Are you about to launch a new website for your business?
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for 20 years or 20 days, it’s 2019 and that means that your website is one of the two or three most important things for your company’s success.
If you think that you’re just going to be able to launch the site and watch the orders come in, you’re dead wrong.
Digital marketing is always changing and it’ll leave you in its dust. There are a few things you’re going to need to familiarise yourself with.
The most important is search engine optimisation (SEO). Optimising your website will let your potential customers know it’s there.
If you’re good at SEO, the site will flourish. If you’re not, it’ll fade into the background with all the other failed websites.
In this article, we’ll go over a new website SEO checklist to get you on your feet.
New Website SEO: Things to Remember
SEO isn’t difficult to master, but it takes a lot of diligence and hard work.
If you misfire, then you’ll have wasted a lot of time for not a lot of results.
It’s not exclusively about keywords, though they play a big part.
Analytics play a huge role in SEO, so we’ll go over what you need to know about them here.
Install Google Analytics
Make sure to have this installed before you launch the site.
Google Analytics is an incredible tool that will show you keyword rankings, but when you start digging in, it helps you with pretty much everything.
It’ll show you the amount of organic vs. non-organic traffic on your site, it’ll show you the search quality and the terms used in the search that got them to your page, and it’ll show you the pages on your site that load slowly, thus hurting the user experience.
The Need for Speed
Speaking of speed, it’s one of the critical things that will keep people on your website or drive them away. If your website takes too long to load, people are going to beat it.
Typically, websites are hindered by clutter.
Large image files and extra stuff that doesn’t need to be there can cause your website to take up to 25 seconds to load.
Measure that against the 3 seconds that people usually give a site to load before they leave.
Google has a great tool to analyse your site’s speed and provide advice on how to improve it.
Mobile
Mobile SEO is so important.
If you haven’t noticed, people are usually on their phones now, conducting searches, and watching cat videos.
If your site isn’t optimised for mobile, you won’t get hits.
Google ranks and indexes websites based on mobile users now, so having that in good shape is actually more important than your actual site.
Again, use a less is more approach for this since we know that people will leave if your site is slow or hard to navigate.
Now You Can Optimise
Now that you’ve got the design and analytical side of the website down, you can work on getting your landing pages properly optimised with slogans and keywords that match up with popular search terms.
The key is to be specific and descriptive.
If you run a clothing shop, make sure all of your landing pages are concise and informative.
Keyword tools will help you with finding the right ones to use.
Do All This Pre-Launch
Take care of all the new website SEO stuff before you launch.
It’s even a good idea to stockpile a lot of content to have ready to put out for a big push when you do launch.
You should be refining your SEO approach months before your website launches.
It can’t be understated how important proper SEO can be for your success, so do your research and get it in tip-top shape!
Check out our SEO services page and get the help you need to successfully launch your website.
