Digital Marketing Todos for your website

So you are done with your awesome website. Well done! But there is more from this point onward. You have a long way to go if you want your website to be profitable. And this doesn’t just go for only E-commerce websites. All websites are created to be seen and visited. You have something to tell the world, which is why you created your website. Unfortunately, there are over 1 billion websites out there, and unlike the initial days of the internet where every website looked kinda amazing, it isn’t so anymore. If your website is going to stand out, it will need some extra work. You need more visitors, you need more visibility — you need traffic! Sit tight while I walk you through free things you can do to increase your traffic and show your website to the world.

1. Fix up your SEO

Out of the billion websites in the world, some are search engines. These are lifesavers. How does one find what they need in a sea of websites? Search engines solve this problem. Now we do not have to remember the exact name of the website. We can search for exactly what we need and the websites that contain those things pop up almost immediately. The search engine is important because of this. Take advantage of it. You want to position your website so that whenever the user searches for something relevant to or contained in your website, you appear. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in. Now I know, you hear about SEO every day but optimizing your website for search engines grow your website’s visibility. Here are a few pointers on how to make your website optimized for user searches, so that your website, out of the others, appear on the first page of a search engine result.
Get a few phrases of what you stand for. Let’s say you sell pretty flowers in your locality. Your shop is Awesome flowers. Phrases such as flower bouquets and the scented floor in Ghana are keywords that prospective buyers may type in search engines.
Search engines use what we call meta tags and the content of the website to determine which search should appear first. Popular standards are the Open Graph Protocol and the JSON-LD Go through these and make sure you have them on all your pages. Also, Provide a sitemap and robot.txt, for easy crawling of your site.
Make sure to keep your website up to date with relevant information and be sure to add an FAQ, Terms and Privacy Policy to your website.


2. Create a Newsletter

So now you have people coming to your website. Congratulations! But you are still not done, just like the subscribe and follow buttons on social media, you will need a way to alert the visitors of your website that you have new and amazing content. This is where the newsletter comes in. Your goal here is to collect emails of visitors and, using your exciting newsletters, turn them into fans. Do it right and these visitors will always be refreshing their emails to get your content. There are a few free services to start with, which include Mailchimp, MailerLite and Sender. Your goal here is to only send your subscribers relevant information, and only what they subscribed for. Do not bombard them with irrelevant emails lest you go to their spam, or risk being unsubscribed.


3. Collect and analyze your traffic insights

Probably this should even be the first, but I am assuming you will have all these before you launch so I saved the best for the last. You will have to record and keep track of the users that visit your website and the actions they do on your site. This is invaluable as over time you can measure your performance against some benchmarks and you can also note when a new introduction to the site affects usage and other metrics you are tracking. I cannot emphasize this enough. Even if you do not plan to look at your analytics, I say it’s worth collecting the data, it will become valuable in the future. Collect all info which you can; clicks, scrolls, heat-map, bounce rate, navigation etc. A few services you can rely on include Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Segment, Mix Panel.


4. Make informed decisions

Once you have your analytics and data in place, you can make an informed decision about your audience by analyzing how changes in your website affect your audience, and with this, you should approach it scientifically. I suggest you can use A/B split testing to test out new features before launching. In AB Split testing, you test one and only one thing at a time, and you always keep a control group so you can measure performance.
There is always more but I will expand on them in another article. Stay tuned! All the best and have a successful launch of your product.