So you’ve built a new website for your company. You put in a lot of time, money, and resources to develop your internet presence. It effectively represents your brand, it’s user-friendly, and it looks pretty dang good. Having a company website that can help you to achieve your goals is a great start to any inbound marketing strategy. However, the hard work doesn’t end there. You now have to get your website off the ground. You can’t just sit back and wait for results.
Just because you’ve built it doesn’t mean prospects and customers will flock to it. It doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly rank first on search engines. No matter how well designed it is. In order to help your new website have a positive impact on the web, here’s what you need to do after you’ve built it.
Optimize It for SEO
All of your site pages, your headlines, your content, your meta descriptions, and your tags need to be optimized for SEO. This is how you’re going to increase your organic rank on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! And the higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll get to your website.
Do some keyword research and find relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience will use when searching for products and services that are similar to yours. Don’t overstuff your content with these keywords, just add them in organically.
Keep Adding Fresh Content
You’ve written up your product descriptions, company information, and mission and values. That’s great content to start with, but it certainly won’t be enough. You have to attract prospects to your new website by constantly adding fresh new content. Write whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, and infographics. Make videos or put on a podcast. Start adding new blog entries. When you create content that your target audience will love, they’ll be drawn to your site—they’ll seek it out.
Plus, Google bots are crawling the internet every day looking for new content that signifies that your site is still alive—the more new stuff you give these crawlers to look at, the more they’ll boost your site on search engines.
Publicize It
Now it’s time to market your website—let people know you’ve built it! Add your link to your email signature, letterhead, business cards, and to all of your marketing materials. Announce the launch to your email list. Entice your social media followers to visit it. Reach out to others in your niche and compel them to share the news. Offer some free content, like access to a webinar or a free whitepaper download to get people through your website’s “doors”. This isn’t the time to be shy!
Advertise It
There’s no harm in a little online advertising either. Invest in your new website and take out a pay-per-click ad that will put your website link at the top of search results for specific keywords in order to increase your traffic.
Analyze Your Data
Every month after the launch of your new website, analyze your data. Web analytics are incredibly effective in helping you understand how well your website is doing. They can tell you how many visitors you’ve had, where they’re coming from, which pages they looked at, how long they were browsing, and much more. With this information, you can strengthen your website’s weaknesses and maximize its strengths. Just don’t obsess over analyzing your data to measure your success every day—it’ll drive you crazy.
Your Hard Work Will Pay Off
It will take time for your new website to rank high on search engines and gain traffic. But with some fresh content, search engine optimization, a little shameless publicity and advertising, and web analytics, you can effectively raise your online visibility and get a steady stream of website traffic. Stop waiting for results to occur out of nowhere—work hard on your new website and make them happen.