|
Listen : Audio version of this article
|
Probably the most commonly given advice to any business owner is “you should open a website.” While everyone talks about building a website, no one really passes on the advice on what to do immediately after the dust settles and you have a live website.
Whether you built your own site or hired a web development company, your website doesn’t start attracting traffic right after it’s launched. In fact, launching a website marks the starting point of an endless journey of tweaking and modifying your website and its content to better target your audience. This will include researching new keywords, finding social media platforms to get traffic, updating website design, creating new blogs, hiring SEO experts, and much more.
When it comes to online success, evolution is the only constant. With each new Google update, you would need to adopt new marketing strategies while discarding old ones. Before you get to all that, the following are 7 things you need to do immediately after you launch a website.
Perform a Website Usability Testing
There is a science behind how people navigate a website. Get it wrong and all the traffic you worked so hard to get is going to bounce, thus severely hurting your website rankings. Usability testing shows you how people are likely to react after they enter your site. Buttons they are likely to click, pages they are likely to visit, and other crucial information. The test also checks how smoothly the features on the site performs. In the end, you will get a detailed report including recommendations to change the design and content that would yield more results.
Add Content on a Regular Basis
One of the best ways to add new keywords to your website and get people interested is by creating blog posts. This includes finding relevant and trending topics people are searching for and creating detailed posts covering those topics. While it may sound simple on the surface, it takes a lot of work. You can either hire an independent writer with an SEO background to write and add new posts to your website by giving him or her backend access or get a digital marketing firm to take care of writing posts for you.
Hiring a Digital Marketing Company
No matter what your business goals, you need a digital marketing expert to guide you on your way to achieving them. Digital marketing is increasingly becoming more complicated and hiring a company to do all the legwork and draw out strategies definitely gives you a competitive advantage.
Setup Offline Notification
There are several apps that allow you to submit your site details and they send you a notification if your site is down. Your site can be down for several reasons but getting the vital notification on time is critical to solving the issue quickly.
Submit Your Website to Google Webmaster Tools
This is a great resource that’s provided by Google to empower website owners to see how they are ranked by the search engine. You need to submit your site’s URL and the XML site map to get started. It will show if your site is indexed in Google or not, keywords that your site is ranking for, and others. This is a great tool that deserves a dedicated post of its own. Start exploring the tool and you will find features and information that will help tweak your site.
Listed on Relevant Social Media Sites
Now, that your site is operational, you need to draw in the crowd from social media sites. You need to create business pages on all major social media platforms whilst focusing on a few that really drive the business. For example, if your end goal is to find business clients an account on LinkedIn is going to get you more results. Fashion sites seem to benefit from Facebook and Instagram posts. No matter what your niche, find a social media platform where your target audience loves to hang out. Once you do, start by creating a business profile on that social media platform and seek help from a digital marketing expert.
Habit of Checking Your Site’s Progress
You should pretty much start tracking your site’s traffic numbers from day one. Without the organic traffic data, you won’t be able to tell if your SEO tactics are working or not. Paid traffic data will help you track the progress of your PPC campaigns. Google Analytics is completely free and works better than most paid tools.