You’ve launched your web design – what next?

The final web design has been signed off, the launch button pressed and your website is now live but now what? Time to get marketing like a pro. Web Design Marketing You need to start driving user traffic to your website and drawing attention to it. There’s a range of ways you can start generating site traffic. For us marketeers, we call these sources of traffic ‘channels’. ‘Channels’ can include:

• Email
• Social Media
• Google Search (Organic)
• Brand Awareness (Direct)
• Videos (YouTube, Vimeo)
• Links on other sites (referrals)

You'll want to make sure you use Google Analytics to measure your channels and discover how well you're doing. Get in touch with us if you need help installing it.

From the illustration above, it's clear how much of a key role organic search plays in traffic generation for the website example given. This is a common trait so let's discuss how you can improve your website SEO. Firstly, think like a customer or user. Which popular search terms would be associated strongly with your offerings? Let's say you have three types of services. Come up with a few associative search terms for these. For us, we specialise in web design, digital marketing and SEO so we'd focus on these three areas. Once you have your first terms, do a search for them in Google. You might not feature yet but it’s worth checking your starting position. 'Build it and they will come' - is a useful mantra to adopt for SEO. Create purposeful content and the users will come. Once you've determined which terms will help generate the most return, structure your website content around these. Prominent titles (known to web designers as H1 tags) must match and the supporting text should be engaging, concise and authoritative for your subject. Where possible, link your website menu text with them.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic from social media is a good idea. Promote your website content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube and always link back to your website. It’s good practice to use these to channel traffic to your website where possible.

Brand Awareness (Direct Traffic)

You'll see a 'Direct' channel breakdown highlighted and listed in Google Analytics. Direct traffic to a website is the result of a user looking up your website URL directly - either by typing in yourwebsite.com or clicking a bookmark to return. This channel is an excellent way of gauging your brand awareness. In theory, the stonger this channel is, the more your market is aware of your brand and website. So we can use this channel report as a key metric of how well your brand is doing in general. How can we develop the Direct channel? This is a good question. A simple solution is to increase exposure to your brand and domain name by way of billboards, flyers, posters, vehicle signage, and email marketing.