5 Things To Do After Launching Your Website
You did it!! You’ve designed your website, you’ve got all the copy optimized so it’s searchable, relevant, and helpful to visitors, and you’ve maybe even shared a link here and there, but now you’re ready to start seeing those visitor numbers soar.
After launching your website, the work doesn’t stop. Marketing your site and making sure you’re showing up in all the right places is the next step to ensuring all your hard work doesn’t go to waste. Signing up for Google Search Console, tracking visitor activity, and creating an ongoing plan for reach are some of the best ways to optimize the growth of your site.
There are some other helpful things you can do after you launch and here we will be sharing 5 of our best tips so that your website gets seen by the right people at the right time. Keep on reading to find out how you can harness the power of search engines and hard work to get your website out there.
Tip #1: Get Visible
We know that numbers aren’t always the most fun part of running a business, but how will you know how well you’re doing if you don’t have any statistics to look at? Well, this is where Google Search Console and Google Analytics come in. It's crucial to be able to track how many visitors you’re getting, but it’s also important to be able to see exactly where they’re coming from, what they’re doing on your site, and how long they’re staying on each page (among other things).
Google Search Console
This is a great tool to use that will help you identify any issues with your website. It ‘crawls’ your site and will pick up errors in your page addresses, slow load times, and many other issues that are causing a below-par experience for potential users.
It is used to help you optimize search potential by eliminating errors and providing suggestions for improvements. In essence, Google Search Console will tell you how well your website is performing in search engines, which is crucial to enable you to be seen by more people.
Google Analytics
This is a brilliant tool to help you monitor the activity on your website. It will give you an overview of daily (or weekly, monthly, custom) visitors to your site and each individual page, as well as showing where they came from, how long they spent on your site, your bounce rate (how many people came on and left only having viewed one page) and much, much more.
At its most basic level, it’s a great piece of software for you to get an idea of whether or not your traffic is going up or down. Once your site has been live for a few months and you can spend some time digging into the data available, you’ll gain some priceless insight that will help you hone your marketing efforts.
Tip #2: Track Visitor Journeys
Being able to see how your visitors are actually interacting with your website is really helpful so that you can make adjustments and updates to better suit the natural path that most people take.
A mistake that some websites make is creating a customer journey that has too many steps to find out the information people are looking for. If you’ve gone to a website to find the answer to something specific or inquire about a service, you don’t want to have to click through 5 different pages of information (information that might be interesting and helpful, but isn’t the direct query) to get to what you want. Unfortunately, visitors will simply click off and go to a different website that presents the information more clearly.
Apps like HotJar or Mouseflow are great for helping you discover which parts of your site visitors are exploring and also highlighting areas they may be getting stuck and clicking off. These are helpful as you can view heatmaps and even watch session replays for visits, helping to give you a very clear idea of how your users are interacting.
Tip #3: Spread The Word
Okay, this can sometimes be daunting. You’ve put all this work in and now you have to actually tell people about your site - talk about being vulnerable! However, the best way to start spreading the word is to do just that - tell people!
Share With Family and Friends
Share it on your social media channels, talk about it with your friends and family letting them know you’re open for business and, critically, share with your professional network too.
LinkedIn is a great place to do this and showcase your new website. Even if you’ve been in business for a while without a website, it’s a great opportunity to create some buzz and get people interested in what you’re doing.
Update Your Social Links/Directories
Wherever you can, it’s a great idea to add your link so that people who come to your profile (whether on Facebook, LinkedIn, or even Instagram) can easily click through to your website. The more links that exist the more likely you are to see your visitor numbers grow.
It might feel uncomfortable at first but word-of-mouth truly is one of the greatest marketing tools you have, so shout it loud and proud.
Tip #4: Create a ‘Google My Business’ Listing
This is particularly important if you are a therapist who offers in-person sessions. Creating a Google business listing means that you’re more likely to come up when someone searches the relevant terms, especially if you include your location in the listing.
When you do this and someone searches “Therapists in my area” (with location turned on) guess who’ll pop up? You!
This increases the chances you’ll get discovered, can get you more website traffic, and will increase visitor trust.
Remember, to close those sales and get those clients it’s all about the know, like, and TRUST factor. If a visitor can see you’re local to them and recognizes the phone number, for example, they’re likely to trust and therefore contact, you.
Tip #5: Create a Plan For Ongoing Maintenance and Reach
Any website requires a certain level of maintenance to keep it running and up to date. Usually, for a small website, it’s not much work, but it is worth noting down things such as:
The date your domain renewal is upcoming
The date your SSL certificate is upcoming (this is what keeps your website secure, if you use Squarespace, they will update this for you automatically)
A reminder to update the year on your website footer
A reminder to update the year in your privacy policy/legal terms and conditions
It’s also good practice to go through and check that your links are working every few months. You might forget that you changed a page name or moved a form, so make it a habit of clicking through, filling out your form, and making sure it’s all working as it should. This is all the admin stuff that is easy to forget but will help you feel much more in control if noted down.
Next, if you plan to create a blog, it’s helpful to come up with a realistic blogging plan. Search engines love consistency, so create a blogging schedule that you can commit to consistently. Ideally, one blog post a week is great, but if you can only commit to one a month, that’s fine. Do your best to stick to it and get the posts out on your planned dates.
If you want some support in creating graphics to market your practice, consider Connected Clinician. A quarterly or annual membership filled with templates, workshops, and tutorials to support clinicians in marketing their practice easily, stress-free, and on their terms.
Final Thoughts
This is a really exciting time for your business - you’ve got your shiny new website and you’re ready for potential clients to come. Getting everything set up to monitor how it’s going is easy and will help you make improvements over time. Share your site with as many people as you can - the more visitors you get the higher the search ranking you’ll get, so shout it out loud and proud and watch as those numbers start going up.
