It is easy to own a website. You may have easily started one just within a day through Wix or WordPress. Or perhaps you have paid a hefty price of a professionally designed website with all the complicated features to wow your audience.
The real question is what happens next?
Here are the Top 5 crucial actions that website owners should take the moment they own a website
1. Install tracking
It is never too early to begin your tracking journey. Yes, even with a brand new website! In fact, you’re losing out on valuable data if you have not started doing so as these data actually belongs to you. You can gain valuable insights on whether you are reaching the right audience, and whether you should start “tuning” your content to connect with your desired audience.
If you are planning to run paid traffic to your website, tracking is one of the most important step you need to take. It is recommended that you install the different paid channels tracking codes even before running your paid campaigns. When you eventually start advertising, you would have collected some data to work on – such are visitors to your website, potential buyers who have added to the cart or audiences who have watched your video. These are data that allow you to create “remarketing” activities and better target your ads at the right audience.
There are plenty of tutorials out there to guide you on this, and here are my usual “must-have” list of tracking:
- Google Analytics
- Facebook pixels
- Google Ads Conversion Tracking
- Hotjar (optional)
- Linkedin Conversion Tracking (recommended for B2B)
Tip: Rather than installing tons of tracking codes into your website’s header, which could potentially slow down your website loading speed, utilize Google Tag Manager to consolidate all the tracking codes.
2. Optimize your website page titles (Title Tags)
Page titles are one of the most powerful on-site search engine ranking factors that website owners have control over but are often neglected.
To find out your website page title, just view the top of the browser window/tab tab. Although it remains a secret on how Google’s search engine algorithm decides what to display in a search, keywords in the website page title is closely link to it.
Hence, imagine the “free traffic” that you’ll be missing out if the relevant keywords are not inserted as part your website page title.
Your website page title also appears as a headline in an organic search result. This is where you can take the opportunity to stand out from the competitors fighting from the same traffic with ensuring that your headline is enticing.
This is a search for “delivery service” on Google search. Notice how the first 3 links “sell” their services through how the website title is delivered. Meanwhile, the 4th link simply just displays their usual URL and you have to read the smaller text to be enticed to click through.
Optimizing your website page title is indeed one of the most basic step you can take to ensure your website is “SEO” friendly. If you hired a web designer for your website, simply convey the right keywords to place as the website page title. You know your business better than them, so it should come from you.
If you like to go further on this, seek help from a SEO expert and take steps to further improve your website ranking in a search.
Tip: Keep website page title within 60 characters
3. Link your website up !
There are so many avenues that you can share the link of your website and have free traffic flowing in. Starting from social media channels, take every opportunity to share your website link:
- Facebook page – create a button that links to your website
- Instagram – add your website link in your bio
- Linkedin page – create a button that links to your website
- Youtube – insert link in your about us section
Your chat status (whatsapp, facebook messenger) is a great place to shout out about your website as well. Don’t forget to take advantage to share during your chat conversations or add your website link while posting up your social media posts. My recommendation is not to “spam” your social media posts, but share the applicable direct link of web pages – you want people to take lesser steps to find the information they are looking for.
If you have a Youtube channel, remember to insert the link at your video description channel when posting a video! You never know an interested audience would buy your product with that one click. This applies especially to E-commerce stores – don’t lose out on sales by not giving a direct link to your audience!
4. Create a plan on directing traffic to your website
Most people stop short at the web-design phase and missed out on planning on directing traffic to the website. It would be unfortunate if a nicely designed website only have few visitors.
Even for offline businesses, traffic plays a huge part in bringing in the sales. This principle applies the same in the online world, the more traffic you have, the higher likelihood it is for you to achieve your sales objectives. It takes careful planning and deliberate action to direct traffic to your website.
Besides the free avenues, you may want to consider investing into some paid channels. If you have invested much in developing an awesome website, it makes sense to allocate some budget to bring in the traffic.
What are the best paid channels? There is no a one-size fits all answer for this. It really depends on the platform your audience spend most of their time and the type of business model. For example, Instagram applies best for fashion related products that are targeting younger audiences. If you are B2B solution provider, consider Linkedin or even webinars.
You may want to put yourself in your audience’s shoe and think of the buying process he/she go through in finding your product. For example, generally people find solution selling services through search engines – therefore investing in Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc would be a good bet.
If you are unfamiliar with creating ads on these channels, I would strongly suggest that you gain some knowledge or seek a digital marketer’s help instead of going in blindly and burning $$ while doing so. Experiences and knowledge are required in proper audience targeting, curating ad creatives and ads setup.
5. Make it lead generation friendly
Most people expect a “return” as a result of developing a website and it is usually related to lead generation and making sales. Even for an informative website, it is never a waste to have new leads or inquiry. This shows that people are interacting with your website and have taken a step to indicate that they are interesting to know more.
If that is your expectation, it make sense to optimize your website to create such result for you. A typical website would have a “contact us” link in the menu or website footer. While it is great to have that, most audiences do not naturally browse the contact us page unless they are intentionally trying to reach out to you.
Make it easy for audience to provide their details or contact you. This can be done by placing lead generation forms at strategic locations or within an audience’s natural browsing flow. In that way, your interested audience can fill up the lead generation form whenever they feel like it.
The recommended practice is to utilize “call-to-action” buttons that lead audiences to a pop-up form or a page with the form. If you have a long website, strategically place your CTA buttons along the way to entice your audience to click at different points.
Conclusion
If you have not noticed by now, most of the above recommendations are free! It doesn’t cost you a dim to install tracking, share your link, optimize your website title or include a lead generation feature on your website. These are simple steps that website owners can take to ensure not losing out on what can gained freely!
