My website is live, now what?

You’ve had a beautiful new website created and you want to know what the next steps are. I get asked this question on a regular basis. In this article, I’d like to offer you guidance on how to proceed. I assume you want to achieve a business goal with your website, such as generating leads and/or driving sales. That’s what I focus on in this article.

Using your website for marketing

Your website acts as a marketing tool. So it is not enough to just put your website live to achieve commercial success. Although the website is designed to inform and convert visitors, it takes more to actually attract visitors. This brings me to your first important task: generating traffic to your website.

After you’ve taken the first steps, it’s time to learn from your data and conversions. Based on these insights, you can further improve and expand your website and make adjustments as needed. This step is only effective when you have already collected actionable data and visitors are coming to your website.

Attracting visitors to your website

There are several methods for generating website visitors. While offline options, such as listing and displaying your URL are important, in this article I focus mainly on online options. Within this framework, we can distinguish between generating organic traffic and getting paid traffic. I will discuss this topic in more detail in this article.

Generating organic traffic for your website

Writing content for your website

An easy and accessible approach to actively engage with your website is to create engaging and informative content for your visitors. Do this regularly and Google will reward you with improved visibility. Although SEO, of which content development is an important part, is a complex area, it is better to start writing content than to abandon it altogether. At a later date, you can always consult an SEO specialist to optimize your content for even better visibility.

Google values original, homemade content that is actually useful to visitors. It does not require advanced knowledge, and writing from your own passion and expertise about your product, service and/or market will benefit your website. This not only affects your site’s visibility in search engines, but also the credibility you exude. Content can take different forms, such as blog articles or new case studies. Unleash your creativity and share your knowledge with the world.

Collecting Links

Another way to increase your online presence is to collect backlinks, or URL referrals from other websites to yours. To do this, you can approach your regular business partners and look for relevant websites yourself where you would like to be listed. I recommend choosing a Web site that has content in line with what your own Web site offers. It is also possible to approach major publishers within your industry for a possible collaboration. Perhaps you can write an article for their platform in exchange for a link to your website. Gathering links has two advantages: you can attract traffic to your website through these links and it strengthens the domain authority of your website, which leads to improved visibility in Google.

Social media visibility

In addition to improving your visibility in search engines, it can also pay to have a presence on social media channels. For business services, these may include LinkedIn and Twitter, while for the consumer market, channels such as Instagram and TikTok may be appropriate.

Before you start posting on social media, it is advisable to make a plan in the form of a content schedule. Determine some themes to which you can link your content. For example, for an online marketing agency, “Conversion Tuesday,” where you share a tip on increasing conversions every Tuesday. These themes ensure that you have an idea of what to post each week on set days. This helps you be consistent, which is key. In your social media posts, be sure to make references to your website whenever possible.

Purchasing paid traffic for your website

In addition to many ways to generate organic traffic to your website, you can also choose the paid route (or combine them). Unlike the above options, buying traffic through ads directly results in website traffic.

Google Ads and Bing Ads

Google and Bing both offer an option to promote your Web site in search results through a bidding system. The bidding system is set up on the more you bid, the higher you rank. Do you bid enough? The higher you rank the more you pay, but you also get more traffic because you are more visible. You can get started easily enough with this advertising option because you’re guided through a startup module of sorts. You can take courses to better understand the bidding system and get the most out of your budget. You can also ask an agency which is a certified Google Ads or Bing Ads specialist, such as Mad Pack to help you further.

Social media advertising

Similar to Google/Bing Ads, you can advertise on all social media platforms. From Facebook to Snapchat, Instagram and X. Each platform offers options to target your audience at low cost. To advertise through social media, you need to have a clear idea of the target audience you want to approach. After all, here you are not bidding on keywords but on visibility in a target group defined by you. The more companies you want to target, the more expensive the ads will be. It is easy to start advertising through social media platforms because they all have a simple onboarding process.

Convert visitors

After you start generating traffic to your Web site, you also want them to convert. A well-made Web site has thought about conversion points. By bringing traffic to your website, conversions will have to come from it. However, you can often optimize this further or possibly build in more conversion options. I provide some tips and tricks below.

Monitoring your website success

To monitor your success, you can use Google Analytics and HotJar. We typically install this for every website we deliver so our clients can monitor their website right away. Get into the habit of checking what your website is doing at least once a month. There are three key questions you should at least analyze with your data:

• Where are my most valuable (converting) visitors coming from?
• Do enough visitors convert?
• What are exit points before a conversion is reached?

These three questions will give you insight and direction. If you see that a lot of valuable visitors are coming from Google Ads, then it might be useful to increase budgets or further optimize campaigns. If you see that there are too few conversions, then you can figure out what needs to be done to increase conversions on your website.

Collect email addresses

Sometimes a conversion is too big a step for a customer. Then it’s often nice if you can convert visitors with a smaller step. A good example is a newsletter, but this could also be a white paper download or something similar. Be creative and use your website to collect more leads. Again, use your data to make wise choices.