No more changes after this date. Any changes submitted after this date will be billable at the minimum of one hour’s work for amendments.
5. Agree Launch Date. Test. Now is the time to rank your domain in Google with professional SEO.