Web

So You Just Launched Your New Website, Now What?

Launching a new website is hard work.

From wireframe to implementation, website design is an all-encompassing investment that occupies a significant chunk of time and money to complete. We understand that it can be both exciting and relieving to launch that birdie from the nest. On the other hand, we also know how tempting it is to sit back and relax now because the hard part is over, right? 

Eh, not so much.  

Just because you build a wonderful new website does not guarantee that the traffic and leads will come. Post-launch is definitely not the time to sit back and relax. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Now is when the real work begins. Don’t think of your website as a static object but, rather, as a hub for continually useful and up-to-date information and your customers will respond. The following best practices will help to ensure that your website launch is a success:

• Social Media 
• SEO 
• Directories/Listing Up-to-Date 
• Testing to see if things are working using tools such as Google Analytics 

 

Social Media

Social media and content strategy attract more leads to your website. If you’re not on social media, stop what you’re doing and create an account now! This is one of the most straightforward ways to increase traffic to your website. If you want to succeed in digital marketing you can’t ignore social media. We recommend that B2B businesses at minimum have a presence on LinkedIn and B2C businesses be on Instagram or Facebook (ideally both). Sharing thoughtfully curated content on your social channels will help raise awareness and establish your authority for your brand.

But it’s not enough to haphazardly post images and links hoping these will automagically attract new traffic to your website. Your target audience expects useful, entertaining, and engaging content from you. This isn’t the time to wing it. Start by creating customer personas and planning content in advance that can then be scheduled to post over a set period of time. If you have a blog, be sure you’re publishing fresh, quality content at least once a week and sharing that content on your social channels. These activities will drive traffic from your social channels back to your website.

 

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your customers find you online. The whole point of having a website is so that your current and future customers can find you online, and ultimately do more business with your brand. Search engine optimization is a strategy that helps your audience find you online; however, SEO is a term that is often misunderstood and therefore ignored.

We urge you to not ignore SEO and do whatever it takes to ensure that your website is optimized properly. While aspects of SEO can be difficult to understand, the basics are necessary for your website to do its job well. Even the way your website is designed will impact your search engine results due to how search engine algorithms read and process the information on your website. All of the websites we design at Cross & Crown come to our clients fully optimized, but if you are unsure about your website’s optimization give us a call. We can conduct an audit to determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and recommend suggestions for improvement.

 

Directory Listings

Directory Listings must be current and consistent. It’s not uncommon to think about web searches leading people to your website, but what a lot of folks tend to forget is that other websites will also pop-up alongside your company’s site. There are multiple other digital properties that display information about your brand. Let’s conduct a little experiment, shall we? Open a new tab on your web browser, type your company name into the search bar, and see which results you come up with.

A web search on your company name will likely produce results from sources such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YellowPages, Wikipedia, and more. Your company’s information on every platform must be current and, ideally, optimized for search. The goal is to have all of these digital properties communicating a unified message and to give your audience more opportunities to connect with your brand. At a minimum, each of these listings should have current contact information and no broken links, or you run the risk of losing leads and new business. If you aren’t sure how to do this, we are happy to help!

 

Analytics

Analytics will reveal if what you’re doing is working. Tools such as Google Analytics are useful to determine if your website is performing the way you want it to. If you skip analytics, you’ll miss out on important feedback such as which of your website’s pages are the most popular and how much time a visitor actually spends on your site.

If analytics reveal that what you’re doing isn’t working you can always make changes, but without analytics, you won’t know whether that pretty new site is accomplishing its purpose.

Social media, SEO, online listings and analytics, oh my! We understand that this is a lot to digest. While you don’t need to be an expert to do these things well, hiring an expert will give you peace of mind and help ensure that your website launch is a success.

We believe that your awesome new website deserves to be seen and would love to help you get the traffic and leads your business deserves. Let us know how we can help take the next step to engage new audiences and increase your traffic so that the hard work you put into your new website actually pays off.