You have to follow the steps to launch a website for your online business if you want to succeed without making many mistakes. If you are reading this, you are probably looking forward to the rewarding moment you finally launch your website.
Even though you don’t have a huge audience when starting, launching a website creates a similar feeling to an album launch for the artists. It feels good. The difference is that for a website, you have to follow a designed process.
It’s the standard process everyone has to follow no matter the uniqueness of their business. Now, we’ll explain these steps below so you don’t have to look elsewhere.
1. Determine Your Website Goals
We’re in the 21st century, and every business needs a website to achieve a competitive advantage in the highly digitalized business environment. That's true, but it is not a good enough reason to invest resources into launching a website for your online business. You need to have goals for launching a website.
Incorporating e-commerce into your online business qualifies as a primary goal for launching or upgrading your website. Also, bringing more clients into your business is another justifiable goal for launching a website.
Determining your website goals will influence several aspects of your website launch, including the website design. It also influences your research on competitors' websites and industry trends.
Remember, this research is vital because it will inform many website launch strategies. An example includes the best SEO strategies to implement or how you will promote your website.
2. Choose a domain and Web Hosting
Choosing a domain name is essential in launching a website for your online business. Your domain name is part of your brand identity. You can see why you cannot afford to make mistakes when selecting a unique domain name for your business website.
A website domain name is a unique, easy-to-remember address people use to access your website. It is an equivalent of a physical address or the entry point to your website.
Selecting an excellent domain name is vital to your online business's success. It is the first of the many SEO activities you will be performing to improve your website's competitiveness.
We will discuss more search engine optimization (SEO) for better search engine ranking. But here are a few tips for better SEO of your website domain name:
Choose an easy-to-spell domain name with no abbreviations
Sprinkle some relevant keywords that relate to your business
Use a common domain extension like '.com'
Choose a memorable domain name
Remember to register your unique domain name and host it – you can use popular domain registrars like domain.com, Wix, GoDaddy, or a more affordable option like NameCheap.
Make your web address easy to type
3. Create Pages and Content
Your next mission is to ensure your business website doesn't appear like a static homepage. It is time to buff it with relevant pages and content.
Your website should include pages that reflect various aspects of your business operations. You need these pages for a start:
Home page-
It's the first page people will see when they visit your website. Therefore, it should create an excellent first impression and inform your visitors about what your business does. Remember to include a catchy headline, readable fonts, eye-catching graphics and videos, and an enticing CTA.
About us page
It’s the section customers visit when they want to learn more about your business. This page can help you convert leads and improve relationships with customers.
The contact page
It’s an essential section for customers wanting to contact your business. You can also design this page so customers can fill out a form to share their contact information.
Landing page
Your website should also be an important tool in your mission to convert leads. A landing page should have a CTA that helps convert leads to paying customers. It should contain content that effectively persuades your website visitors to take action, such as subscribing to a newsletter.
Blog page
It’s an important page to drive customer engagement. Your blog page could be the reason you attract more leads to your website from the optimized content you post.
4. Ensure all Content is Optimized for Search Engines
The content you create on your website drives customer engagement and boosts your website's search engine visibility. Surprisingly, the quantity of your content matters but it’s the quality of your content that counts the most.
You should be able to develop content that makes your customers want to visit or stay on your site longer. It should also be persuasive enough to encourage customers to take action specified in the CTA.
Most importantly, you want your content to help your website rank high in the search engines. That is why the content you write should achieve your industry SEO standards.
That means before you write any of your website content, start by conducting keyword research. Identify the essential keywords for your industry-related content. For example, if you're a life coach, you must research the terms customers use to search for life-coaching services.
Moreover, be clever enough to understand that it is not the volume of keywords that helps your content rank. Rather, it is how you blend in just enough keywords in your headings and content body. Moreover, include authoritative links to your website content to improve the relevancy of your pages.
Your website SEO content is not limited to the content written. The images, videos, and infographics you include on your site also contribute to your search engine ranking.
Your visual content plays a significant role in increasing clicks and customer engagement with your site. However, they should also be optimized to contain the relevant keywords and prevent them from slowing our site.
5. Make Sure Your Site Architecture is Clear and Logical
A website's architecture influences its competitiveness. Conducting technical SEO helps you optimize for search engine crawlers and indexes.
Here is a checklist of the technical SEO you should consider when launching a new website.
Optimize your URL structure
Generate an XML sitemap
Improve your page load speed
Include Robots.txt –they help instruct search engines on pages to crawl
Include schema and structured data - provide search engines with the context of your pages and content
Get an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS – customers have more trust in sharing their information on secure sites
You also need to have a responsive design on your website. Responsive, in this case, also applies to the ability of your website to load effectively on a mobile phone device. It is the very least you can provide to show that your website has been developed for use in the current century.
Also, remember that you aren't developing a website for yourself. Therefore, ensure that your site can pass a usability test among various groups of people, including non-digital natives. A website that is easy to use and navigate creates a better customer experience.
6. Develop Consistent Branding
Have you ever walked into a cool place like a restaurant and never had the urgency to leave? That should be the feeling customers gets when they visit your website.
You can capture this feeling by making your website appealing to your visitors. However, that doesn't mean you overdo it with your website design.
There is a great appreciation for consistency in the colors, fonts, and graphics you use on your site. There is even a greater appreciation for white spaces on a website. It makes your website more appealing and easy to scroll through all your content.
Also, ensure the content on your website is fresh. Give visitors a reason to keep visiting your website and catch up on the latest blog.
7. Connect to a Web Analytics Tool and Monitor the Performance of Your Content
You put so much effort and time into developing and launching your business website. The least you can hope is to get maximum ROI on the project.
Don't worry; you have web analytic tools like Google Analytics to help you measure the ROI of your SEO efforts. The analytics will show which of your SEO strategies have been working and what can be improved to make your business website more competitive.
The analytics tool will also offer you information about your target customers. You can acquire the following vital information about your customers from analytic tools:
Your level of organic traffic
Amount of direct traffic to your website
The main traffic channels/ sources into your website
Content that generates the most traffic to your website
Level of user engagement with each of your content
The devices users use to access your website
Demographic characteristics of your website visitors
8. Promote Your Newly Launched Website
Launching a website is like opening a new brick-and-mortar shop. You must notify potential customers that you have opened a shop and the products and services they can find there.
Promoting your site can start earlier before you even publish your website. There is no harm in inviting your target customers to the grand website opening.
One place you can certainly create enough awareness about your new website is social media. Use your social media pages to share your new website link. Moreover, you can use targeted paid ads to reach more target customers.
Another creative way to create awareness and draw traffic to your website is by offering incentives. Hey, few will say no to ridiculous website launch discounts, special offers, and promo codes for your products and services.
Just ensure that they can only access such incentives once they visit your new website.
Launch Your Website with Royal Advisory Today
Launching a website for your online business can be overwhelming, particularly if you are a business owner. A lot of things could go wrong in the process and undermine the level of your website's competitiveness. On the other hand, there is the alternative of maximizing your ROI by hiring a website design and launch expert. We will work towards ensuring your website contributes to the success of your online business.
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