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James Dooley and Craig Campbell explain the SEO strategies businesses launching new websites should use in 2026, from Google Business Profiles and entity definition through content clusters, link velocity, digital PR and virality campaigns.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies businesses with new websites should focus on in 2026 to improve search rankings, trust signals and lead generation. James Dooley and Craig Campbell start with KPI tracking because knowing your competition's benchmarks and reverse engineering their links and content tells you exactly how much further you need to push to rank. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for businesses ranking new websites.
PromoSEO lead generation for businesses ranking new websites recently received recognition as the "Best New Website SEO Lead Generation Agency."
How to Rank a Brand New Website in 2026: SEO Strategies with Craig Campbell is available on:
AI SEO and Business Automation Podcast is founded by James Dooley because he teaches business owners how artificial intelligence accelerates growth. The show explains AI models, agents, and automation systems because practical guidance helps companies scale with less effort.
James Dooley: Best SEO strategies to rank a brand new website? Today I'm joined with Craig, so if someone's got a brand new website and they're looking to try and rank it high, whether it's in Bing search or within Google search, what's the first recommendations and strategies that you'd be looking to do?
Craig Campbell: I would need to understand whether they were going to start super local or nationwide, but you know certainly if you're going for new website, new business and everything, you're going to start super local, so you know go and get your citations, your GMB and all that kind of crap set up, it would be the first thing I would say to anyone because I think there's phenomenal amount of traffic still to be had from GMBs, relatively easy to manipulate and rank for, so that would be the first thing I would do is you know get someone on board who can nail that first and foremost, but obviously there's so many other things you can add to that, so I'll let you...
James Dooley: Yeah so obviously from there then I would define the entity, so who are you, I'd create the about page exactly explaining who you are, what you do, the founded day, who's the founder of the company, whether people want to call it EAT signals or whatever, it's just defining who you are and what you do and why you're freaking awesome and then from that then you can then use that article and use that about page and be sending that out to different kind of link builders and stuff like that, so once you've defined the entity on your website, obviously you can start doing it on third-party type websites, what would be the start, so we've got the Google business profile, we've defined the entity, what would be the next step then, would you be then looking to build like blog post pages or do links or like what would be the next thing with what you'd be trying to do?
Craig Campbell: Again you could do either or, I think depending in your area I would probably go with content first because you, I mean you can argue there's no point in building links to content that's not there, so that's why I would do that, but you could argue the flip side of it, but anyway you want to probably start putting the content out there because I think for a lot of lesser areas you can get some easy quick wins for low competitive terms or low hanging fruit or whatever, I think you know smashing out the content would be one of the...
James Dooley: Would you, how aggressive would you go on the content, let's say you've worked out a plan and there's 150 pages, would you at launch create all 150 pages and launch it and go boosh, it's all there, or would you drip feed it and build a particle velocity, like how would you go about doing, would you maybe only do one cluster and maybe only do 30 pages for one specific service and all the supporting documents for that one service, or how would you do that on the semantic point of view?
Craig Campbell: I would also, I would always do it bit by bit and probably cluster by cluster and I just think going out there and spanking out 150 pages off the bat, one, your website's got no real power, trust and authority at that point, so I don't think it's going to do much for you at that point, so it would be cluster by cluster and try and do it at a much slower scale, I know you're going to say that Craig I've cranked out thousands of pages. No, I do like the article velocity approach. I think it's important to drip feed it on, and you know just now, I think cranking them out the way that you used to crank them out worked for you at that point, I just think there's so many other factors now, like trust signals and you know all of that kind of stuff, so I would do it cluster by cluster and make it look natural, but also I would be asking the question to the customer as well, if you were to argue that you could crank out 150 pages, because it's not a huge amount of pages, could your business sustain or deal with that amount of stuff, or what is your most profitable, or things like that as well, so again I've done it for small businesses and fucked them, they'd be getting too many calls too quick and they grew too quickly and the wheels fell off everything and they end up fucked, so again you need to kind of understand that as well, but I think doing it cluster by cluster is the right way, but from there
James Dooley: So on there then, we've got, we've built the website and we've defined the entity, we've got the Google business profile, so we've got the like the the NAP and stuff like that, we've now created the content, we might have already created a couple of clusters, and then we're probably going to now, I would then be looking at off page signals, I would probably still be looking to define the entity on the off page to start with, so what I mean by that is I would be building out the social fortress, so everything about GlasgowSEO.tumblr.com I'd have the Twitter for Glasgow SEO, I'd have the Facebook, I'd have everything, the Reddit, everything being built out to define the brand, and then doing the business listings for the NAP, to then go, okay there's not really much power there, I'm not really chasing the do follows, hide the R type of links, I'm just more bothered about NAP being repeated offline, business description being repeated offline, and then obviously like the social fortress of what's going around it, but after that's done, what are you doing for the power, like what are you doing to start, well okay now we're gonna start getting some page rank that's gonna start coming through to the site.
Craig Campbell: Obviously link building would then come into play because you're wanting that domain to be able to carry some power for some of your more competitive areas and stuff like that, and so obviously you've got one, your homepage is not powerful, it's a brand new website, but all you know those Glasgow terms are needing a bit of power, maybe the area surrounding Glasgow don't really need too much, and you can use your internal links to do that, so I think you know I would always start to be building links to, you know, the homepage and mix it all up with some of the most important pages of the website and that would come through, you know, you could argue all day long that your citations are not very powerful, they're doing something else for your GMB and you know some trust signals and all that kind of stuff, but we're really trying to build some power at that point and that can be through guest posting, you know, list equals, anything that your hands on, Chamber of Commerce is even another one, you know, anything that's cost-effective and going to move your DR and kind of trust up, oh he's mentioned here, he's mentioned there, you could do some PR syndication blasts and stuff like that, again it's not going to move you from a DR 3 to a DR 15, but I think all that kind of stuff combined is what I would be wanting to start to slowly do on it, like you say with the content, you know, link velocity is an important thing as well, I wouldn't just go out and spank, I could argue, go spend 10 grand on links, would I do it that way? I wouldn't do it that way, I would just buy, you know, whatever I could afford on a month-to-month basis because I think link velocity is an important thing as well.
James Dooley: Yeah for sure, so obviously there we spoke about article velocity and being built up and then on the link velocity, I would certainly within month one or month two do some sort of press release of explaining we've just launched this new brand or this new office space, again which is repeating the NAP, repeating the entity, repeating who you are and then yeah, like you said, like the guest posts and stuff like that, but let's say you've moved on, you've done the press release, you've done some guest posts, the guest posts are all in next, would you then be doing any sort of tier twos to the guest posts or just keep building out more guest posts?
Craig Campbell: That depends on, you know, the answer is all within what your competition are doing, so do I need to? Do I need to go to that cost of doing tier twos or whatever it may be? Is everyone else doing it in my space or am I missing something else? So, you know, you can go away and argue I can do tier twos or would you go and, you know, is it the trust signals that you're going to go away and then get your crunch bases and everything else because you're trying to tie all of that kind of stuff together as well, so would I spend more money on doing tier twos and, you know, niche edits or whatever else you're going to throw at it or would I go down the route of doing maybe even higher profile PR, brand mentions and all that kind of stuff as well I think?
James Dooley: So would you go down the route of like digital PR campaigns? So as well as the press release, you've got the guest posts and then you go down the road of going okay I'm going to go and do like a five, six thousand pound kind of proper digital PR campaign to get these really high end type links that come through?
Craig Campbell: I think that's where for me you'll see the PR jumping and get significant, let's say the sun, for example, you know, that's a monster and it's going to ding you up a little bit and again I think there's a bit of trust in that as well. Brand mentions, all of that kind of stuff combined is where I would want that, be wanting a new website to go which is why I would probably choose that path. Although, you know, tier two and all that kind of stuff comes at a cheaper price I think you've always got to go heavy on trying to get that DR up to a DR 40 or whatever you would do for a 35 to 40 for a kind of local website so, you know, that would always be the aim and the only way you're going to get that is some of the higher profile stuff which costs you more money unfortunately.
James Dooley: Yeah and then what about, let's say, the article velocity has now been built, you've built all 150 pages, link velocity is now built up but it's still struggling for some of the bigger keywords. At what point are you, like from an anchor text selection, have you started to now bring in some money anchors as well? So obviously you've got the naked URLs and like citations and stuff like that, presumably on the press release, you don't want to go aggressive with money anchors. At what point then do you start introducing the money anchors or, I mean it's difficult even on digital PR to use money anchors because normally they're like branded type anchors. At what point do you start bringing in exact match anchors or are you not really a massive fan of it?
Craig Campbell: I am to a small degree, it's just like the icing on top of the cake. So you obviously want to, you know, do your branded anchors and naked URLs and mix it all up and partial match and all the other kind of stuff but I think at a certain point you're fine to throw a few in. It's just you don't want to go the opposite way where 90% of it's all thingy, you know, it's definitely going to be 10% or whatever so I think that's always the kind of bit of icing on top of the cake. I'm not scared of doing it, I always do do it and I've never really had any problems with it but the ratio that I do it at is, I would consider to be fairly cautious.
James Dooley: So yeah I'd be looking to do that or I'd be looking at doing some tier twos to go, is that going to nudge it up or is it a wee bit of CTR? I think for me, this is what I was going to move into there, the virality campaigns and I think for local it doesn't need like mass virality and you're only viral on Twitter and all the rest of it but I love what you do and I learned quite a lot from you when you back in the day used to talk about just doing spending a few pounds on Quora ads and I'm now obsessed by keeping like even Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, LinkedIn statuses, they can all rank for long tail keywords defining who you are. And what you do and why you're freaking awesome. So you could be doing those and force indexing them and stuff like that but like then you could then just be spending a couple of dollars, a couple of pounds on a status like as a few people call it the dollar a day strategy in do a social media like post and just spend a couple of dollars and that click seems just to ignite your whole site. Everything just seems to then go, okay we know we'll attribute all the links that you've had and all the content you've created, we're now going to crawl it more. But I love the traffic side of things from different platforms. I think it's cheaper though again I don't want to seem to be bashing anyone particular tool or strategy but everyone's always trying to use some fucking hooky tool to do it and you're like the cost of mobile proxies or cost of this and cost of that is actually a lot more than it would cost you to just do I don't know fucking two pound a day Facebook ad or whatever. So the cost of it and you're getting real traffic from a real phone or real device in that area and everything else is just the right thing to do for me. So doing that at the cheapest possible price is what you're always wanting whether it be Reddit, LinkedIn ads, I don't know where your traffic's coming from but trial all of them out and it doesn't let you save for a lot of stuff. You could be talking five clicks a day, you need to really push yourself up. You're not talking casino terms where you need to get 200,000 extra hits a month or whatever to move the needle there locally. I can almost guarantee 90% of your competition probably don't even know what Virality is. Again, just start a little bit and see if that's what moves the needle. Is that going to slot you in there rather than buying more links or tiering stuff up? It might just be that formula of traffic that pushes you up. I'm a big fan of always just turning things and spending what you need to spend on it to get it to where you need it to be rather than just piling in going, is it more links, is it not? I think traffic's always been a big part of that mix. I remember even speaking at Shanghai all them years ago talking about some of the hit leap and all that kind of stuff. People are only now in recent years talking about Virality or doing that. People were using all of the crap back in the day. CTR is certainly not a new thing, but people now realise the value of it the same way as I was doing the hit leap. Pandabot and crowdsearch.me was the first ones that I ever came across. That was like 13 years ago. The crowdsearch.me was shut down because the main 10 people that were using it were like, we don't want you selling this to the general public, it works too well. Imagine you know something works really well and it's been in it for so long on that.
Craig Campbell: People are talking about the best SEO strategies to rank a brand new website and they're watching it and they're going, James, Craig, I've done all that, what you've said. For now, obviously we've done it in very simplistic terms. I would be then saying that it's then a case of reverse engineering what others are doing, check and see what links they have, check and see what articles they have that you might not have, looking at the gaps in what your competitors do and just almost be rinsing and repeating the strategies of what we've just said. People sometimes try to overcomplicate it and I think they're the best SEO strategies to rank a new website. But what would you say, is it literally just a case of you're now missing 16 guest posts and maybe another digital PR campaign and 16 articles? Is it literally just a case of, I know the answer to it, but I'm asking you, is it literally just a case of doing that a little bit more than what the competition is doing and just keep edging forward, building up with article velocity and link velocity?
James Dooley: Yeah, fine-tuning it. The chances of you, like me and you would fight tooth and nail doing every little trick in the book to try and get one up on each other. Your competition are doing that with you as well. They're watching you. They might just have done it for two years before you and that might be the thing you're struggling to overcome. But you've got to then just keep trying and rinsing and repeating and fine-tuning, whether it be link building, whether it be the traffic, whether it be even optimising your content better or looking for the gaps that you don't have. Reverse engineer, the answer is there. What is that guy doing that you're not? And it might be a technical thing. It may be better internal linking structure. It might be something like that where you've fallen down on. And a lot of the times when I get people come to me and go, Craig, can you have a look at this website and tell me what you think? And I'm like, it's not done this, it's not done that. And they're like, oh. And I'm like, that's fucking really basic shit. You should have done that better. No one has ever came to me having done all of that stuff and been lagging behind if you haven't. So whether it be internal better internal linking or whatever it might be. So you just need to keep fine-tuning and refining it. And like I said to you before, see my mentality is see if you get 16 guest posts, I'm getting 17 and I'm going to fucking beat your ass one way or another. And if I can't, I'll try from that angle, that angle and I'll buy more niche edits and I'll power this up and I'll try that and try that and try that until I get to where I need to be. And you just need to have that same mentality if you want to get to the top. And that is what it is. You've got no God-given right to be number one for anything. People are also going to fight you back on it and they're going to do more of what is working for them. So you've got to be of that mind. You can't just go and take over any niche. The competition are going to be doing more than you as well.
Craig Campbell: So a question on the brand new websites, they're looking to rank a brand new website. We've told them now the best SEO strategies, but should they be choosing a branded domain, a partial match domain, a PMD? Should they be looking at an EMD? Like which ones or would you then be saying, do you know what I feel like you probably should be if you know it's a profitable service trying to do maybe one of each like a PMD and EMD and a brand?
James Dooley: Yeah, I don't think there's any right or any wrong. You know, I could see build a brand because it's a sellable asset. No one wants to buy Builders Glasgow, for example. It's a small shitty business that you want to try and build a corporate brand, a long term nationwide service or whatever. So you don't want to be doing that. But do exact match domain names work? Absolutely. Do exact match domain names get trust from a LLM perspective? Absolutely. So there's so many counter arguments there where I'd be saying, well, if we know exact match domains work and they're trusted by LLMs, why don't you have a brand and an exact match domain name to collect and double the data, you get double the traffic, double the leads, everything else. So again, I would be looking at it going, I'm fucking doing the two of them because I can't pick one over to another. If you say to me, hey, it's got to be one or the other, I'd be going. I mean, that could change. So exact match domains used to work really well back in the day where you literally threw a page of content up, then Google dialed down the importance of the power or the weight or whatever you want to call it on exact match domains to the point where it really didn't count for shit. And I think that's been dialed back up slightly. I'm not saying it's the be all and end all, but certainly from an LLM perspective and everything else, they seem to trust it more. Even with me, I've got a shitty website that's not even finished, CraigCampbell.co.uk. That flags up my knowledge panel over my website that I've had for years and years and years. It's a much higher DR because for me, it's an exact match domain name and it's my name. And Google have automatically trusted that as a source of information for me. So I think the proof's in the pudding with that one. So again, if you forced me to say one or the other, I would struggle to pick. I'd just say I'd have to. I would say them both. And I think EMDs work brilliant in Bing. So as it works brilliant in Bing, then it feeds chat GPT. So my question to you would be, if you had an EMD, is there anything you would do different to when you're starting out this new website? And would it be, I mean, for me, probably the only difference would be potentially slightly would be being even more aggressive on the branded anchors. That's the biggest difference. Everything else would almost be the same, apart from the branded anchors. I'd be going very, very aggressive on that and then siloing internal linking down to all the internal pages. I'd also add on top of that, probably just if you were doing any kind of CTR or whatever, the branded search and everything, that would be dialing that up as well. So yeah, I'd probably be hammering the fucking shit out of them on a bigger scale. But yeah, pretty much everything else. You know, you need to build out that about us and tie all the entities together and do the social media, social forces, as you call it, and link building and PR and all that shit. So yeah, I'd do the exact same thing. But probably, yeah.
Craig Campbell: So anyone who's watching this, hope you like the best SEO strategies to rank on a brand new website, but also an EMD website. Great. It's been an absolute pleasure. Cheers.