So you have decided to launch a website in 2020. Congratulations!

Of course, alongside excitement can also come a bit of uncertainty. What should you be doing to make sure that your launch is as smooth and successful as possible? In this guide, we want to talk through some of the details of launching a website, including how to set yourself up for success, and how you can start your online marketing strategy off on the right foot. Your website will become one of the most important assets to your business — often times, the very first thing a prospect will see when searching for your products and services.

1. Create Original Content

Launch Day for your website is an event to celebrate — and, in fact, a good “celebration” can actually bring attention and visitors. The goal of the launch day is to get as much traffic as possible, and as much viewer engagement and interaction as possible from day one. Specifically, you need your audience to quickly identify who you are, what you do and the value you can deliver. How the heck do I do this? Well, creating original content is a good start. On day one, when you launch your website, you should have a number of high value, informational, engaging, and relevant posts, guides and website copy that speaks directly to your target audience. Quite frankly, the world is heartless. You can talk all day about what you’ve accomplished or what you think you can accomplish, but if you aren’t leading with value, you’re going to fumble..

2. Get the Details Right

Regardless of how amazing your product, service, or content is, if guests to your site cannot navigate it, or find it unpleasant to use, you will lose traffic and business. A good quality and well thought out site is the difference between high bounce rates or high conversion rates. Let’s start with the the user experience: Are you re creating or creating? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Does it speak directly to your audience? Do you have clear conversion paths and Call to Actions? When a user lands on your website, do they immediately know what they should be doing? How quickly do pages load? Do you have any duplicate or extraneous content?

All this and more must be answered before you launch your site. Designing a website involves care, time, and attention to detail. Your site should be a reflection of your company, a visual representation of who you are.

3. Pay Attention to SEO

We see it all the time. A company launches a new website and loses all earned page and domain authority. Understanding even the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) can greatly improve your success on website launch day and is absolutely a key component to creating a successful site. Here are a few strategies to improve your SEO:

  • Keyword Research: You cannot stress the importance of this enough. Building out your website with Title Tags, Headings (H1, H2, H3), Alt Text, Meta Descriptions, Copy, etc.  Don’t know where to start? Tools like Ubersuggest, Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Correlate. Another good place – look at your competition. What are they ranking for? What are they allocating their spend for? The tricky part – finding a happy medium of highly competitive keywords and developing some longer tailed strings that can increase your brands exposure.
  • Content: Successful SEO relies heavily on consistent publishing of new and original content. This content helps your site remain relevant when crawled, and stay higher on search engine results pages.
  • Link Building: A well-curated series of backlinks is another essential component of successful SEO, and can be done relatively easily.
  • Multi-Device Friendly: With the ever-increasing number of people browsing on mobile devices, ensuring your website is mobile friendly is integral to a successful site launch.
  • 301, 302 and Link Structure. My gosh, the easiest, but the most overlooked piece of a website. When launching your new website, maintaining the link structure for like pages and creating redirects for removed or not yet created pages is sooo important. There is a very good chance your website is indexed on the web. Quite simply put, if you don’t implement this, you’re essentially starting over.

4. Create a Buzz

Once your site is prepped and ready to go, it is time to create some buzz around the launch. Tell people about it. Start by writing a press release for local media sources. This is a great way to share your business with potential customers locally and reach an audience who may not have had your brand on their radar. Not only does a press release help promote your site, but it can also function as a simplified mission statement for your audience to learn more about what your brand is all about.

Posting on social media is another excellent way to garner more attention for your launch. Social media allows your audience to engage more personally with your content and can help increase word of mouth sharing to help you gain more viewers. Have your team share, like and comment to their networks. Think about how many friends you have on your social networks. Think about how many friends they have. The impressions and traffic opportunity is endless.

Launch Day and Beyond

On launch day, as your customers, potential customers, and loyal fans flood to your website concentrate on replying to comments and engaging with your audience. People will likely have something to say about your newest achievement, and want to hear what you have to say back!

Create a dialogue, humanize your brand, just interact with those interested. It’s easy, yet effective. I know when I comment on a post, getting a response often leads to further interest or “snooping”

Interested in learning the specifics to good website design or ongoing marketing strategies to bring you to “Brand Number 1”? Sign up for our newsletter or reach out and we’ll be sure to take a peek at your current strategy and help identify some opportunities. Our expert team is eager to help!