Before your Website Launch: 4 Practical steps your Business must follow

1. Define Your Audience
2. Do In-Depth Market Research 
3. Do Proper Keyword Research 
4. Plan Amazing Value Giving Content

Define Your Audience

Hands down, one of the most important parts of any business, but surprisingly one which businesses fail at constantly. Why? Because they simply don’t grasp the importance of it. 

The reasons why defining your audience is critical to your website success and can make your business. 

1. It will help uncover the most important needs and pain points your product fulfils for your customers. These are the reasons why your prospects will come to your website and buy whatever you have to offer.
2. It laser targets your marketing messages and connects the reader to your business. This builds trust with your brand and engages them with your content.
3. Generic, boring content will not yield the results you want. We live in the age of digital personalisation.

Hopefully you can see why it’s of the utmost importance to define your target audience. So now you’re ready to do that, here’s what you need to do. Fire up your laptop, or if your old school a pad and paper and follow this exercise:

Come up with your ideal customer: Name him or her, let’s call her Jenny Smith. Now write down every detail about her.

How old is she? Where is she from? What does she do? What is her budget? Hope and Dreams? Pains and fears?

The more in depth you go the better your marketing efforts will be in connecting with your ideal customer or Jenny Smith’s. 

Do In-depth Market Research

The next most common mistake made by businesses is not doing proper market and competitor research. 

Market research is not only about analysing competitors’ products or services. In the digital age you have to analyse their website, social media, backlinks and all of their available data. It’s also important to know the history of the market – Who were your competitors 1 year ago? 2? 3? Or even 10 years ago? Why did the past companies fail? Why have my competitors succeeded?

Most people start with an idea and then try to find a market. This is never a good strategy and has been the undoing of thousands of businesses for years. Especially in the digital age. Instead find a market , discover the wants and needs of their customers and build a product or service around it. 

How can you do market research?

Look at Social Media, Blogs, Companies, Websites ect. If they exist then there is competition. No competition is most likely a bad sign! Or you’re about to change the world (more often than not). 

One way to find competitors is a Google search. Search what your ideal customer would search for your product or service. Look at the Top 10 search results. Those are competitors. Scope out their website, social media, general feel and take notes. Check out their products and services.

How do they differ? Quality? Price? Even shipping costs? Make a list and pick out their strengths and weaknesses.   

• Services like SimilarWeb allow you to monitor and track all of your customers’ website data. See where they exceed and where they fail at driving users to their website, how long the users browse and even how many of their users leave instantly.

• Tools like these can be crucial in building the correct marketing plan. Competitor research combined with the proper messaging, as mentioned above will have untold benefits. 

Do Proper Keyword Research 

Ranking highly on Google is no easy feat. It requires patience and a variety of tactics executed well. When deciding on researching your key words you should ask yourself:

• How hard will it be to rank for this keyword?
• How much traffic am I likely to get if I rank for this keyword?
• What kind of content should I create to rank for this keyword?
• Are people searching for this keyword likely to become my customers?

Using a customer centric approach to this is extremely valuable. To get inside the mind of one of your customers is difficult, but using programs like SEMRush (Paid) or Google Adwords (Free) can give you guidance.

Here are your keyword research steps in a nutshell:

Choose Your “Seed Keywords”

These will be the root keywords that the tools will generate related keyword ideas from, so it’s important to think about what topics your prospects will be searching for.

For example, if a startup is offering iPhone accessories, then some possible seed words would be ‘iPhone Accessories”, “iPhone cases”, “iPhone earphones”, ect. Seed keywords can be more than the long tail keywords they will generate.

Calculate the keyword competition for the long tail keywords you think are the most relevant to your audience, and then export the data in a spreadsheet for later reference.

Keyword competition

You want to find longtail keywords with low competition, but still enough search volume. Remember on average the 1st position of Google gets 30% of clicks, the 2nd position gets 15% and the 3rd gets roughly 10%

From these rough estimates, you can calculate how much potential traffic you could get to your site if you were to rank for these positions.

For example if a keyword has 100 monthly searches and you ranked 1st, you could get around 30 clicks (this will vary based on keyword and other factors)

Value Giving Content 

Now that you have chosen the keywords you want to target, it’s time to plan your amazing value-giving content. What do we mean by “value-giving”? We mean content that serves to answer a question, solve a problem, or generally help the reader improve their life without hard-selling a product or service. It must be useful and of high quality. That is what Google is looking for and will reward you with higher rankings.

Now, where do you start?

Expert copywriters all agree that the headline is the most important part of any piece of copy. This goes the same with blog posts and pages. Apply the 80/20 rule here and spend 80% of your time crafting the headline.

Why? Because if searchers are not compelled to click on the title, then the content you have written may as well not exist.

For each keyword, craft an attention grabbing, benefit giving headline that you would like to write content about.

The clearer you are, the easier it will be to execute when it comes to going online. Use an excel document to plan this.