7 SEO Tips You Need to Know Before Launching A New Website

Creating an engaging website is critical for any business. A great website can attract viewers, drive interest in your brand – and, of course, boost sales! One of the most important factors in creating a winning website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO can make the difference between your site being a boom or a bust. Here’s Next Level Marketing’s guide to seven SEO tips you need to know before launching a new website.

Know Your Target Keywords and Use them to Structure Your Site

Knowing your target keywords is critical to ensuring your new website will be a success. Effective keyword research is the difference between a site that gets tons of traffic and one that is a ghost town. When devising keywords, there are two simple questions you should consider:

• Do my keywords match what people are searching for?
• Will those who find my site using these keywords have their questions or needs answered?

If you can’t answer these questions, you need to reconsider your keyword choices. Tools like Google Adwords and SEMRush are excellent for researching keywords and their effectiveness.

Once you have determined your keywords, you need to structure your site so that each page targets a set of related, relevant keywords. Structuring your website like this has several benefits, including creating a clear theme for each page, maximizing page relevance, and allowing for further break-down into additional subcategories.

Engaging Meta

Meta descriptions are the brief blurb that appears below your website’s title and URL on Google search results. Google doesn’t actually use meta descriptions as a factor when ranking sites, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t critical for your site’s success. Here’s why:

Meta descriptions are crucial for increasing the clickthrough rate of your site. Clickthrough rate, or CTR, is an important factor in determining the “quality score” of your site, which affects how well your ads may perform and how much you may pay per click (PPC). Think of it as like a credit score for your website.

Test Usability

When launching a new website for your company, usability is key. What’s the point in even creating a new site if no one can actually use it correctly? Testing usability entails making sure everything on your website works exactly as you want it to. Often, it’s best to get a third-party to examine your site, as you may miss out on errors or lag due to bias.

When testing your site, key things to look out for are if the site is easily accessible across a variety of platforms, such as computers, phones, and tablets; is the website easily navigated; does the site feature duplicate content, and so on. Testing like this is often called “UX” (user experience) and can also include how the site looks visually, how fast it loads, or if anything is missing.

Create a Buzz

Now that you have a flashy new website, you probably want people to come to look at it, right? One of the best ways to get attention to your site is to get some helpful, organic links from influential people. Finding relevant bloggers, industry contacts or press is an amazingly useful resource for driving clicks to your website.

Blog

The mantra “content is king” no longer rings true, as we covered in a previous blog, but that doesn’t mean having an engaging blog isn’t important! Blogging is an excellent way of creating compelling content with updates on your company and offering material that people will want to link to. Blogging can also help you increase your long tail keywords, which is critical for improving your Google rankings – as Google will consider your website more authoritative and therefore more important.

When blogging it is essential that you know your audience, use simple terms to describe complex subjects and most important – type with passion! If it doesn’t make you emotional or it’s not significant enough, find a way to make it applicable to your own life. As Ben Franklin said, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

Social Media!

Strong social media goes hand in hand with a great blog. Having a strong social media game can drastically improve the numbers of people visiting your website, as well as your brand awareness. 

By establishing yourself as a more familiar name on popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram and countless others, you’ll not only have a platform to share your products and blogs, but also the opportunity to increase your company’s profile.

Set Up Tracking

Once your page is up and running, it’s time to start tracking software to analyze how users are using your site. There are a whole host of useful tools for tracking website metrics. One of the most popular tracking tools, Google Analytics is free tracking software that provides information on how people engage with your website and how they found it in the first place. Google Analytics is also a great way to monitor your SEO and how it can be improved. Moz Pro is another popular tracking software, which can target specific keywords and monitor visitor site usage.

Take Your Company’s Website to the Next Level!

Designing a website can be a tricky proposition. Following the helpful tips which we laid out above, you can create a dynamic, compelling, and oft-visited site of your own. If you need a little help, however, Next Level Marketing is here to help.

If you’re thinking about launching a new website for your company, now is the perfect time to partner with a team as dedicated to building your business as you are. Our experienced marketing team will work exclusively with you to discover what sets you apart. This allows us to create a compelling strategy to dynamically develop your business visibility and awareness and take a holistic, evolutionary approach to deliver exceptional results continually.

We have our own proprietary tracking software, which allows us to monitor our digital marketing through a number of verticals – meaning we can track:

• Eye Movement – what catches your user’s eyes on your site
• Location Tracking – where are your users coming from?
• Behavior Monitoring – how do they engage with your site?
• Demographic Monitoring – What types of people are using your site (age, gender, etc.)
• Conversion Tracking – we can track digital conversions down to the keyword level
• ROI – clickthrough ratio, conversions, site ranking, etc.

These metrics allow us to understand how your keywords are ranking and leading to conversions; how to eliminate wasteful spending; and how to initiate changes to increase the effectiveness of your site.

So, if you’re launching a new website, and ready to take your business to the next level, give us a call today at 1(844) SEM-NEXT (736-6398) for a free consultation.