How can I promote my new website?
So your shiny new website has been launched and you’re waiting for the enquiries to come flooding in, but so far…nothing! What can you do to get your site noticed and start building traffic? Try these 10 tips to build your audience and start getting some leads.
TIP 1: The search console
Submit your site to the Google Search Console to encourage the Google bots to crawl the site and put you in the search index. If we built your site, we’ve already done that for you!
TIP 2: Submit a sitemap
Submit a sitemap to the Google Search Console. A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, organised in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand how your website is structured. You only have to submit a sitemap once – if you add new pages to your site, the sitemap will automatically update to include any new content (or remove any deleted content). If we built your site, we’ve already submitted a sitemap for you!
TIP 3: Check your SEO
Make sure your website pages use relevant keywords, image descriptions, meta descriptions. Two of our site build plans include all of this automatically, but remember every time you upload a new image or make a change to the text to think about what keyword you want that page to be indexed for. If you want to be found for the keyphrase ‘flower delivery West Auckland’ for example, uploading an image with the filename IMG3957.jpg isn’t going to help – change the name of the image to match the keyphrase BEFORE you upload it to the website.
TIP 4: Google My Business profile
If you don’t already have one, it’s a good idea to create a Google My Business profile. It’s completely free to create a profile, and that will add your business to Google maps and to the sidebar on search results if someone is looking for your services and are in your area. Customers can also review your services, and getting positive reviews is critical in building a good online reputation. With our Standard and Full service website build plans, we can create a Google My Business profile for you included in the cost.
TIP 5: Ask other people to search for you
Ask friends, family, or previous clients to search for your new site by using the first part of your domain name. For example, if you ask people to visit https://www.mynewwebsite.co.nz, they will go directly to your site, but if you ask them to search for ‘mynewwebsite’ (without the https://www part or the .co.nz part) and then scroll down until they find your site in the search listings and visit the site, you get pushed higher up in the search listings (make sure to look at tip 6 below too!). Bear in mind that they may have to search through quite a few pages initially.
THIS ONE IS VERY IMPORTANT: you do not want to add to your website’s ‘bounce’ rate! When you (or your helpers from tip 5) do find your website in the search engine results, you need to click to visit the site and then view other pages as well on your site. Don’t just briefly visit one page of your website, do not immediately close the window and do not immediately click the back button. With a quick ‘click and leave’ visit (‘bounce’), search engines think the visitor didn’t find what they wanted and that the website was a bad result to deliver, and are therefore less inclined to push the website up the rankings. Each visit, click through to at least two pages of the website to avoid ‘bounce’.
TIP 7: Create an email signature
Add your website address to your email signature (if you don’t have an email signature, we recommend you create one!). Make sure to use the FULL website address – not mynewwebsite.co.nz or www.mynewwebsite.co.nz, but https://www.mmynewwebsite.co.nz. That way it will automatically become a clickable link for most people.
TIP 8: Local community pages
Join any local online community pages in your area – this could be a local Facebook group, sites like https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/ or even put postcards in the window of the local shop with your website on it.
TIP 9: Make minor changes to your site
Search engines like change, so by simply logging in to your website and adding a word, deleting it and saving the page will give the page a new ‘modified’ date. When the robots that crawl your site see a new page modified date, they start sending the robots more often to see what else you might have changed, and this again pushes you up in the rankings.
TIP 10: Leverage social media – even if it’s not yours!
If you have any social media pages, then promote the new site – post a link to the site and maybe even run a promotion. If you have Facebook, a 3 day Facebook paid campaign or boost can cost as little as $25 and can get people to start noticing you. You can also ask friends and family to post about your new website – the more people who put a link to your site the more search engines will push you higher in the rankings.
Promoting your website takes time and patience
…but if you’re still not getting the results you want, we also offer search engine optimisation (SEO) services . You just let us know what keyphrase you want to get a good position for and we get you there – take a look at our SEO services here.