The 3 most important things to do after you launch your site

Building and launching a great new website for your business can be hard, but marketing it after can be even harder! These are our 3 tips for businesses starting off marketing their new online presence.

Your first goal is to generate traffic. If you are expecting Google to do all the work for you, you are in for a surprise. There are lot of different activities one can to do increase traffic to your site, and it involves more than just getting to the top of a search engine. 

The best thing you can start doing right now is creating high-quality, relevant, content. Write articles that would be interesting and provide value to potentials customers in your industry. Keep in mind that the content you are creating is to provide value to site visitors, not just sell to them. Teach them, inform them, and look like an industry leader in your field. This will help them site visitors down the sales funnel.

The other great thing about generating content for your site, is you now have cannon-fodder for all your social media networks and other communication channels. By generating content for your site, all the other pieces start naturally falling into place (you will even start rising up the ranks in Google!).

 

Generating traffic is only half the battle. Now you need to convert those visitors to customers. This is where Google Analytics comes into play. Using this tool, you can see where your customers are coming from, where they are going, and where they are leaving your site. You can start to see patterns in the data. Are people coming to the homepage, but leaving right away? Why? Perhaps your homepage needs a clear call-to-action to help visitors walk down the sales funnel.  
 

An important metric to keep an eye on is your ‘bounce rate’. This is the rate of which people leave your new website when they arrive. The goal is to keep that bounce rate as low as possible. This is a rate that can always be improved through a series of tweaks and A/B tests. Which brings us to:

 

Your business website can always be better. Look for ways to optimize. Does changing the colour of a button encourage more clicks? Test it. Change the colour and watch your statistical data in Google Analytics. Is traffic that comes to your site using a mobile device leaving right away? Perhaps you need a responsive website because yours does not work on a small-screen device. 

“In a 2009 New York Times profile, Marissa Mayer—Google’s vice president of search products and user experience—recounts discovering that Google users were more likely to click on a toolbar that was a greener shade of the current blue. The team liked the existing color, so Mayer decided to split the difference and make the toolbar a hue exactly between the two colors. Unsettled by her gut decision she decided to test 41 gradations between the two blues to see which got the most clicks.”  Masterworks.com

Launching a new website can be an exciting time, but it just marks the beginning of the next chapter in the book of online marketing. It is not simply a game of “build it and they will come”. You must continually work to generate traffic, convert traffic into leads, and never stop tweaking and optimizing your website to make it an efficient lead-generating machine.