4 Tips To Use When Re-launching Your Brand

It’s time. Your business has grown a bit, you’ve learned about the direction you want to go, or you want level up the image you’re giving out to potential clients.

YOU’RE ABOUT TO RE-LAUNCH YOUR WEBSITE.

A lot more than pretty pictures goes into rebuilding your website. Depending on the starting point: upgrading the content management system, adding social media platforms, incorporating your sales funnel, making conversion a top priority, and yes, making it pretty with great graphics.

Here’s 4 things to remember when starting the rebuild process on your website.

Think about (and test) the user experience. This is done before you start any sort of reorganization of content or creation of graphics. Ask someone who has never been on your website (and that you know would give an honest opinion) to go through your site for a specific goal (to buy, find out what you do, or get on a free discovery call with you). This goal is based off your site goal – and you should only have 1.

Next, don’t say anything. Seriously, just let them do it their way. Take notes on how they achieved the goal or where they gave up. Take the information you learn from this mini user testing session and apply it to any site reorganization.

Confused about user-testing? Ask your designer or hop on a free call with us!

Rethink your content. Go through your site and jot down all the pages you have. Check your tracking (see below) to understand if any of these are getting you leads. If you see that your site isn’t getting much traffic anyway – change any content because it could only improve the activity. On the other hand, if you saw one page that is important in terms of ranking or lead generation: consider keeping it. Deleting those pages will only decrease your status.

Get your tracking together. 90% of my clients had no idea that their site needed to have Google Analytics installed. Ask your designer to add it to your list of requests and start seeing how much traffic you’re getting (and from where) to focus your marketing efforts.

Already have it installed? Awesome! Here’s where you can opt to create another profile for the new website. This will keep the old stats and you’ll be able to compare it with your relaunch.

In addition to Google analytics, make sure you get a “recrawl” once the updated site has launched. You can check out Google’s webmaster tools to see if there’s any errors coming up that might make search engines not see your site the right way.

Your links might need adjusting. Often, when reorganizing the content of a website, the links also change – causing confusion from social media (organic or paid). Your awesome web person will get to create 301 redirects. This will essentially start pointing the search engine to the correct page. One main tip on redirects though – use them sparingly or start switching up the links later on to avoid having too many redirects.

Another solve (which should also be done in addition to the above)  is to optimize your 404 page (read more about it here). This way, anyone who does click on the wrong link still gets to see some content instead of a broken link.

Whether it’s a small or large re-launch of your brand and website, these tips will help the transition become smoother while you focus on building your business.