You already have yielded a great deal of effort to create a website. What’s next?
Are your prospects aware of its existence?
Basically, it is not about how attractive your website is. It is all about the actions you are taking to bring it in front of the target audiences.
There are a lot of things to do after launching a website to get the desired results. Website or other web content including social media pages are futile if they are not boosting conversion numbers. After all, you need copious traffic for your site to achieve the goals of your business.
Let’s explore the steps you need to follow after building a website.
Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is an assortment of free tools offered by Google to all webmasters. Through this tool, you can understand how Google sees your website. Again, GSC guides every web owner, site administrator, SEO expert or web developer to troubleshoot and improve their sites’ performance on search engines.
Here is how Google Search Console helps in improving the performance of your site:
- Track whether the search engine can find and crawl all pages of the site
- Evaluate top-performing and underperforming keywords
- Analyze search engine traffic
- Determine site performance based on the number of impressions, clicks and CTR
- Identify the number of inbound links your site has managed to attract
- Notify indexing issues through the warning and error reports
- Ensure proper crawling and indexing of your web pages by submitting and updating XML sitemap
- Helps in fixing mobile usability and AMP issues
This tool provides you a complete overview of your organic search results.
It also helps you to improve your site appearance on search engines using structured data.
With structured data, the search result of your site will look like this. It includes details of the recipes like preparation time, calorie information and ratings. This type of result entices the audience more to click on the webpage.
Create and Submit XML Sitemap
An xml sitemap is the complete list of your website URLs. It is a roadmap for search engine spiders to assist them in finding and crawling all the pages of the website.
The sitemap provides the following information to the web crawlers
- Location of the page
- Last modified date of the page
- Update frequency
- Relevance and importance of the page
- How to find and index such a page
Using sitemap assures search engine bots about the original content of an authentic site.
Creating an xml sitemap is quite easy. Go to XML-Sitemaps.com. It is a free sitemap generator tool available online. All you need to do is put your website URL and click on start. It will generate your sitemap within a minute.
However, if you have a WordPress website, then creating a sitemap becomes more convenient.
There you will find several plugins such as Yoast SEO or Google XML Sitemap to generate a well-structured sitemap for your site.
Once you have generated the xml sitemap, you need to submit it to Google Search Console to allow Google to crawl and index your site seamlessly.
Create Robots.txt File
Robots.txt is another crucial file that influences your web page indexing. It instructs search engine crawlers about how to crawl and index web pages.
The basic robots.txt file includes
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The asterisk after the “User-agent” directive implies the webmaster allows all search engine bots to crawl webpages. Again, the “Disallow” directive indicates that the webmaster is not hiding any page from search engine bots. In other words, these directives denote all search engine bots are allowed to visit all pages of the site.
However, here is a catch.
You may have numerous pages on your site. If Googlebot crawls every page of your site, it will take considerable time. It will provide an adverse effect on your site.
Googlebot sets a crawl budget depending on the number of URLs Google can and wants to crawl.
Hence, you should allow only the most valuable pages of your site for crawling to rationalize the crawl budget. Thus, you need to disallow your duplicate and private pages from crawling and indexing.
Research Keywords for Your Website
Keywords are the search terms that searchers enter into the search engine to find your site.
Whenever you enter a search term on the browser, you may have noticed the search engine shows the number of results against that search query.
It is called keyword competition. Thus, you need to conduct keyword research to beat this competition and take your content in front of your target audience.
There are free as well as paid options for keyword research tools. Google Keyword Planner is a free option for researching keyword. Optimizing website content with proper keywords can bring your desired traffic and enhances the chances of conversion.
Besides showing keyword ideas, this tool provides you insights about competition and average monthly searches for those keywords.
Say, you sell t-shirts. If you go for the keyword t-shirt for men, you may get 100K to 1M monthly search traffic. However, the competition will be high.
Conversely, if you pick blue cotton t-shirt for men, you will find 1K to 10K searches, but the competition will comparatively low.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO proves to be efficacious when we talk about organic traffic. It does not only improve web content ranking but also helps in creating dominance.
Let’s throw some light on how SEO improves the organic traffic on a website.
SEO can be performed in two ways – on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO is the optimization of internal elements of the website. This optimization is much required to make web content SEO friendly. Here are the elements of on-page SEO.
High-Quality Content
Content is the heart of any website and simultaneously the prime element of on-site SEO. While creating content for website, you need to focus on optimizing it with relevant keywords.
Create informative and valuable content for your blogs as well as for web pages to promote awareness and influence the buyers.
To know more about how to create SEO-friendly content, follow our guide on Tips to Create an Awesome Content.
Page Title
The title of a webpage helps both search engines and visitors to understand the content of that page.
- Write your title between <title> and </title> tag.
- Include the prime keyword in the title naturally
- Keep it under 65 characters
- Write attractive and relevant title to catch the attention of the target audience
Meta Description
Write a compelling meta description, containing your focus keyword to entice the readers to click on the search result.
Google allows 220 characters meat description for web searches and 120 characters for mobile searches.
Header Tags
Break your content using <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags to make it organized and easy to understand.
Image Alt Tags
Image alt text helps search engine crawlers to interpret the content of the images. Write a specific description under 125 characters, containing the keywords for image alt text.
URLs
Write SEO-friendly URL, including the page title followed by the domain name. It makes URLs easy to understand for both Google and audiences. Use HTTPS extension for URL as it is one of the ranking factors of Google.
Internal Links
Link your content with other relevant pages using a hyperlink. Internal links help to channelize traffic to other pages of the website. Always provide do-follow internal links to pass the SEO juice.
Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile responsiveness is yet another top Google ranking factor. To ensure whether your site is mobile-friendly, check your site with Google mobile-friendly test tool.
Page Speed
The page load time must be less than 2 seconds. Otherwise, it will trigger bounce rate tremendously. Check your page speed using the Google page speed insight tool.
Off-site SEO does the job of spreading the words in the marketplace by
- Building backlinks
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
Link submission on high authority pages helps web content to rank higher in search engine results pages.
Search engine algorithms encourage high-quality link building. This link building helps web content to be found from different sources.
Once you have done the required task of getting the traffic, you need to check the effectiveness of elements put on the website. Like any other process, element testing is done by A/B resting.
Doing SEO for the website takes considerable time. It doesn’t provide results overnight. However, if it is done in the right way, it brings desired results within a few months.
Tracking
Once you have developed a full-fledged website, you need to track traffic statistics. Setting up analytics tools like Google Analytics can help marketers tracking users’ data.
Google Analytics is an unmatched tool offered by Google to webmasters for free. It is a widely popular tool as it is easy to set up with your website. This analytic tool helps you to figure out:
- Prime source of your website traffic i.e. whether it is from social media or paid ads or search engine by organic way or from other websites
- How long people stay at your site
- What are the most visited pages of your site
- What are the non-performing pages
- Compare monthly user data
- Measure conversion and ROI
- Demographical, geographical and personal interest of users of the site
This tool also provides you reports of such analysis. You can use these reports to plan content in the future.
Tools like mouseflow, mopinion, crazyegg and hotjar also provide the data of user activity on web pages. By analyzing these data, marketers can detect the elements which are hindering the users’ experience.
A/B Testing
The purpose of A/B testing is to detect and replace the non-performing elements to improve the results. So, the first requirement of A/B testing is the determination of elements.
At the time of website development, A/B testing is skipped and minimum iterations are performed on the design part. While going for A/B testing, think from the user perspective. It makes a sales funnel developed as per the ease of users.
To get the max out of a sales funnel, A/B testing should be carried out under the supervision of the marketing and development team.
Conclusion
It may take a while to deal with these things. Once you have done with it, you may focus on content creation for promoting your site. However, if your skip the primary things, the high-quality content won’t provide you good results as search engines will not find it for crawling or indexing. Hence, devote your time to the basic setup before creating and promoting your content.
