7 Steps to Take after a Website Launch

Whether you’re embarking on a website launch for the first time or have recently undergone a major overhaul, putting your website live is only the start of your journey toward establishing a strong online presence.  It’s crucial to prioritize key tasks to guarantee your website operates seamlessly, reaches your intended audience, and delivers the desired outcomes.

In this insight, our expert performance team shares their top seven tips for maximizing your online presence and achieving your goals once your fter a website launch. Whether you’re launching a brand-new website or revamping an existing one, our actionable tips are designed to help you succeed and make the most of your online presence.

What good is a website if no one can find it? Off the back of a website launch, you need to make sure that it is optimized for search engines.  Why? Because this is how you can appear on the SERPs (Search engine results page). Following good SEO practices can be instrumental in helping Google discover your new website and index its pages for search results, allowing it to be ranked and displayed to relevant searchers.

On-page SEO includes optimizing content, which entails crafting a well-written page title and meta description, as well as ensuring that your homepage paragraph text incorporates relevant keywords.

Optimizing for SEO will often help you:

• Improve your website’s organic search ranking.
• Increase your website’s visibility on SERPs.
• Enhance the relevance and quality of your website’s content
• Boost your website’s click-through rate (CTR) and impressions
• Generate more organic traffic to your website
• Reach a larger and more targeted audience
• Improve your website’s user experience (UX) and usability.
• Establish your brand as an authority in your industry or niche
• Build trust and credibility with your target audience and customers

If you’re not very familiar with the technical side of SEO, it might be a good idea to get some help from an SEO professional. These experts can set up Google Search Console for you, which will give you more in-depth information about how your website is performing.

By looking at the data in Search Console, you’ll be able to see which pages and search terms are bringing in the most traffic. This can help you figure out what type of content you should be creating more of, which can lead to even more organic traffic!

One other cool thing about Search Console is that it can help you get your site crawled by Google faster. If you’re always updating your site with new content, using Search Console can be a quick and easy way to make sure Google knows about those changes.

If you have just launched a new website, you’ll need to submit a sitemap to Google. A sitemap shows Google all the pages your website contains. When you submit a sitemap, Google gets notified about your site and can start crawling it to add it to their search results. Google requires a specific type of file called XML for this process to work. If you’re not sure how to do that, having an SEO professional who knows how to create and submit an XML sitemap can really help your website’s long-term success.

Having a mobile-responsive website is becoming increasingly important, with an average of 60% of all web traffic coming through mobile phones. Your site may look great on larger screens, but what if it’s not mobile-friendly? After a website launch, you need to ensure that the website content adapts and adjusts its layout and design to provide optimal viewing and interaction across all devices. This is especially important for eCommerce websites.

Ensuring responsiveness will often help you:

• Improved user experience
• Faster load times
• Better SEO ranking
• Higher conversion rates
• A seamless user experience

An additional benefit to having a mobile responsive website is that it compliments SEO. Google considers mobile responsiveness as a factor in its search algorithm. Having a mobile-friendly website can boost your search engine rankings, leading to increased visibility and traffic.

Improve your website’s chances of ranking well on Google by posting content regularly.

Google considers fresh, valuable, and relevant content that is regularly added to your website as a factor to rank your website higher.

Following the initial website launch, there are several ways to introduce new content on your website, including dedicated service pages, lead magnets, and blog posts. Blogs and lead magnets offer the opportunity to dive deeper into topics than you would on standard website pages, allowing you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Publishing fresh content that highlights your first-hand experience and expertise on a subject is crucial for achieving high-quality ratings on Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) scale. Doing so can significantly boost your search engine ranking and improve your overall online presence.

Adding and updating content will often help you:

• Establish yourself as an expert in your industry
• Increase customer engagement and influence conversions
• Improve your SEO efforts
• Generate new leads (Lead magnets)
• Keep visitors engaged deliver helpful, interesting and engaging content to your readers.
• Build out an SEO strategy to help you bring up your ranking even more

As you create new content, it’s essential to keep your existing content up-to-date to avoid it becoming stale and unappealing. Additionally, SEO techniques and website design trends are continuously evolving, making it vital to stay informed and adapt your content to meet the latest standards. Consistently updating your content not only keeps it relevant but also ensures that it continues to resonate with your audience, helping to improve your website’s overall performance.

Stay on top of your audience’s mind with a social media presence. Regardless of whether your website is new or has been in existence for some time, consistent promotion is essential to reach new audiences and drive traffic to your site.

There are a few things to avoid on social media after a website lanuch. First and foremost, don’t create social media channels just for the sake of it. You should always consider your target audience and which platforms they are most likely to use. For example, a finance firm would likely find more success on LinkedIn and Facebook rather than TikTok.

Another important point to remember is that consistency is key when it comes to content. However, you should also avoid posting the exact same thing across all platforms. Instead, take the time to alter and tweak your content to ensure it resonates with each specific audience.

Setting up social media channels will often help you:

• Amplify brand identity and image
• Build trust and foster loyalty in your brand.
• Engaging with potential and existing audiences.
• Makes it easier for visitors to contact you and engage with your brand (on their preferred methods of communication).
• Direct visitors to your website for further information.
• Increased exposure

A social media presence presents the opportunity to share your blog posts and other relevant content that your target audiences will find compelling. If others share your content, it will create links back to your site, which also contributes to improved SEO. The more your content is liked and shared on social media, the more exposure you’ll have.

An additional bonus of having an active social media presence is social listening. This involves actively monitoring what your audience is saying and thinking about your brand, as well as asking for feedback to build trust and foster positive relationships. By listening and responding to your audience’s needs, you can create a more meaningful and authentic presence on social media.

Social media can be a powerful tool for promoting your website and cultivating a long-term relationship with your audience. While organic promotion is certainly effective, there are also additional marketing options you should consider advertising your website once it goes live. By reaching out to more people through different marketing efforts, you can build stronger relationships and drive more traffic to your site.

From Paid Search to email marketing, the advertising options can be endless.

Marketing options will often help you:

• Increase brand awareness and recognition
• Attract new customers and retain existing ones
• Generate leads and sales
• Increase revenue and profits
• Differentiate your brand from competitors
• Reach a larger audience
• Rank at the top of search results (paid)
• Target a specific audience with your ads.
• You can target people based on their interests, demographics, and even location.
• Choose the option that makes the most sense for your business and budget.
• Build customer loyalty and advocacy
• Establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry or niche
• Gather customer insights

A website’s outward appearance is not always indicative of its actual performance. Following a website launch, you need to incorporate analytics such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) into your website so you can analyze the flow of traffic to and through your website. Analytics connected to your website can be great at providing valuable insights such as who is coming to your pages, their search terms, and their behavior after arriving at the site. This information can facilitate informed decision-making toward enhancing the website’s overall user experience and performance.

Monitoring traffic will often help you:

• Diagnose areas of your website or app that are performing well or poorly and make informed decisions about how to optimize your website for better performance.
• Optimize your website or app for better user experience (UX) and conversion rates.
• Gain insights into how visitors are interacting with your website or app
• Understand audience demographics, behavior, and preferences.
• Measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and promotional activities
• Monitor and improve website or app load times and speed
• Identify and address security concerns or potential threats
• Track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as session duration, and conversion rate

A Google advertising specialist can set up Google Analytics 4 to track the performance of your website and aid you in making data-driven decisions to improve your website or app performance and achieve your business goals. If you wish to track specific actions on a website such as clicks or form submissions, you should install Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Although analytics can provide valuable insights into user behavior, it falls short in capturing their actual thoughts and opinions. To supplement analytics, it is recommended to actively gather and monitor user feedback. This can be done internally through customer satisfaction reports and email surveys, or externally through platforms like TripAdvisor and Google Business listings. By monitoring both positive and negative feedback, you can steer your website in the right direction and make improvements that align with your users’ needs and preferences.