You’ve finally decided to create your new website. That should mean that you get your desired amount of traffic, right? Well, it depends on how solid your website launch strategy is.
Many websites fail due to their debut being forgettable. This is especially true for small businesses that want to scale their operations through the help of a website. After all, you get a myriad of benefits just by building one, such as customer insights and brand recognition.
How exactly do you launch a website that gets everyone on board from the get-go? Here are 5 tips for launching your new website:
1. Quickly Get Your Website Indexed by Search Engines
You’re probably wondering why you need this since your website will get eventually indexed by search engines such as Google.
For those that are not yet familiar, indexing your website allows search engines like Google to retrieve information. This information is then used to show your website’s content on its search results. Google uses programming and bots called crawlers to “crawl” your website and add it to its index. This process can usually take a long time since there are billions of websites and new content to index every single day.
You can fast-track this process, however, with a simple yet nifty trick. And this is perfect for newly-made websites that want to get instant results.
To do this, you need to link your website to Google’s console and click ”URL Inspection” on the left sidebar. To index your website on Bing, just use Bing’s URL Submission tool in its suite of Webmaster Tools. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do that.
“What if I just wait for my site to get indexed, though?” Well, that’s certainly an option for you to take but it usually takes at least weeks to be indexed by crawlers. Directly indexing your website means that your content has a chance to be ranked in search engine results and drive traffic towards it. So, just do it. A few more clicks are certainly worth it.
2. Leverage Your Existing User Base
Even as a small business, you may already have a certain following for quite some time. This may be in the form of social media presence, an emailing list, or even through word of mouth. Let your followers know that you set up a website for your business. This way, you will get organic traffic without investing so much in paid marketing.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the bread and butter of growing small businesses. It’s a cost-effective way of attracting leads.
If you are looking for an instant audience that will most likely visit your website, then your email list is the way to go. Promote your website by announcing its debut and redirecting your audience towards it. You can highlight a free resource or a recent promotional campaign that you’re doing.
Make sure that you are using best practices in email marketing to avoid getting flagged as spam content.
Social Media
Well, this one is easy. You just have to tell your audience on social media to go visit your website. They will then visit your website and give it the traffic that it deserves.
However, defining who your audience is can be quite tricky. It’s not just the people who like and follow your page. They can also be your:
- Friends
- People you share a group with
- Someone with the same niche
- Previous customers
And many more. You can use social media’s various tools to reach them, building anticipation for your website. You can do this by posting content regularly on your social media accounts. Reach out to your target demographics as well in groups where you share the same industries and niches. Use relevant hashtags to maximize the reach of your posts to certain audiences.
Social media is one of the most effective ways to reach your audiences as a small business. This is because most of your audience is already using it every single day.
Furthermore, you can even use paid advertisements. Social media, when used properly, can generate a lot of leads for your website in just a single day.
Referrals
Not all website traffic can be generated from your audience alone.
If you know another business that also has a website, then you can ask them if they can set up a backlink for you.
Backlinks are essentially links that lead to your website that are from another website. This is called referral traffic which can be beneficial to you since the traffic generated stems from an audience that is already relevant to your niche. Furthermore, backlinks also increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rank and are a popular method for a lot of SEO marketers since it increases your website's authority and ranks you higher up in the search results.
3. Prepare and Optimize Your Website Content
Launching your website entails expectations from your leads that they will read or consume something useful from it.
This is the reason why it’s so important to make sure that you provide a steady stream of high-quality content for them. Your website’s content must be optimized for SEO to increase traffic through organic search.
You can achieve this by using the right keywords, adding meta descriptions and providing plenty of relevant content. View our blog on how to get more website traffic from Google which gives more insight on keywords and content.
4. Improve Your Page Speed Performance
Page speed refers to the amount of time it takes for a website page to display. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool to check your website's performance. If your website is taking too long to load, you risk viewers leaving your website due to the inability to find information quickly. Google also considers site speed in their search ranking algorithm.
One easy way to improve your page speed is to optimize and compress your images and files. The ideal file size is 200KB or less. Compressor.io is a free online tool that will compress images and PDF Compressor is a free online tool that will compress PDF files – all you have to do is upload your files then download the compressed versions.
Minifying the CSS, HTML and Javascript files will reduce unnecessary characters and spaces which loads the page faster. Webflow has the built-in ability to turn on minification.
5. Make Sure Everything’s in Place
The last step for a website launch is to make sure that everything flows smoothly and works correctly.
From your initial content, site speed, redirect links, to your website widgets, and other tools. You need to make sure that no hiccup will contribute to a bad user experience. Quality assurance for everything before launch should be done thoroughly.
Make sure that nothing looks awkward on your website since first impressions usually last forever. And don’t forget to test forms and workflows that have been implemented.
Build Your Website with WebRenew
That’s all for our website tips for small businesses. There is a lot of work to do to ensure that everything works as it should on your website.
This is the reason why WebRenew makes it a mission to improve the digital presence of many business owners through affordable yet high-quality website building services.
Turn your ideas into a reality and grow big in the digital space. Contact us to learn how!
