3 Marketing Checklists when Building & Launching a Website

The understanding of a website’s purpose must be the reference point where all decisions are based off. For example, if it’s true that the website must serve a marketing role, then marketing expertise should be consulted before further planning or building begins.

Today we’ve put together a three-part checklist that you should consider when building and launching a new website.
The first question in part 1 of our checklist is: What is the expected purpose of the website?

For example: if the website must be found organically in search engines, then expertise in SEO should be consulted in the early stages, prior to major investment being made into building the site.

It can be much more costly to reverse engineer aspects of a website if the build isn’t suitable for search engine discovery. Yet, this is a common error made in the planning and build phase – to fail to build for one of the key marketing channels where it was expected to work.

Here are examples of other questions that should be answered:

What type of user should the website appeal to.
Which geographic locations should the website serve.
Are digital marketing landing pages important.
What content is important to share.
What should the site structure look like.
Will the site be easy to navigate.
Is paid search engine performance going to be important.
Is social media integration or marketing going to be important.
Is the site replacing an existing website on the same domain name or is the site an entirely new domain name.
There are more questions to consider, but these are some of the more critical ones.

There are more questions to consider, but these are some of the more critical ones.

Even if all of the above were well considered, things can still go wrong. We recommend that you be able to answer these types of questions before going live:

Does the website development perform well across mobile devices or other most commonly used screen types and browsers for your target market.
Is the site free of code faults and usability issues.
Does the site perform well for a “first time user”. This differs to how it works for you or the development team because of many factors such as caching.
Does the site follow all best practices for Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media sharing including tags, titles, descriptions, content schema, pagespeed, etcetera.
Does the site design you are replacing already have Analytics and have you set up customised measurement based off the new Information Architecture.
Is the domain data claimed in Google Search Console.
Have all the necessary 301 redirects been assessed and set up ready to launch.

Great, at this point it’s probably a great releief to know that you have discovered and resolved most of the likely barriers to success. We still recommend that you perform a few post launch checks and continue to be aware of any issues that might arise.

Some factors that make for a good site launch can’t really be assessed until after it’s live.

So once you have at least a few days or weeks of performance data, answer these sorts of questions:

Is the site performing as expected in Google search? Evidenced by Google Search Console data, not by “Googling it”.
Is the new analytics recording data as expected.
Now that the site is gathering public hits, does it perform as expected from a UI perspective.

At any stage, if you determined that marketing was an important factor for your website, we are here to support your needs throughout planning, build and launch phases, right through to post-launch promotion across Google, Bing and Social Media platforms like Meta.

For more information about marketing services for your new website, visit our website, or email me at alex@rankpower.com today.