This is a curated list of our favorite tips and tricks for new websites. A website is like a house plant; it needs constant care and upkeep to grow or else it will die. With that said- this list is like miracle grow for websites. Do these things to your website and watch your website flourish from a tiny seed to a full-fledged forrest.

Google My Business

Google My Business allows you to create a custom business profile for when people search your business. This profile allows you to add your business location to Google Maps, allows customers to review your business, and you can add things such as hours of operation, photos, Q&A, and much more. Not only does this tool make your business look more professional, it increases your chance of your business being at the top of Google searches.

Google Analytics

Setting up a Google Analytics account allows you to keep track your website traffic. This is a very effective tool because you can see if your efforts to gain more traffic are working or not. In Google Analytics you can see an overview of who your demographic audience is and create your online content to target that audience. You can also see which pages of your website are the most popular and which page’s users are first entering or leaving your website.

Add a Blog

The most important thing you will ever do to your website is create a blog. Today, a blog is a business’s resume; a way to showcase a business’s expertise in their field. Every website should have one. A blog is an easy and free way to create and share content on the web. In fact, many users first visit a website through a blog post. A recent study showed that 52% of marketers said that a blog is the most critical content marketing tactic for overall content marketing success. Businesses even have great success in outsourcing their web content- ensuring fast creation of effective content.

Update Everything

Once you have your blog up and running, make sure you give your users a reason to keep coming back. Yes, old blog posts can bring in new traffic but a website needs to stay relevant in order to rank higher on Google. The best way to stay relevant is to not only keep updating your blog with new posts, but to update your old blog posts.

Competitive Research

If your website is based around a general business or industry, chances are you’re going to have some competition. You may think that the more competition you have, the harder it is to succeed in gaining traffic. However, you can use this competition to your advantage. If you use a keyword research tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can study your competition and see what keywords they rank for and aim for the same or similar keywords in your written content.

Email Marketing

It’s important to have new users coming to your website, but be sure to not forget about the users who come to your website consistently. To build a customer business relationship, make sure you set up an email subscriber list for those who want to stay updated on your business. Email newsletters have the best ROI of all digital marketing tactics. Websites like Mailchimp and Constant Contact help businesses create, manage, and maintain email campaigns and email newsletters.

Social Media

Once you get your social media profiles created and optimized, it’s time to share the content you’ve made on your website. This is everyone's favorite marketing technique because it’s free and can be completed in relatively short period of time. The tip here is to study up on what day and time is best to post. You can find this information on your Google Analytics profile or - for a more general overview of what time and day to post - you can visit this Hubspot post outlining the best post times for each platform.

Paid Ads to Start

Using paid ads is a great way to start off with your new website. However, you shouldn’t rely exclusively on paid ads. When you first start a website, paid ads are a great way to get your site out there, gain exposure, and start building customer relationships. Once you take away paid advertisements though, you will see a decline in traffic. So when using paid ads don’t believe you will keep seeing the same amount of traffic once you stop.

Quality over Quantity

When you start researching SEO and start applying it to your website, it is easy to forget what’s important. Users want to be informed, and they want to learn something that they didn’t know before; why else would they click on your site? Just like first impressions are important, so is a title. But it’s the quality of your posts that keep bringing back recurring users. If you stay true to quality content, before you know it, users will turn into loyal customers.

Responsiveness

Wondering why our company is called Responsival? Well, responsive means making sure your website looks good on all devices -- not just on desktop. In 2016 nearly 60% of searches were on mobile devices. Responsiveness is certainly the future of web design, so if you’re looking for a responsive website design make sure you visit our home page and check out our work. We would love to help!