Your Website’s Finished – Yeehaa! But What’s Next?

Getting a new website is an exciting time. We remember launching Spaghetti Agency back in 2015 and being super-excited to share our new baby with the world. We’d rebranded but we also built in new functionality and offerings too.

We wanted to share it, and we hoped for sales from it too!

You might be getting a new website because you needed one (it’s your first), or you needed revamp an old one. But there’s one thing you need for that site to be a true success, and that’s visitors.

Getting traffic (visitors) to your website is essential if you’re going to have any sales from it.

You might not be that concerned about traffic. Maybe you gain a lot of business from referrals and you’re ticking along nicely.

But wait! We’d urge you to read on because even if this is the case you might as well have a site that’s going to rank on Google and send you some enquiries to add to those word-of-mouth referrals.

Your Website’s Finished – Yeehaa! But What’s Next?

That’s what we’d like to share with you.

A few notes here:

• We’ll refer to Google throughout as it’s the most popular search engine. Others matter and for the most part most of this blog relates to all search engines.
• We’ll try not to use jargon.
• We’ve shared tips for new websites and ones that haven’t seen much love.
• We’re sharing all this from experience, and we’re happy to hear your experiences too.

If you have any questions, please do comment as we always read and reply to blog comments.

Right… let’s go.

Before we start, it’s a funny old techy world this website development one so we felt it would be useful to have a jargon buster (which we’ll update as new things arrive). There are clearly tonnes of things we could include, but this is merely aimed at those who are new to websites and the phrases thrown around when you have one.

Here are some common ones

Alt tags – Added to the image data to help search engines and visually impaired people ‘read’ images

Analytics – Data that shows you how people interact with your site

Bounce rate – The percentage of people who visit just one page of your site and leave

Direct traffic – People who find your website via the exact URL (not from search)

Embed – Embedding code from sites like YouTube adds media content to your site

External links – Links to content on your site to other websites on the internet

Footer – The bottom of your website (usually references the website code rather than the design)

Header – The top of your website (usually references the website code rather than the design)

iFrame – Custom code from sites like YouTube to allow forms and media players on your page

Internal links – Links to your own other website pages such as services or blogs

Indexed – Google uses an ‘index’ to rank pages. Getting your site ‘indexed’ is a good thing

Meta data – A description of your website page or post seen in search engines

Meta tags – Tags like Heading 1, 2, or 3 or alt tags (above) that are seen by search engines

Ranking – Ranking from 1 – 100 and more on the Google search results pages, 1 being top

Referral traffic – Traffic sent to your website from other websites

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Helps your website get seen and indexed by Google

Speed – The speed it takes to load a page on your website. This is closely linked to ranking

Traffic – People/visitors to your site including number of visits and more

404 error – A link to a page that doesn’t exist

301 redirect – A link to a page that is redirected to a new page

502 error – A bigger issue with your website, often linked to a server fault

We’ll add to this list so please feel free to ask about others in the comments.

Ranking on Google isn’t an accident

If you’re trying to get seen on the Google search results, then you’ll soon find out that it’s not an accident when you do.

(Well… actually that’s not quite true. Sometimes you’ll rank for search terms and phrases when you didn’t mean to, but there’s a logical system at play that puts you there.)

But it’s better to be purposeful with all this SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) stuff.

Working out what your ideal prospect/customers/clients are searching for really helps you build and create great content; great content they will find.

Setting out a good plan from the start and creating content (pages/blogs) that follow that plan is what we’re all about.

For example: if you want to rank on Google for ‘Fluffy Pink Bananas’ then make sure you have a page about them on your website, and then go into detail if you can. By the way, we do rank highly for that term and if you’d like a lighthearted look into SEO (and see why we do) then check out our blog “I’m top of Google for a search term on one searches for”.

Key jobs to do to help your website now to rank on Google later

There are some basic jobs to get done now that you’ve got your new website live. We’ve shared them here with links to tools and blogs or further information where needed and added some brief explanations for you.

As always, if you need more clarification or ideas then please do get in touch.

Technical jobs:

• Google Analytics – This is a free tool from Google that allows you to see all the visitor actions on your website. You’ll be able to see where they come from and which pages they visit the most, and it gives you the ability to track your marketing success by checking where your visitors are coming from (direct, referral, social media etc). We’ve shared the top Google Analytics reports most people need to see here. You can set up Google Analytics here.

• Google Search Console – Google Search Console is the less famous partner to Google Analytics, but it’s just as important. Google Search Console helps you to index your website with Google, check your traffic and what they actually searched in Google, and also see if you have any major issues with your website in SEO terms. One really important job to do first is submit your site index to Google. You can get Google Search Console for free, here.

• Google My Business – Google My Business is your free Google business listing. It helps you appear on Google Maps and drives a tonne of business (traffic) to you if you’re a local business who serves customers at your location. Even if you’re not a restaurant or bar it’s still a good SEO tick, so get a business listing set up ASAP. Set up a Google My Business Listing.

• Set up business listings – And once you’ve added your Google My Business listing, make sure you add some of the big, recognised local listings, too. This is really great for local SEO (and something we offer as a service if you need help finding all your current listings, updating them, and creating more). Set up a listing with your local Chamber of Commerce, network profiles, and the obvious ones you know of and then head to Cylex, FourSquare, Yelp, and many of the other recognised local listings. You can find a great list of them here.

• Keyword research – This could be a job you outsource but getting to grips with what and how people search in Google for the thing you do or sell will really help you when it comes to content creation. We found out that people search for marketing agency, not marketing services for example (our ideal clients, anyway!). Getting to grips with words and phrases people put into Google to find you – and then applying them to your website copy in pages and blogs – works. It works very well indeed!

• Check your page titles and descriptions – Oh, and when you’ve done the keyword research, make sure you’ve checked your meta titles and descriptions to see if you’ve used the terms and phrases your ideal clients use. This should match so they see in you in the Google results and then click on you as you speak their language!

• Update your social media links – This is an obvious one, but well worth listing here. If you’ve added a website to your business or changed the brand (and therefore the URL) then head to your social media and update your about sections and website links. That also goes for any old profiles you have on Pinterest or blogging platforms.

• Build an email list – Growing an email list is important. As good as Google are now, and as wonderful as having a good Facebook and LinkedIn following is, one day they won’t be here. Grow a list by creating lead magnets (there are some ideas here), or by adding a simple opt-in for more information or to hear from you in your monthly email (please don’t call it a newsletter, here’s why!). Building a list enables you to engage with your visitors to your site and social media on email; a much wider used medium!

• Update your marketing collateral – If you have business cards, leaflets, signage, vehicle graphics, or anything that’s visual in the offline world then now’s the time to update them with your shiny new website URL.

Ongoing marketing jobs:

• Get some digital PR – Press Releases are a great way to shout about your website or business and as an added bonus you’ll usually get a link from the online PR article to your new website. This can be really helpful for your SEO.

• Look for linking opportunities – Look to write content or get listed on relevant websites and then get a link back to your website for a simple way to gain a backlink.

• Create ‘noise’ about your website – Consider other ways to tell people about your website. Adding hidden codes or prizes or funny images or content can be a really simple and fun way to drive people to your site. We added a member of our Facebook community to the backdrop of the testimonials section once and told them we’d added this person ‘somewhere on the website’. It took people days to find him (and we gained a tonne of clicks!).

Marketing jobs:

• Go networking – Get out there with fresh business cards, a roller banner, and those all-important networking follow-ups and send more people to your website. You could even create the follow-up on your website with a video message or maybe share a blog post (more on the below) that follows on from your chat around the coffee table.

• Exhibit at an event – We love a good business exhibition and it’s another way to drive interest and conversations that you could then send to your website when you follow-up. You could also create a game on your stand that’s incorporated on a part of your website, driving all the stand visitors to your site!

Creating content to help your SEO

Blogging. This is probably the biggest thing you can do when a new website goes live, so we’ve given it its own section!

Blogging (adding blogs, useful news, or updates to your website) is a simple and highly effective way to continually add keyword-rich content to your website. Google likes it, Googlers search for it, and your website ranking will improve because of it.

We’re VERY passionate about creating content for websites and blogs and we’ve shared a load of tips over the years.

We’ve shared the important updates below, but the biggest takeaway is this:

“When you need a problem solved, you head to Google, and the answers you find are mostly blog posts. Blogs help Google to help people, so Google boosts your SEO/rank over time the more you help to encourage you to help it help more and continue to be the top search engine in the world!”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy: Blog to help people Google wants to help and Google helps you by sending you more of them.

Blog! It’s essential for your website’s SEO.

Here’s some further reading for you new website parents:

• How A Blog Benefits Your Small Business
• How to Create a Blog That Improves Your SEO: A Step-by-step Guide
• A Really Simple Way to Improve Your Website’s SEO with Blogging

Sharing your website to drive more traffic

And then, once you have all the foundations sorted and you have a way to grow your list and some cool blog content – get sharing it!

Getting people to your site isn’t an accident and it’s not easy. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. You’ll need all the boxes ticked and then a process to keep on creating content each month so that you have something to share and offer.

Sure, your main pages on your website will remain mostly untouched and intact, but the rest of the action is very much in your hands. Blogging is a key one, but so is communicating with your email list and social media and also sending people to your website from networking, exhibitions and other places you meet people.

The more people you can get to visit your site, the more interested Google will be, and the more people it will send to you over time.

We appreciate this is a long list and we should also say that this isn’t it; it’s the starting point list! It is worth the effort though.

A website that sends you visitors every single day will eventually send you leads and those will convert to sales and then… one day… the website will start to pay for itself over and over again!

Need more help?

That’s what we do. We do all of the above and more.

If you’d like help getting your website found online and would love to benefit from our wealth of experience from clients and our own relaunch and rebrand, then give us a holler now.

Do You Struggle to Create Content to Generate Sales?

We’ve Created a FREE Online Marketing Plan…

Use our simple ideas generator to help you make better content, over and over again…

Learn More

Tags associated with this article