Whether you’re embarking on a website launch for the first time or have recently undergone a significant overhaul, putting your website live is the start of your journey toward establishing a solid online presence. Prioritizing critical tasks guarantees that your website operates seamlessly, reaches your intended audience, and delivers the desired outcomes.
In this insight, our expert performance team shares their top seven tips for maximizing your online presence and achieving your goals once you’re after a website launch. Whether launching a brand-new website or revamping an existing one, our actionable tips are designed to help you succeed and maximize your online presence.
You can get your website optimized for search engines.
What good is a website if you are still looking for it? Off the back of a website launch, you must ensure it is optimized for search engines. Why? Because this is how you can appear on the SERPs (Search engine results page). Following good SEO practices can be instrumental in helping Google discover your new website and index its pages for search results, allowing it to be ranked and displayed to relevant searchers.
On-page SEO includes optimizing content, which entails crafting a well-written page title and meta description and ensuring that your homepage paragraph text incorporates relevant keywords.
Optimizing for SEO will often help you:
- Improve your website’s organic search ranking.
- Increase your website’s visibility on SERPs.
- Enhance the relevance and quality of your website’s content
- Boost your website’s click-through rate (CTR) and impressions
- Generate more organic traffic to your website
- Reach a larger and more targeted audience
- Improve your website’s user experience (UX) and usability.
- Establish your brand as an authority in your industry or niche
- Build trust and credibility with your target audience and customers
If you’re not familiar with the technical side of SEO, getting some help from an SEO professional is a good idea. These experts can set up Google Search Console for you, which will give you more in-depth information about how your website is performing.
By looking at the data in Search Console, you’ll see which pages and search terms bring in the most traffic. This can help you figure out what type of content you should create more, which can lead to even more organic traffic!
Another cool thing about Search Console is that it can help you get your site crawled by Google faster. If you’re constantly updating your site with new content, using Search Console can be a quick and easy way to make sure Google knows about those changes.
You must submit a sitemap to Google if you have just launched a new website. A sitemap shows Google all the pages your website contains. When you submit a sitemap, Google gets notified about your site and can start crawling it to add it to their search results. Google requires a specific type of file called XML for this process to work. If you need help with how to do that, having an SEO professional who knows how to create and submit an XML sitemap can help your website’s long-term success.
Could you check for mobile responsiveness?
A mobile-responsive website is becoming increasingly important, with an average of 60% of all web traffic coming through mobile phones. Your site may look great on larger screens, but what if it needs to be mobile-friendly? After a website launch, you must ensure the website content adapts and adjusts its layout and design to provide optimal viewing and interaction across all devices. This is especially important for eCommerce websites.
Ensuring responsiveness will often help you:
- Improved user experience
- Faster load times
- Better SEO ranking
- Higher conversion rates
- A seamless user experience
An additional benefit to having a mobile responsive website is that it compliments SEO. Google considers mobile responsiveness as a factor in its search algorithm. A mobile-friendly website can boost your search engine rankings, increasing visibility and traffic.
Write new content & update it continually.
You can improve your website’s chances of ranking well on Google by posting content regularly.
Google considers fresh, valuable, and relevant content regularly added to your website as a factor to rank your website higher.
Following the initial website launch, there are several ways to introduce new content on your website, including dedicated service pages, lead magnets, and blog posts. Blogs and lead magnets offer the opportunity to dive deeper into topics than you would on standard website pages, allowing you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Publishing fresh content highlighting your first-hand experience and expertise on a subject is crucial for achieving high-quality ratings on Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) scale. Doing so can significantly boost your search engine ranking and improve your online presence.
Adding and updating content will often help you:
- Establish yourself as an expert in your industry
- Increase customer engagement and influence conversions
- Improve your SEO efforts
- Generate new leads (Lead magnets)
- Keep visitors engaged by delivering helpful, exciting, engaging content to your readers.
- You can build out an SEO strategy to help you bring up your ranking even more.
As you create new content, it’s essential to keep your existing content up-to-date to ensure it is fresh and appealing. Additionally, SEO techniques and website design trends are continuously evolving, making it vital to stay informed and adapt your content to meet the latest standards. Consistently updating your content keeps it relevant and ensures that it continues to resonate with your audience, helping improve your website’s overall performance.
Go Social
A social media presence lets you stay on top of your audience’s mind. Whether your website is new or has existed for some time, consistent promotion is essential to reach new audiences and drive traffic.
A few things to avoid on social media after a website launch. First and foremost, make sure to create social media channels for the sake of it. It would be best to consider your target audience and the platforms they will likely use. For example, a finance firm would likely succeed more on LinkedIn and Facebook than on TikTok.
Another critical point to remember is that consistency is vital regarding content. However, you should also avoid posting the same thing across all platforms. Instead, could you take the time to change and tweak your content to make sure it resonates with each specific audience?
Setting up social media channels will often help you:
- Amplify brand identity and image
- Build trust and foster loyalty in your brand.
- Engaging with potential and existing audiences.
- It makes it easier for visitors to contact you and engage with your brand (on their preferred methods of communication).
- You can direct visitors to your website for more information if you like.
- Increased exposure
A social media presence allows you to share your blog posts and other relevant content that your target audiences will find compelling. If others share your content, it will create links to your site, contributing to improved SEO. The more your content is liked and shared on social media, the more exposure you’ll have.
An additional bonus of having an active social media presence is social listening. This involves actively monitoring what your audience is saying, thinking about your brand, and asking for feedback to build trust and foster positive relationships. By listening and responding to your audience’s needs, you can create a more meaningful and authentic presence on social media.
Please take a look at your marketing options.
Social media can be a powerful tool for promoting your website and cultivating a long-term relationship with your audience. While organic promotion is undoubtedly effective, there are also additional marketing options you should consider advertising your website once it goes live. You can build stronger relationships and drive more traffic to your site by reaching out to more people through different marketing efforts.
From Paid Search to email marketing, the advertising options can be endless.
Marketing options will often help you:
- Increase brand awareness and recognition
- Attract new customers and retain existing ones
- Generate leads and sales
- Increase revenue and profits
- Differentiate your brand from competitors
- Reach a larger audience
- Rank at the top of search results (paid)
- Could you target a specific audience with your ads?
- You can target people based on their interests, demographics, and location.
- You can choose the option that makes the most sense for your business and budget.
- Build customer loyalty and advocacy
- Establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry or niche
- Gather customer insights
Monitor data
A website’s outward appearance is only sometimes indicative of its actual performance. Following a website launch, you need to incorporate analytics such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) into your website so you can analyze the flow of traffic to and through your website. Analytics connected to your website can provide valuable insights, such as who is coming to your pages, their search terms, and their behavior after arriving at the site. This information can facilitate informed decision-making toward enhancing the website’s overall user experience and performance.
Monitoring traffic will often help you:
- Could you look at areas of your website or app that are performing well or poorly and make informed decisions about optimizing your website for better performance?
- You can optimize your website or app for better user experience (UX) and conversion rates.
- Gain insights into how visitors are interacting with your website or app
- Understand audience demographics, behavior, and preferences.
- I’d like you to please measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and promotional activities.
- Monitor and improve the website or app load times and speed
- Identify and address security concerns or potential threats
- Track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as session duration, and conversion rate
A Google advertising specialist can set up Google Analytics 4 to track the performance of your website and aid you in making data-driven decisions to improve your website or app performance and achieve your business goals. If you wish to track specific actions on a website, such as clicks or form submissions, you should install Google Tag Manager (GTM).
Although analytics can provide valuable insights into user behavior, it needs to catch up by capturing their thoughts and opinions. It is recommended to gather and monitor user feedback actively to supplement analytics. This can be done internally through customer satisfaction reports and email surveys or externally through platforms like TripAdvisor and Google Business listings. By monitoring positive and negative feedback, you can steer your website in the right direction and make improvements that align with your user’s needs and preferences.
Testing and maintenance
Whether your website is just launched or recently redesigned, it embarks on a continuous improvement cycle, just like with any endeavor. With testing and maintenance, you can continuously improve your website to ensure you offer the best user experience.
Testing can include checking if a contact form is loading correctly, if page speeds negatively impact SEO, or if there are any missing images on the website. Other forms of testing include A/B Testing. From changing colors to altering the calls to action (CTAs) to updating images, virtually everything on your website and in your promotions can be tested, contributing to your website’s overall performance success.
Maintenance can ensure everything functions correctly, from checking for broken links to 404 errors and other issues that could negatively impact the user experience. Website functionality should constantly be tested, even long after a website launch. Reviewing website functionality is critical to the success of your website and can make or break a customer conversion.
Testing and maintenance often help you:
- It would be great if your website is more secure.
- Identify and fix issues and bugs which keep your website running smoothly.
- Experiment and find what works best for your target customer.
- Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reduce support and maintenance costs.
After a website launches, it requires continuous attention and upkeep to remain a valuable asset. By implementing these seven steps after the website launch, you can maximize the potential of your website’s online presence, improve its SEO rankings, and increase the chances of generating leads, conversions, sales, and revenue.
