You’ve worked with your designer (hopefully it’s us). You are super excited and your new website is live. Now what? What do you do after your website is live?
The work doesn’t stop here, it actually begins here. So often in my 10 years of helping small businesses create a new website, I have found many businesses stop working on marketing their business through their website the moment that it REALLY counts. Below are my top ten recommendations once your new website is live. We’ll go deeper into each one in the coming days but this BRIEF summary should get you started.
1. SEO the Website Images
A great website is a super start. It’s now time to pay for or SEO your site yourself. One of the best places to start is with your website’s images. Here is a great article I have previously written that will help you with this. How to SEO a Picture for Your Website.
2. Add Some Internal and External Links
This post doesn’t go into the details as to why this is important (you can read more here. But let’s just say, you will help your SEO if you add at least one link to another section in your website (internal linking) and perhaps to an article outside your website (but not your competitor). Again this will help long term your Google ranking and is part of the core of good SEO.
3. Go Green on Yoast Readability
And speaking of SEO, one of the best ways to help your SEO the content of your new website is to install the free version and follow the guidelines for Yoast SEO. This is so important, I’ll dedicate a full blog to this in the coming days
4. Speed Up the Website
Believe it or not, how fast your website loads, plays a small factor in your ranking. There are a number of ways to help with speed, ranging from a faster host, smaller images, and even a few plugins that cache your site for you. We’ll discuss more this shortly, but you can check your website speed here using GTmetrix one of my favorites.
5. Submit Your Site to Google
Did your developer create you a site.xml? Are you listed using Google Search Console? There are a variety of different elements you need to perform to get your website ready to be found on Google. We’ll dedicate a future full blog to this.
6. Start Social Media
Do you have a social media plan? Does your social media that matches your brand on your new website? Do you have an idea of how you can tactfully use social media to help promote your website? With a good plan, this can be one of the best ways to gain traffic, attention, and perhaps even good leads.
7. Start Blogging
You have heard the phrase content is king. One of the easiest ways to increase content on your business website is to start a business blog. What is a blog? How often should I blog? How do I do that effectively? What is the frequency? We’ll address all these questions and more.
8. Submit to Other Search Engines
Google may rule the world, and you certainly want to start with them, but what about all the other search engines out there. Here’s a good article by Renee Groskreutz to get you started.
9. Tell the World
This may seem obvious but it deserves repeating. Post a sign, send out an email blast. List a press release. Mention it at the company meeting. Add it to your business card. Post it on your personal Facebook page. It is time to tell the world about your new website.
10. Consider Google Ads
If this is your first website for your business, and you have not had a web presence before, even if you do all of the above, it’s going to take some time to get found online. So what do you do? My suggestion is it make be time to start with some form of paid Google Adwords. Depending on your business, I like to start clients with $100-$500 the first month in phone only AdWords. With this you only advertise on mobile devices, they can only click to call, and you choose the hours to be available. Again I’ll show you some examples we do for clients you can follow.
So as you can see the work has really only begun once your website has gone live. Stay tuned we’ll dive deeper in all these topics. If you need help feel free to reach out to us. Taking a time bit of extra time will make all the difference in your new site.