A new website is an exciting venture that has the potential to strengthen your brand and add to your credibility. Businesses that have websites increase their chances of getting new clients and increasing their sales. However, what does it entail to launch a website? This article seeks to educate business owners on how to unveil a website successfully. Go through it to educate yourself and to get valuable tips that you can implement.
1. Determine Website Performance Metrics/Analytics:
Due to the high amount of data available, you can use various key performance indicators (KPI) to measure the success of your website. As a company, you need to narrow the performance metrics that you intend to use. However, use the goal of your company as guidance. Below are some of the performance metrics to watch out for.
- a) Acquisition Metrics – It evaluates how effective your marketing strategies are in driving people to your new website. It also analyzes who has visited your website and their point of origin.
- b) Engagement and behavior metrics – Engagement metrics track how effective the website is in converting a visitor into a paying customer. The website should offer an opportunity for consumers to interact with the business. It can be in the form of leaving a comment or reviewing a product.
- Bounce rate:
An individual can evaluate the bounce rate by calculating the average time spent on a page. A high bounce rate shows that the website does not have valuable information for a prospective customer. - Average session duration:
It helps to measure whether consumers are finding valuable content on your website without loosing ranking. When you evaluate the time spent on the page and the drop-off rate, an individual can calculate the average time spent on the website. The longer one stays on the web page, the higher the likelihood they are interested in the content. Other website performance metrics include conversion metrics, and user experience metrics.
- Bounce rate:
2. Have a Stranger Test Your Website:
Feedback is critical to you, especially if you are launching your first website. You need to know if the website looks attractive, and whether it is driving traffic since the bottom line of establishing a website is generating revenue.
Remember that what looks good to you may be boring to another person. Therefore, do not use a custom fit setting. A stranger can provide constructive feedback and project it fearlessly. There are high chances that you will receive genuine feedback from strangers rather than your friends or family members.
You can also consider using online tools such as the user brain. It allows you to see how consumers are interacting with your website. It also enables you to get real-time feedback from your consumers without loosing ranking. You can also ask for design reviews from sites such as Reddit Design Critiques. The portal has countless designers who can review your website and give you constructive feedback. Exposure Ninja is also a great site that can offer you insight into ways to generate traffic from social media sites and the most common search engine.
3. Record changes to Page URLs that will happen and create a redirect to new URLs:
If you are moving from one platform to another, you need to keep the URLs of pages in a particular structure that matches the original website. Doing this helps visitors to find new pages and retains the authority that flows to your page. You can also use other redirect options like creating a spreadsheet and writing the old URL together with the new one to keep track.
4. Transfer the SEO data:
If you do not want your site to go on without losing ranking, consider transferring search engine optimization data. If you use WordPress, its theme frameworks allow you to add data such as establishing a custom site title, keywords, meta tags, and descriptions. Some plugins will let you add the data to your pages and posts. Therefore, if you switch to the plugins or change a theme, chances are you will lose your data as well as search engine ranking.
You can use the SEO data transporter plugin to help you to transfer data. It will assist you to move your settings to any platform. It supports themes that include builder, genesis, frugal, and hybrid, among others. Also, it backs plugins that include Meta search engine optimization pack, Yoast, and ultimate, among others.
5. Launching the New Website:
After verifying that you have all the needed elements, you can go on to launch your website. It may seem so easy just clicking publish and waiting for the traffic to start rolling it. However, there are a few things you need to do to ensure its success. The first thing to do to get visitors to your page is promoting your website. The first two vital marketing channels include social media and email.
Keep tabs on the performance of your site so that you know the areas that need improvement. You can consider using analytics that is a free resource for establishing how the site and the individual pages are performing. The search method used can display the website on the first page when the results pop in. An effective search strategy will help to bring in more leads and traffic.
The search strategies you can implement include:
- a) On-page Search engine optimization – Consider implementing the keywords that you desire to rank in the website contents. Without losing ranking, your website will continue to be the best. Use keywords during the search like on the title, subtitle, and throughout the body of the page. Conduct a keyword research that helps you know the words trending that can get your website on top of google search results without losing ranking.
- b) Establish a pre-launch site – The advantage of implementing such a strategy is that you build hype around the upcoming site and generate interest in new subscribers. You can create a simple landing page with information on how you will launch your site. The searching method that is used can help you to advertise your website even when you are yet to start the business.
You have established that it is not easy to launch a website, you need to be extremely careful in your planning and purposeful in the strategies that you use. The best thing to do to ensure you are on the right track is to set out your expectations and write down a checklist that ensures that you tick whatever has been done. When you are ready, click the publish button and allow yourself to be found on Google and other search engine sites. The search engines used will determine the success of the site. While Google is the most common one that is utilized by customers the internet has others such as Bing, Yandex, Baidu, wiki.com among others.
