You’ve taken the time to set up the perfect website for your business, and it’s ready for launch! If you’ve never had to market a website before, you’re probably starting to wonder: “What’s the next step?”
Don’t worry—we’ve taken all the guesswork out of website promotion for you.
Follow these 10 steps to increase your traffic and get your site off the ground.
1. Gather Website Analytics
One of the first things you should do when your site goes live is set it up for Google Analytics tracking. Google Analytics tracks your customers’ behavior when they visit your website. It then provides you with important metrics like page visits, bounce rates, and high-value keywords.
Use this information to figure out which parts of your website are successful at generating conversions and which aren’t. Then, adjust your lower-performance pages based on what you’ve learned.
2. Work On Your SEO
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your new website is if no one can find it! That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important to address early on in your website’s life.
Improving your search engine rankings involves digging into topics like keyword research, content creation, and backlinking. Check out this post some beginner SEO tips. Unless you’re an SEO genius, you probably need help implementing an SEO startegy. But there are some nice beginner tools for onsite / technical SEO to make sure that your website is crawlable and can index well with search engines like Google. Using a plugin like Yoast can help.
Just remember that technical SEO is just the beginning. For your website to really capture valuable traffic and revenue from that traffic, it’s important to have a comprehensive strategy with the right content and back links.
3. Create Great Content
Content creation is an important part of any SEO strategy. Great content adds more “crawlable” pages to your site and helps to establish you as an authority in your industry.
The secret to making your content worthwhile is consistency. You won’t see many returns on a blog that’s only updated once every few months. Ideally, you should be putting out new content on a set schedule at least a few times per week. Once it’s published, make sure to promote it on various channels.
With that in mind, make sure you focus on types of content that you’ll put consistent effort into. If you can’t stomach the thought of writing dozens of detailed blog posts, why not start a podcast or video channel instead? As long as your content is informative, engaging, and valuable to your customers, it can come in whatever package you want.
4. Build a Social Media Presence
Organic social media promotion is a free way to reach a large audience, which gives it a massive potential ROI. Take some time to research different social platforms and decide which ones fit the best with your brand and content types, and focus your efforts there. For example, Instagram is great for beautiful product photos, but LinkedIn is better for long-form B2B content.
Use your social media pages as avenues to promote your content, products, and services. But don’t stop there—social media is a great way to interact directly with your customers. Make sure you reply to as many comments as possible and listen closely to the feedback you receive.
5. Explore Paid Advertising
Sometimes paid, targeted advertising can give your website the boost it needs to take off. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) platforms like Google AdWords or social media ads are a great place to start. But before you spend money on ads, make sure that it fits your budget and is worth the investment.
6. Build an Email List
Sending out regular email updates or newsletters to a subscriber list is a fantastic way for your brand to stay front-of-mind. To start building a list, set up a submission box or pop-up on your site that allows visitors to enter their email. Using your best content as lead magnets is another good way to increase your subscriber count.
If you do send out emails to a list, make sure that you include an unsubscribe option. It’s required by law in the United States—you can read up on the details here.
7. Gather Reviews and Testimonials
You put a lot of effort into giving every client a great experience, so make sure they spread the word!
Honest customer reviews and testimonials are one of the best ways to bring attention to your site. Be mindful not to bribe people for positive feedback, but include a call to action at the end of emails and customer service interactions.
8. Improve Your Site’s CTA
When visitors reach your website, do they have a clear idea of what they should do? Or do they click around aimlessly and leave before even visiting your important landing pages?
If the first case sounds familiar, it’s time to improve your website’s call to action (CTA). CTAs are prompts that tell visitors to take a specified action, such as buying a product or scheduling a demo. They should be clear, strong, and easily visible on each page.
9. Venture Into the Great Beyond
It’s easy to get caught up in making your website perfect, but don’t forget to venture beyond your own URL! Work on increasing your digital footprint by guest posting on authoritative blogs in your niche and answering questions on forums. This helps you become known as an industry expert and can direct more traffic back to your site.
10. Experiment and Make Changes
No one gets their website promotion strategy right on the very first try. As you go along, gather data on which tactics are the most successful and which ones are better left alone. A digital marketing strategy should be dynamic and responsive to customer feedback, industry trends, and the success of your content.
The Keys to Website Promotion
Promoting your website takes a lot of work, but following these tips will get you off to a great start.
If you’d rather not take on the task of website promotion all by yourself, contact the pros at Bear Fox Marketing. We’ll work with you to understand your business goals and craft custom marketing solutions to boost your revenue and ROI. Contact us today if you’re ready to start seeing your business grow!