Contact us anytime to know more - Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
Web design company Studio can assist your company in avoiding common pitfalls and streamlining the launch process. By planning for launch day, these seven ideas can ensure a strong start for your website presentation to clients or viewers.
How to Launch a Website: Step-by-Step Guide
A website is an integral component of digital marketing, not only to reach out to those searching online but also to build trust with customers and showcase unique value propositions.
Your website is the cornerstone for social media, online ads, and interactions. Before building your site, selecting a CMS (Content Management System) is wise.
This will enable you to easily manage content, design, and optimize it without hiring outside help; otherwise, the risk is that you could lose control over its outcome.
By learning how to use a CMS, you can quickly change the content on your website while simultaneously lowering costs and accessing options that might otherwise remain hidden from view.
Effective websites will convince visitors that you can solve their problems or meet their needs, especially for businesses. Visitors will want to learn about your company, brand, and products while emphasizing benefits to ensure a positive customer experience.
1. Plan the Site
As part of your site planning efforts, the initial phase should include:
- Researching competitors.
- Defining your audience and setting website goals.
- Devising a content strategy plan.
- Devising an outreach promotion strategy plan.
Competitor Analysis
Begin by compiling a list of strengths and weaknesses among your competitors. At this stage, competitor research entails understanding your website's battle against its rivals. Reviewing is essential when conducting any project or business activity. Recognizing strengths and weaknesses allows improvement; link reviews may also be valuable.
Conducting a full site crawl can provide invaluable information about their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and content creation process. A high score could signal its strength as a competitor. Keyword research should be one of many approaches taken when conducting competitive analysis. Understanding the barriers to entry will give you an idea if you can carve out a niche for yourself and outstrip competitors.
Define Your Audience and Their Needs
Sometimes competitors target the wrong user base segment; for instance, they could be targeting one gender while neglecting others. To stay ahead of competitors and ensure success for yourself and your brand, identify who your audience and users are by clearly outlining them and their requirements.
Establishing the focus helps define your website's visual identity, design, and content. If desired, you could even design its mascot! Understanding people's needs is vital when developing content, designing websites, or creating features.
Content Strategy
A content strategy should culminate all your previous steps and be created alongside link strategies. Websites link to pages online because they fulfill a need or inspire excitement among their audience members. Content strategy can be enhanced by understanding what people link to.
Promotional Plan
What will the role of social media be when combined with content creation? Are there opportunities for link acquisition that the competition might have overlooked? Successful websites are advertised both online and off.
2. Select a Domain Name
To ensure the domain you select relates directly to your product or brand, we suggest following in the footsteps of many businesses by opting for their business name as their domain. Staying at the forefront of search results when people search for you is essential to being noticed by potential clients and partners. Search engines use your brand or company name as an indication as to whether or not you are relevant for specific terms being searched for.
Avoid anything too gimmicky, and ensure that the name of your product or company doesn't convey different connotations when written out as one string. Explore the list of lousy domain names for inspiration. An unwanted domain name can be hard to regain control of. While changing it and rebranding later may help, doing so could potentially harm your rankings, potentially costing you the exposure that would otherwise be available.
Take some time to consider your plans in the long term.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
3. Create Content Pages
A pre-launch page can inform visitors about your launch date while building excitement about the website. Consider including a countdown until your expected launch date, signup form, or "Notify me" button to begin building an audience right from the beginning. Start building relationships with your audience immediately if this is your first time building a community. Check out how to write engaging welcome emails.
Now is the time to write content for your website! Ensure you provide quality material that adds value for your target audience - such as writing blog posts about topics or implementing products. This process should go smoothly.
Homepage
Your homepage is likely one of the most essential pages, as visitors will first arrive there and see it. Focusing first on the content above the fold is recommended. Here is a list of items that should be stored here:
- Your logo
- Navigation menu (usually located in the header).
- Headline
- Call-to-action (CTA)
- Reviews/ testimonials/ social proof
- Images that catch the eye/product photos
Your value proposition should be presented as your headline in an engaging and concise paragraph. Remind visitors of the benefits of visiting your website, and persuade them to stay.
Your Call-to-Action (CTA) should convince visitors to move further down your sales funnel, leading them to register or view product pages.
Reviews and testimonials are integral to your site, as they demonstrate to visitors that you are reliable. Although finding such reviews may be challenging when creating a brand-new website, you should keep them in mind later. Add brand images or product photos that readers can easily recognize while reading your content, keeping in line with the website design. Here are a few suggestions for what should go below the fold, depending on your business and the services offered.
- Secondary CTAs
- Your product service can provide you with many benefits
- Company information
- Footer (company information, additional links, repeat of primary CTA)
Landing Pages
Landing pages serve a single function - persuading visitors to take specific action on them, such as showcasing a special promotion or gathering subscriber details for email marketing campaigns. Typically, they feature one call-to-action (CTA) with content tailored toward this end, such as special discounts or encouraging newsletter subscriptions. Landing pages target leads who are already halfway down their funnel but need that final push to convert.
These pages are helpful because you can use any space available to drive conversions. However, they must adhere to your homepage's content above-the-fold requirements.
Create as many landing pages before launching as needed for selling your service or product, such as:
- Product pages
- Features pages
- Case studies
- Use cases/ Solutions
- Discounts and promotions
- Lead Magnets
- Subscribe to our Newsletter
Blog Posts
Build authority in your profession by disseminating articles, stories, and news to your readers through blog posts. Such articles are proven effective at increasing brand recognition, driving organic traffic to websites, and increasing sales. Your blog posts that feature keywords will rank higher on search engines, making them easily discoverable by users searching on related terms.
Furthermore, creating blog posts targeted at existing customers and subscribers to your newsletter will increase traffic to these blog posts and drive conversion. At first, when beginning a blog, time may only permit creating one blog post. Still, set aside enough time to produce five vital pieces that will help rank for keywords related to your product or brand. Increased domain visibility will improve its search engine rankings and allow easier linking between articles and web pages, creating a clear site structure.
Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
These are critical components in driving conversion on any website. Each page should feature at least one CTA that leads visitors directly to another part of your site.
These messages encourage individuals to stay on the path through the funnel.
Here are a few pointers on how to write CTAs.
- Create them to stand out from other content
- Copy that encourages visitors to click
- Placing them in the most visible place
- Frame the CTA to solve a problem that people face
About Page
This page should give visitors to your website an introduction to yourself, giving them a chance to get acquainted. Use this opportunity to build brand recognition by communicating your story, message, and mission clearly and persuasively. Make it personal; tell them how and why you started, about your team, and what distinguishes you as unique.
Make the navigation menu's contact page visible so prospective clients can find you easily; making this easier will encourage visitors to contact you more often.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can only expect people to find you if you are optimized, so ensure all pages of your site are SEO-friendly to increase visibility in search engine listings and raise search engine ranking positions. Creating optimized SEO-friendly content will increase site visits from digital sources as it ranks higher with search engines, giving your business more online presence. Increased exposure will give your company more chances to expand its customer base. SEO is an expansive subject; here are a few primary considerations when launching a new site.
Keywords
Search engine users often utilize these terms to narrow their research focus on specific subjects. Sometimes these keywords or phrases are explicitly customized to each user's requirements. Search engines will then recommend your content when people perform queries related to those keywords. Each page should include both primary and secondary keywords to enhance its relevance.
Use your primary keyword sparingly to demonstrate to search engines that your content is relevant for a query, but beware of overusing it, as keyword stuffing may render the text unreadable or even lead to penalization by search engines. Keyword cannibalization refers to using the same keyword across multiple pages to use up its supply of search traffic. Tools exist that can assist with keyword optimization.
Metadata and Tags
Meta-data provides additional information that helps search engines rank your website. Meta tags are one form of metadata tag; page title and meta description tags can usually be found within the header section of a website. Search engine results display these details alongside links to your website, accessible from search engine results pages. You can add more meta tags into HTML as needed - see for further advice regarding SEO meta tags.
Your website body also utilizes tags. One of the most helpful tags is header one, which allows you to add headings and subheadings for structure in your material. In addition, search engine snippets ranking may highlight search engine snippets with long-tail keywords designed to meet users' questions directly. Include your main keyword in the tags to increase search engine ranking.
Tech SEO
Technical SEO refers to all the efforts required to optimize a site so it can be read by search engines and indexed while easily accessible to visitors your technical SEO measures how accessible your website is for users. Use this checklist to make sure that your new website is technically SEO-friendly:
- Optimize URL structure
- Clear site architecture (e.g., site.com/category/page-title.com)
- Create a sitemap in XML (listing all pages and posts for crawlers)
- Robots.txt is a text file instructing the search engine which pages it should crawl.
- Structured data and schema (provide search engine context for your pages and content).
- Page load speed (low speeds can lead to bounced pages)
- Google introduced mobile-first indexing (Optimize for mobile)
- Add SSL to HTTPS to increase your site's ranking (a key security-ranking signal).
Auditing your technical SEO strategy is essential since it can significantly affect the domain authority score (which ultimately determines whether or not your site ranks highly). Here is a link that demonstrates how to optimize technical SEO.
Link Building
Link building refers to returning backlinks from other websites to your posts and pages once your website services are up and running. Your SEO strategy should prioritize link-building efforts as one component. Google considers the number of links pointing back to your site when ranking its pages, taking their indication as evidence that other sites find your content valuable and, therefore, likely offering their users value from visiting you.
It works best when websites linking back have related content, such as that found within your field, or possess some connection to what's found on your own. Build your link portfolio through directories or other questionable methods; otherwise, you could face severe repercussions from Google and other search engines. If the domain authority of the site linking to you is low, its link may have little impact on your rankings or, even worse, could harm your reputation.
Read More: What is Website Design and Development?
5. Branding, Design, and Usability
It is crucial to keep branding, design, and usability in mind while creating content for your website. When writing the text and featured images that make up each page, it should also be considered to decide how many should appear there. Before launching your website, this should be one of your final checks. Your site must be visually appealing and straightforward for users to navigate.
Global Styles
A consistent look across your entire website is crucial in creating the impression of belonging to one brand. When designing your page, design using global styles, colors, fonts, and graphics will all remain uniform across every page design element.
That doesn't mean each page cannot have unique designs; that will help to prevent your website from becoming repetitive.
Responsive Design
Before releasing your website for public consumption, run tests across various devices and browsers (desktops, tablets, and mobiles) to ensure its design remains stable across platforms and browsers. No one wants to create an unpleasant first impression for visitors by having an outdated design, as this can lead to high rates of bounce backs - which signal search engines as to the quality of your website.
Tests of Usability
You should conduct usability tests if your website contains many content or options on its navigation menu. You can do this by gathering representatives of users and asking them to complete various tasks on the website so you can gauge its ease of use for themselves.
Your website's processes must be as streamlined and straightforward as possible for visitors, whether they are trying to contact or purchase something. Poor usability creates friction between your users and yourself, resulting in poor customer experiences.
6. Integrate With An Analytics Tool
Your next step should be connecting your website to an analytics tool. Google Analytics is our top recommendation for those just getting started. Free yet full of vital data needed for monitoring site performance, it is an excellent solution for startups and new websites.
Installing the code into your website code will enable you to track traffic. Here are some metrics you should monitor:
- Organic traffic
- Direct traffic
- Traffic channels (where the visitors come from).
- What is the most popular content?
- What content engages users (clicks on links, comments, shares, etc.)
- User demographics
- Users' devices (for further optimizing your site)
- Bounce rates
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor various aspects of your technical SEO strategy, such as broken links, issues crawling your XML sitemap, page speeds, and missing or incorrect structured data. By using this free tool, you can keep an eye on several technical SEO tactics - broken links, issues crawling your XML Sitemap being crawled, page speeds, and any missing or incorrect structured data structures on your website.
7. Promote Your Site
Now is the time to promote your new website; here are a few strategies for doing just that: paid and free options are available to help market it effectively. Here are a few ideas to get you underway
Submit URLs to Google Inspection Tool
By submitting your new URLs through this tool, Google can index them more rapidly. Only submit once; multiple submissions won't speed up indexation.
Create Social Media Accounts
Create accounts on social networks to build your audience. Each link you share, and interactions you have with others will help expand the brand awareness of your product or service and forge relationships between individuals.
Paid Ads
Paid ads on social media and search engines can increase website exposure while remaining easy to create. However, you will pay per click for this option. Finding keywords suitable to you may take some time, as there is often plenty of competition.
Incentivize Visitors
Incentivize your website visitors by offering them incentives such as promo codes or discounts. This may increase sales. Lead magnets can help expand your email list. This enables you to build stronger relationships with customers while offering discounts.
Two Tasks Before Launching The New Site
Before launching the new site, two tasks should be accomplished before going live:
Crawling of Existing Website
If your new website replaces an older one or consolidates two existing ones, first crawl the old site before going live. Before transitioning, you must compile a list of URLs belonging to both sites; one will soon disappear and be converted. After this step is complete, feed the URLs for the old site into site diagnosis software.
Conduct all the usual site audits to make sure the site is healthy. Changing your URL or upgrading its design is an identical process. Please use site auditing software (such as Screaming Frog ) to evaluate your website before updating it, so you can compare both versions side-by-side.
Restore Your Old Site
To ensure the success of this step, the next step should be backing up your old website and downloading as many documents as possible - ideally all - including databases, images, and any other assets that might exist on it. Make sure you set aside money as insurance in case something catastrophic arises. You may quickly restore the previous website and move any newly created one back into the staging environment.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
This list needs to be more comprehensive; for the best experience, it is wise to speak with a professional website development company firm regarding your ideas. A company or brand can be built with the right partner - let us be part of making something unique together - give us a call right now and let's create something together. Here is our checklist for launching websites; this checklist will assist in setting up your new site; keep an eye on analytics to monitor whether anything works or doesn't. Here is our manual for starting up new sites as well.
