Ask Questions
Unless you have an SEO on your team already, you may have questions about rankings and traffic. Getting an ‘SEO opinion’ will help your launch go well before you even begin. Especially if you’re transitioning from an old site or redirecting an old domain, you’ll want to have a checklist in place to keep SEO best practices part of the launch.
Quantify
Many times, website owners will have the ‘feeling’ that things are going well. Launching a new site can throw your results off course—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence, gather a strong record of rankings, traffic and goal completions from the past before moving forward with the new site.
That way you’ll be able to put some data behind the performance of the new site. Most of the time an updated site outperforms the old one, but not always. Data will always help you problem solve a drop in traffic or goal completions better than no data.
Evaluate
Even if you’ve built a squeaky-clean website it’s a good idea to evaluate the site once it’s live. After all, you won’t know if there are SEO issues unless you look for them. Have an SEO do a site evaluation, have them check the rankings, have them look at your Google Analytics data. Even if you don’t have the budget to jump into a big SEO effort, you’ll want to know how the site is performing for the future. A good SEO evaluation should help you identify any showstopping errors to fix even if you aren’t going to fix every last issue.
If we can sum up the process quickly it would be something like, ‘prepare, quantify, evaluate’. SEO relies heavily on data and research so make sure you’re in a good position to problem solve if any post-launch issues surface.
If you’re gearing up for a website launch and you have questions get in touch. We’d be happy to help.