There are very few businesses these days that don’t
have a website or digital presence. Websites are being developed and launched
all the time and the competition for the attention of the audience is high.
Websites are after all the number one way that most companies are discovered or
contacted for new business.
The days of phone books and directory inquiries are now long gone. But there is quite a lot behind building a website, it is a platform that requires thought and which needs to have a clear purpose. These are hopefully things that you have considered already, but if you are preparing to go digital, or to go live with your first website. But launching a business website requires some more careful measures.
Depending upon the type of business website, the list
may contain various elements, but this article will discuss thee major concerns
you should consider before launching a business website.
1- Optimize for search
Now a day, the first thing a consumer do to find what he wants is to search on Google. So, this is one of the most important things to consider, when launching a business website. Search engine optimization can serve as a backbone for long term traffic to your website.
Hiring a good SEO agency before launching a website is
the best way to go, because they will help you create an optimized website right
from the beginning. If you launch an un-optimized website and then hire an SEO
expert, you will be spending more money and time.
Moreover, you should ideally hire a local SEO agency,
with whom you can have one to one meeting as well when required. So, just run a
Google search for something like ‘SEO companies Sydney’ and see who
comes out at the top of the list – that is already a great way to establish
credentials. Then make a plan to go and see them and let them know what your
objectives are and what sort of budget you are working with. They should be
able to come up with a play that involves both organic and paid search and
which will match your budget with your needs.
Remember though, you don’t just want to generate traffic, there needs to be a purpose behind that traffic. Is it to drive business, to monetize through advertising or for online sales. Whatever the reason, it is about a user-fueled ecosystem.
2- Servers
The website needs to live somewhere and if you are
anticipating a reasonable amount of traffic then you need to make sure that the
server solution that you have in place is sufficient. Sometimes new businesses
make a mistake of launching a business website on shared hosting due to low
cost.
Shared hosting (on authentic servers) in general doesn’t have an issue, but since there are thousands of other sites hosted on the same server, chances of a collapse are more when a small site is infected with a virus and it spreads across neighbors.
Moreover, shared hosting doesn’t allow much bandwidth,
so what happens if there is a sudden spike in traffic? Or if your server falls
over due to any other reason. The best solution here is to find some sort of cloud-based plan.
Having a dedicated server is the best option, but as it comes with huge costs,
you may also consider a VPS (Virtual Private Server) solution.
More importantly, though, find a company that
specializes in server maintenance and set-up. The last thing you want is to be
dependent on a one-man-band and to discover that he is away on holiday or
uncontactable just when the server crashes. So, find a company who can manage
the whole server side of things for you – from start to finish.
3- Analytics
A website without any analytics is not useful in any way. After all you should know how many people visit your site, where the come from and which pages on your site engage them more. You can work on a growth plan only when you have an efficient analytics in place.
If you don’t know how many people are coming to your
site, what they are looking at or how they are getting to you, then you are
operating in the dark. This kind of data is vital. For example, if you have 100
people coming to your site a day but you are not getting any calls or emails as
a result of this, then there is something wrong with the site. If 100 people
land on your site and look at the contact page, then you should be converting a
significant percentage of that into the business. If not, rethink
the site and find out what is going wrong.
Analytics doesn’t have to cost you anything, in fact,
a package like Google Analytics is free, but they are vital.
The Bottom Line:
Launching a business website requires effective
research and efficient planning accordingly. Depending upon the type of
business website and the industry, there can be various other concerns to be
addressed, but the above three are crucial elements of any business website.