4 Critical Things to Do After Launching Your Website

Launching your website requires a ton of time and energy. Is it ok to sit back and relax after it’s live?

As website redesigns go, a good bit of that required time and energy goes toward writing, rewriting, and perfecting content. Then there’s image research, thinking through the user experience (UX), and developing the calls to action that you want your users to take. Launching your website takes thought and hard work.

But that part’s over now. You did it. Your site is live!

So now you can sit back and let it ride, right?

Absolutely not.

The worst mistake you could make right now is to do nothing. Don’t just sit back and let your website go stale. Your website is an investment. It’s an asset!

Right now, you need to maximize that investment. So here are four critical things to do after launching your website that will drive real business growth.

Step 1: Measure performance and effectiveness.

Launching your website was a success. Now it’s time to monitor performance.

Knowing how your website performs is central to understanding and appreciating the goals you accomplish because of the new site.

Site monitoring begins with choosing specific key performance indicators, or KPIs, and applying them to the metrics that define your goals. Setting up a comprehensive analytics tool, like Google Analytics, and embedding the tracking code will allow you monitor your users and their on-site behaviors.

Gauging the effectiveness of your website concerning functionality, i.e. content engagement and the overall user experience (UX), is critical to your long-term success.

Use KPIs to watch for and measure crawl issues that may pop up regularly over time as Google indexes and ranks your website. Some critical issues are “404 Page Not Found” errors, missing meta tags, and duplicate page content.

In all, the data you collect through this process will offer insight into whether and how your website audience is growing, plateauing, or declining.

On a final note, be sure to measure your data month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter for a more stabilized representation of effectiveness.

Step 2: Optimize for search findability.

As is true for most sites, the majority of your users will arrive at your site from a Google SERP, or search engine results page.

Increasing site traffic will ultimately affect, influence, and increase the success of your goals. However, to increase traffic, your initial goal must be to optimize your site such that, over time, you appear higher and higher in search results.

The goal of every website is to show up on page 1 of a SERP, between positions 1 and 5.

However, the steps it takes to get to page 1 are long and require research, focus, and time.

So begin with defining your search goals. Use keyword research tools, like Google’s Keyword Planner, to perform keyword research and identify specific words and phrases that speak to, define, and apply to your business.

In the research phase, it’s equally important to identify your top marketplace competitors and your top keyword competitors. With market competition and keyword competition, there is often significant overlap.

But not always. So be cautious of what you could be missing.

Overall, unique and high-level content has the greatest effect on search visibility. With your goals defined, you’ll need to build out a content strategy that includes creation, optimization, and promotion.

But we’ll dive deeper into that in Step 4.

Search engine optimization is never a one-off task or project. It involves many moving parts and requires that you pay close attention to Google’s regular algorithm tweaks. In the end, if you don’t adjust accordingly, algorithm changes will negatively affect your optimization, page rank, and overall domain authority.

While it’s true that SEO is an ongoing time and monetary investment, it’s crucial.

Step 3: “Think Local.”

Google My Business (GMB) is an effective way to drive local traffic to your website and your physical business. Redesigning and launching your website isn’t connected directly to your GMB listing, but they do operate hand in hand.

So how does it work?

First, you’ll want to claim and verify your business listing. You can do that by going here and typing in your business name. An optimized business listing on GMB can increase your chances of showing up in Google Maps, Google’s Local Pack, Local Finder, and organic rankings in general.

Simply put, it’s a good idea.

Here are a few key elements to enhance your GMB listing:

Business Photos

When your business listing includes quality photos, you’ll generally receive more click-through traffic to your website.

Business Open Hours

Let your users know when you’re open for business. Let them know exactly when they can expect to reach you online and in-house.

Business Phone Number

For some people, email is too disconnected. So include your phone number in your GMB listing. Users who want to talk to someone can connect with you from their mobile device with one click.

Customer Reviews

Having real customer reviews can make visitors feel more encouraged to engage with your business and website.

Step 4: Build out a solid content strategy.

Often when we talk about strategy, we’re answering this question: “why are we doing what we’re doing?”

Having a well-defined strategy for content is a must for most businesses and websites. The era of brochure-style websites is over.

Having content that provides unique, quality, and helpful information to potential customers in a strategic and thoughtful way forms the backbone of your content strategy.

When building out your content strategy, think through a few different elements. First, think about why you’re creating the content in the first place.

Are you trying to generate awareness? Generate leads?

Once you have your ‘why’ in place, think through your buyer persona and how you can best connect with your ideal customer.

Your buyer persona should inform all of your marketing efforts. It’ll help guide you down the path of which social media channels you should use and which content to produce and when. It’ll also help you decide if trying your hand at video, podcasts, or ebook writing is an effort worth your while.

Now take the next step.

Your site is live, so it’s time to develop a plan of action that will help you systematically work your way through these four steps.

Ultimately, growing your website presence into a real marketing asset takes consistent effort and loads of determination. There’s no single tactic to get you there. In our opinion, you need a holistic marketing strategy that combines everything from technical seo and email marketing to PPC and offline efforts.

At WE•DO, we use a methodology called Growth Marketing to develop straightforward and robust rapid marketing experimentation strategies for our clients.

If you need help strategizing to reach your business goals after launching your website, we can help.