What to Think About Before Building a New Website? Part 3: Rankings & Strategy
In this final post of the series we dive into the rankings and strategy of building a new website. Part 1 was on Branding & Design, Part 2 was on Sitemap & Content.
Rankings & Strategy
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
We recommend starting to think about the phrases for which you should be ranking in Google. When identifying keywords think about…
- Competition – are there other big sites already ranking for the term?
- Volume – how often the term might be searched
- Relevance – the more specific the keyphrase the lower the competition but the lower the volume as well (generally)
Especially early on, we recommend striving to rank for the most relevant and specific keywords. There will be less traffic, true, but it is better traffic! The competition should be lower as well so gaining traction with rankings is doable.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Are there Social Media pages to which you need to link? Should you be encouraging your content to be shared anywhere? e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email is still the most effective tool in most online marketing toolkits. You may need to consider how you will collect email signups and what service you will use to send and track bulk email.
One of our favorite tools for email marketing is MailChimp.
STRATEGY
Hopefully you started this whole journey considering the website’s purpose and strategy; that determines all the above and a lot of what we went over in our two previous posts. (Part 1: Branding & Design, Part 2: Sitemap & Content.
The final step is figuring out what you are going to consider a “conversion” or success on the site. A good technique is to ask yourself “what would success on the site look like 5 years from now?” and then work backwards so you have somewhere to start working and an idea for what to track.
Assemble a list of what you will consider a success / conversion. Here are some ideas:
- Submitting a Contact Form
- Signing up for email list
- Calling and speaking to someone
- Liking a Social Media page
- Downloading a whitepaper or an E-Book
- Filling out some sort of form
There is much to think about when building a new web presence from the ground up. It is exhilarating but can be daunting. Take it in small bites and consider it a continually evolving tool.
