Great news – your website is live! Here’s your guide on how to look after it and get more of your customers to visit it. You’ve invested in your website now make it work it’s hardest for you.
Keep your content up to date
We’ve built your website with all the right content to get started, but keeping it up to date is a key element of having a website.
A website both static and dynamic content. Static items, like the logo, ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’ pages, generally don’t change (unless you change your contact details). Dynamic content should be continuously updated. This might include new products/services, announcements, and new case studies or testimonials. Make sure you refresh the dynamic content on your site relatively often.
Blogging and updating the images on your pages are useful ways to refresh the content – blogs give you opportunities to rank for new keywords and encourage Google to return to your site, while image changes let returning users know that your site is kept up to date.
Keep your software up to date
Every so often, you’ll find that WordPress or your website plugins will release a new update. WordPress is what your website is built on and plugins provide specific functions that make sure your website works as intended.
Keeping on top of the new updates will ensure your website follows best practice, continues to function as expected, and avoids vulnerabilities. Updating plugins and WordPress may have unexpected effects on your site, so we would recommend you fully check your website after you update them or call us before undertaking any of these updates unless you know exactly how and when to perform the changes.
Your website may stop working after these updates so make sure you have a full recent backup and the ability to access and restore it!
Monitor your website visitors
Having a website is step one. Step two is getting people to see your website through marketing it and then step 3 is understanding how people find and use the site. This is where your analytics come in. We have created Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts for you so that you can review this information.
Look at what pages people are visiting, how much time they spend on your site, what pages have high conversions or high bounce rates, and where the traffic came from in the first place.
Once you have looked at this information, you can start to see where you might want to make changes or focus more effort on. If people spend very little time on a page, or immediately bounce away from it, that page isn’t very effective. What changes might make it more appealing? Does the content need to be updated? Is there an issue on the page? Dig into the analytics and see what trends start to emerge.
Your new tools to help you grow your website
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free and packed with useful information and insights about your website traffic. We have set you up an account, which you can access with the Gmail address we have also set up for you.
This video provides some useful information for Google Analytics beginners
Google Search Console
We have also created a Google Search Console account and set it up for your site. It’s another free tool that tracks the performance of your website. Rather than analysing how traffic acts on your website, this tool looks at how your site performs in search results, before someone clicks. And it highlights technical issues that can affect your performance.
This guide talks you through how you can use Search Console: https://backlinko.com/google-search-console#technicalseo
And this one adds some more useful information: https://yoast.com/beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/
Google Tag Manager
This is another account that we may have created for you, depending on your requirements. Tags are pieces of code that are embedded in your website to find out information – things like how long people spend on your pages, tracking form submissions, what links people clicked, and so on. Tag Manager makes it easy to create and embed these tags, and prevents issues with too many tags slowing down your site.
Google has an overview and a video explaining Tag Manager here:
Everything is already set up for you, so if you don’t want to touch Tag Manager again, you shouldn’t need to.
SEO Boost
If you participated in our SEO Boost service, there are a couple of other areas you have access to.
We set up a Google My Business account for you. If you search for your brand name in Google, you should see a Knowledge Panel along the right-hand side of the screen. We set up the main information in the account, but if you want to make any changes or additions, you can access this with the Gmail account we created.
We also set up a number of citations or local business listings for you. These are, again, managed using the Gmail account.
Summary
You have a Gmail email that we created for you so you can access all of your new accounts:
- Google Analytics
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Search Console
- Google My Business (if you used our SEO Boost Service)
Use these accounts to help your website achieve your goals.
Next Steps
If your website is not generating the level of traffic that you had hoped for, or you’re ready to invest more in how effective the site can be, consider Digital Marketing. This includes a range of SEO, content, social media, and marketing techniques to push your website further and grow your audience.
We can provide these services, or we can work on a one-off project to create a strategy for you to follow. If you’re interested in these services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at hello@nivo.co.uk.
