You Have A New Website, Now What?

Building a website has become more accessible to the average person with DIY sites like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. These sites are great for the person/business who is just starting and wants to put up a pretty brochure website that introduces there company, but what if you want more? What if you want your site to be a lead generation magnet? Have you already designed and developed a brand strategy for your new website and online presence? Are you 100% comfortable your website visitors can navigate your site and get to the areas you want them to in a timely fashion? Have you developed content that will help convert visitors to do what you want them to do on your new pretty website? Is there a business process you are currently doing that can move to your website? Are you willing to take the time on a regular basis to review the metrics on how well your site is performing and make the ongoing optimizations needed? Do you have the time to manage your website and not focus on your business?

Before building your website, and if you did not go through a proper discovery process to develop a strategy for your new website, then here are the steps you can take to make sure your site is doing more. 

If you have not already, take the time to develop the goals you want to get out of your website over the next 6 to 12 months. If you would like to get more sales leads, then take the time to do an SEO audit of your site. You can try one of the following tools which will give you a report (And they may try and sell you there services as well) to provide you with a head start on what you can do to optimize your website for search engines.

Moz: moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Google: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en

If you discover that you want your website to be a valuable resource to your clients and constituents, then here is an article that can help you to start the review process of how usable your website is. 

Accessibility

If you are a government website and need to make sure your website is accessible to visitors with disabilities, then you start with the following sites to check your status and plan how to optimize your site for accessibility. 

If you are interested in getting leads from your website, you do want to make sure the adjustments you made from your initial SEO audit are working and that you are consistently optimizing your site. This optimization at a minimum can take a minimum of 5 hours a month. Some tools you can use (Besides hiring EnlightWorks to help you out with this) are from companies like Moz, SEMrush and MarketGoo. These tools will give you a plan and instructions on how to optimize your site so you can be found easier on Search Engines. 

Also, very important is to sign up for Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster and Google Search Console. These tools will go beyond your CMS to give you more data on who and how people are visiting your website. 

If you are interested in converting visitors to do what you need them to do, then you want to sign up for a service that can track what users do when they go on your website. There are several tools out there that can help you track what users have and will do on your sites such as Heatmaps, A/B Testing and user analytics. Below are some free tools you can try and deploy that will give you continuous data about your website visitors. 

hotjar Basic: www.hotjar.com/pricing

Google Optimize: marketingplatform.google.com/about/optimize/

Omniconvert: www.omniconvert.com/pricing

On a side note, if you are writing content for your website, you can also make sure your content is grammatically accurate and optimized for your site by using a service like Grammarly if you are not already doing so. 

In summary, if you have built a new website, really take the time to figure out what you want out of it. Your site can be one of the most significant factors in helping you grow your business, making your staff more efficient and improving your relationship with your clients and constituents. 

​Photo by Le Buzz on Unsplash