Congrats! Your new website is now live on the world wide web and you are looking good out there. Your customers, both current and potential, will appreciate how legitimate, professional and trendy you look. This is great for business and you are on your way to being an authoritative name in your industry! 

But now what? The website is live and your colleagues, friends and family have given their praise. But how do you truly get your website out there - to fresh eyes and potential clients. It’s all well and good having a beautiful, streamlined, immaculate website, but only if people are seeing it. We’d like to give you 5 top tips, curated from our own personal expertise and knowledge, for making your website more present on the internet and harnessing more traffic to it. 

Writing a blog or newsletter is a great way to get your message out there and attract people to your website. Every click that is made to get to your website, or within your website, is golden in terms of how it will rank. Quality content, such as that found in a blog post, is a great way to get people to discover you. Consider: if there are 10 pet shops with a website each, but only one of them is writing a monthly blog post (how to save a choking dog, what are the friendliest cats, the best pooper-scooper under $20) then guaranteed their website will rank higher on Google searches. Even if they are not the best pet shop! As long as the blog posts are informative and relevant their numbers will keep climbing.

As mentioned above you want people from all over (your city/country/the world) to be clicking on some kind of link that takes them to your website. This is SEO 101. So what better way to do this than to plant your website link on the most looked at websites in the world - social media sites. Yes, I’m talking Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and so on. It’s tough work, and depending on the size of your business you may need a dedicated individual (or even a team) to do this. But doing it consistently and doing it well can mean huge ranking points for your website. Just set a goal (say, two a week) and do.not.give.up.

Google maps has got to be one of the most used websites/apps out there. It’s become so much more than a map now. We can view businesses, get valuable information about them and even reviews. It’s a search function itself. I have no doubt you’ve found a few restaurants on google maps, and so too can you find a business of any sort, no matter what the service or product is. Therefore it's a great way to make yourself known and you can add your website to it while you’re at it. Additionally, it's a further making yourself recognisable on Google’s radar. 

We know, we know, you spent hours upon hours getting your written content ready for your website. You may have even needed two or more versions of it (possibly in different languages). It's tough work. But to really keep things fresh and relevant you must keep your content up to date. Once every six months to a year ask yourself what your potential customers are looking for and have a read over your content and try to refine it, update it, include more relevant information. Even images could be updated from time to time. Like the blog, you might want to consider something that’s worth updating periodically, like an ‘events’ page, or a ‘tips and tricks’ page or a ‘case study’ page or something like that. Something just to keep the website humming along and not getting stale.

When your website’s been up for a while, and you’ve been doing all of the above mentioned points but things have slowed down, or worse, declining, maybe it's time to revisit your friendly web designer and ask them what they think could be done to improve your website. There may be a few elements of your website that need refreshing, whether that’s backend or frontend. Some of the web technologies that were used to make it might need a little updating or tinkering, or perhaps there is some kind of usability issue that you hadn’t noticed. In the evolving game of web design, and its myriad of trends, what seemed like a good idea a year ago might in fact not be such a good idea now and it's time to fix that. A web designer will have a keen eye for this and it's worth asking for their advice on it.