8 Things to Do Immediately After Launching Your B2B Website

8 Things to Do Immediately After Launching Your B2B Website The launch is just the beginning. Be ready with a plan of attack to start driving your business website immediately after launching it.

The launch of your website often feels like a massive weight has been lifted, and the relief is calming… that is until you realize that there is so much more to be done.

You launch a website because your business needs one.

However, there is so much more to a successful website than just it’s development.

An online business cannot be run if your SEO is not optimized, Google webmaster tools is not being used, or people don’t know your website even exists. Even today, I still see so many small business owners with the belief that all they need to do is simply pop a website out and boom – they’re good to go.

Launching a B2B website is similar to buying other new equipment for your business; if you don’t read the instructions – you’re certainly not going to be able to use it or at least use it correctly.

There are are a few essential things you should do immediately after launching your B2B Website. Let’s take a look.

1. Monitor Your Website’s Uptime

Your websites can go down because of sudden spikes in traffic, scheduled maintenance, hacker attacks, data center problems, and the website’s code issues.

In the year 2013, Amazon repeatedly lost $66,240 every minute their website was down, hence it is essential to monitor your uptime.

Obviously you can’t sit around watching your website every second, but you can take advantage of websites like UptimeRobot.com, Pingdom.com, Host-Tracker.com, etc.

2. Set the right permalink structure

Permalinks are the foundation of your websites architecture making it easy to browse and index in search simply by the URL.

Your website’s url structure is the equivalent of dialing a specific phone extension, taking you directly to the person you want to talk to.

Good permalink structure is also makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your pages in search. That’s exactly why you should optimize your permalinks for SEO before you start posting on your website. If you have already posted articles changing permalink may result in broken links, so it really pays to pay attention to this little detail from the get go.

3. Secure login information

Weak password problems plague the internet.

About 20% of hacking is done by password theft or brute force attacks. This is only possible because of insecure passwords.

I know…

You want an easy password that you won’t forget.

Trust me, the goal should be to create a random password that you’ll never remember and do it before anything happens to your site.

Choose for yourself a difficult password so that no one can hack it.

With the addition of extra plugins or even better the right hosting, brute force attacks can be avoided. You can also set up email notifications in order to get notified when someone tries to hack your website. These notifications can be customized to also know if there is any new subscriber to your site.

Always update your CMS to the latest security version that is recommended, if you can’t do this yourself hire a company to assist.

Source: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/03/attackers-gain-access-wordpress-sites/

4. Test your Page Load Time

Nowadays, everyone wants everything fast. Akamai, the leader in image compression and speed optimization, highlights this reality –

53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load 

A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent

This study tells that people used to expect a 2 second page load time, but now they want it to be even faster than that. Page load time is also important from the SEO point of view as the bots don’t crawl website with high page load time.

There are tons of solutions out there to help you increase your page speed.

You can use caching plug-ins like Cache Enabler, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, and WP Rocket, to reduce page load time by up to 50%. Again, your hosting can play a huge roll in your website’s load time by utilizing advanced caching techniques like Database caching and object caching.

5. SEO

The best place to start is with the foundational on-site optimization which can easily be done by using a plugin like Yoast SEO.

Once you install the Yoast plug-in, you can go through the setup wizard to quickly implement the basic SEO settings.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes I see with B2B websites is that’s where the SEO ends!

On-site SEO may be the foundation, but without great content and in-bound links – your site is going nowhere.

SEO link building has remained the primary component to ranking content.

Sure, the subtle tactics of what types of links and where they come from has changed, but the fact remains; every website needs them to rank. Find out what link building practices your business should be using.

Once you begin your on and off site SEO, monitoring your search engine rankings will be critical to measuring ROI as well as performance.

To solve this problem you can use Firefox Browser add-ons like Rank Checker.

Google Webmaster Tools is another great and free tool that you must have.

GWT plays a huge role in indexing your website as well as tracking the number of inbound and outbound links or even errors that hindered Google from crawling and indexing pages of your site. Webmaster Tools still remains a great way to help you identify the keywords that Google notices on your website, as well as the keywords people are using to find you SERPs.

Sitemaps help Google to navigate through your website easily & to reach each page and post. Making a structured sitemap makes Google bots job easy & this has an impact on SEO. All of this can be managed within Webmaster Tools.

Once you have made a sitemap, submit it to Search engines to crawl and index it.

Google Alerts is a way to get notified when something new appears on the internet that contains the same keywords. It helps track how often people are searching for you and what is being said about you. This will help you to be at the top of the competition. You can get alerts by typing your website’s name, company’s name, your name, or some other things that are relevant to your website. You can select to get these updates via email or RSS feed. Here is how from Google Search Help. Here is how from Google Search Help.

There are other alternatives to Google alerts like Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, Meltwater

Google Analytics and Google Search Console – As a B2B business, your goal is surely to make money through your website.

To do this you need to monitor how much traffic you are getting, from where does it come, and what your visitors do on your website. If you need this information to take the necessary actions, you have to install Google Analytics. You can go one step ahead by setting up Google Search Console.

6. Forms and Social Media

Forms and Social Media are crucial to lead generation!

Did you know that you can get up to 5x more qualified leads with Facebook Ads and Optimized Landing Pages?

Your CTA’s (call to action) and forms all work together to bring in those leads you’ve been looking for.

Once you have added your social media buttons and forms to be filled by the visitors, it is important to check whether all of that is working or not.

There’s nothing worse than launching a site only to find out weeks later that your forms haven’t been working!

You can manually test the operability as below –

•   Use an Incognito or Safe Browsing tab to test forms as if you are an actual visitor.

•   Fill out the forms or click on the buttons to make sure they are operating as you had wished.

Once you have checked this, you can share your website on your social media as this will drive more traffic to your website. The news about the launching of your website should not necessarily be long, but it should get people engaged in your website which will bring more followers.

7. Backup plugins

We’ve all been a victim of the “dog ate our homework” syndrome, but losing your website data is really going to hurt!

Losing your data will be a disaster, but before that happens you can install a backup plugin. It takes a couple of minutes to set up automatic backups, so do not delay when you know the consequences.

8. Publish a Press Release

Launching your website is no small thing.

People need to hear about it and a press release plays an important role in doing that. They are helpful to B2B businesses in getting the word out.

Here is a Whitepaper resource on How to Use Your Website for Generating High-Quality B2B Leads.

A skilled writer can craft a compelling press release for your company. Once your press release is out, you can share it on social media networks to get more exposure and will even help start building backlinks to your site.

There’s no shortage of things to do after you launch your website, but start with these 8 things and just know that a website needs constant attention so make a list and tackle things one at a time.

The post 8 Things to Do Immediately After Launching Your B2B Website appeared first on Graphic Web Design & Brand Marketing Company Medford OR.

by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company