You’ve Got a New Website—Now What?
Once your website goes live, you can’t sit back and wait for all the traffic and sales to come in, or you’ll be waiting for a very long time. Your website is your retail home on the Internet—Your door is now open for business and you’ve got to get the word out.
The actions that you take after your site goes live are ongoing, because your site is dynamic. That’s the fantastic advantage of Internet commerce—You can easily update your products, services, galleries, and promotions to reflect how your business stays current with the times.
Once you roll out your new website, consistently monitor the results of your web design. Without doing so will lead to reduced website traffic, reduced search engine rankings, and reduced sales.
To get you started, we’re listing post website launch tasks into three categories: Setting Up Your Analytics, Website Promotion, and Post-Promotion Analytics.
Setting Up Your Analytics—Using analytical tools for the long-term
1. Create Sitemap and Robots Files—These files help Google and other search engines locate your website on the Internet, and they will improve your site’s ranking.
2. Install web analytics—To analyze your website traffic, install Google Analytics or alternative web analytics software. You’ll receive traffic statistics that reveal how many people are visiting your site, which pages they go to first, how long they stay on those pages, what sites are sending traffic to your website, and more.
3. Install Google Webmaster Tools—These tools display whether your SEO is on track and whether you need to attend to any fixes to improve Google’s indexing of your website. You’ll need to submit an XML Sitemap to Google to get things started.
4. Submit your site to Dmoz—Get your site listed on this huge, comprehensive website directory. It could help your rankings in Google and other search engines.
5. Set up Google Alerts—Google Alerts notifies you of every new web page that contains your favorite keyword phrases. Use this as a powerful tool to monitor your competition and what people are saying about your site. Also use Google Blog Search, Twitter search, Yahoo! Pipes, and RSS feeds to monitor website mentions.
6. Check out your site’s speed of loading— Slow download speed is akin to putting customers on hold for too long. Your site needs to download fast, otherwise, interested visitors will give up waiting to see your site and move on to your competitors. Also, slow download speed negatively impact Google website rankings.
Website Promotion—Getting the word out at the initial launch and for the life of your website
1. Tell your friends, family, and staff—Simply email them and ask them to check out your new site. Their feedback will catch any content, navigation, and functional errors that you didn’t see while you were building the site. They can also help to spread the word about your site through word-of-mouth.
2. Involve your customers and clients in your site launch—Invite your customers to take a look, tell them about new discounts, products, and services offered at your new website to entice them to visit. Ask them to spread the word to their friends on social media. Request product reviews on your site, and offer a discount, a gift certificate as a thank-you for their time and effort. Also, include an announcement about your new site in your email signature.
3. Spread the word offline—Ensure that your business cards, brochures, signs, and print ads now include your new website address. Include any web-only promotions and coupons in advertisements for your site.
4. Post a press release—Treat the launch of your new website like opening a new store location (because it is!). Create a press release that details your site’s new features and any “grand opening” promotions that you’re offering there. Send it to publishers that cover news of your industry to make them aware of how to access your company online. For extra mileage, share the press release though your social networks.
5. Go social—Set up social media business profiles on the popular social networks where your customers are most likely to roam. For instance, high-tech industries, you may wish to concentrate on posting in LinkedIn, and for restaurants, you may wish to concentrate your efforts on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to include business listings, like Yelp!, too. Start with your first social media post as your website launch and include your press release.
6. Ask your customers to post reviews—Reviews help your business rise in search engine rankings. Invite them to post on Yelp!, Facebook, Google+, and anywhere you created a business listing.
7. Add a blog to your website—Establish yourself as an authority and expert in your field. Search engines love fresh, unique content, so add new posts often (once a week) and do not copy and paste information from other blogs. Promote your blog through social network channels.
8. Update your website—Change up the content on a regular basis. Post news in your blog, update your product menu, add new photos, videos, and graphics. Delete outdated material. Google and all the big search engines love to send people to sites with new info.
Post-Promotion Analytics—Tweaking your new site for better results
1. Regularly check your website in all browsers and on all platforms—Sometimes, new content will appear and load well on a laptop and desktop, but not on a tablet or smartphone. If there are differences in load times and appearance on Chrome, Safari and Firefox, check to ensure that material is uploaded correctly and that you are keeping current with security updates for your website.
2. Establish and review your SEO strategy—Check the effectiveness of the methods you use for search engine optimization against your competitors. Keep tabs on your search engine rankings. The goal is to get your site listed on the first page of the search engine results when your keyword phrases are entered into the search field. The higher the ranking, the more traffic you can expect to your website.
3. Check your website statistics consistently—Discovering which pages are most popular on your site, and which ones are not, will help you determine which pages need new material. If pages for particular products or services are rarely visited you may wish to consider removing those pages altogether and substituting with fresher offerings.
If you don’t have the patience and time to get the ball rolling on these post-website launch activities, depend upon your one-stop shop for Fresno web design to give you a hand—Edit LLC.
Our partner services include on-page SEO, copywriting, social media setup, and more. We’ll set up analytic tools for you and instruct you to monitor your success. We’ll host your site 24/7 to ensure speedy loading times and security updates.
You can either send us the materials to upload to your site or we’ll provide you with a convenient dashboard to give you control of updating your site.
For Fresno web design support that doesn’t stop when your website goes live, contact Edit LLC.
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Date: 09.25.2016