Tips and advice for startup website launch
-
Hi guys
I'm looking for tips and advice to help prevent a startup website launch from embarrassment or disaster.
Couple of examples I have so far are:
- Test contact and download forms
- Check website for duplicate content, lorem ipsum and missing content
- Check page load speed
What would be your best advice/tip(s) be?
Thanks
Anthony
@Anthony_Mac85
P.S. Just to be clear, I'm not looking for advice on how to growth hack a startup website launch.
-
Hey there!
Launching a startup website is an exciting venture, and I'm thrilled to share some tips and advice based on my experience with my e-commerce website, Leather4Ever, which has been running on WordPress for the past four years.
Choose the Right Platform:
As you rightly mentioned, WordPress has proven to be a reliable platform for managing an e-commerce website. Its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin support, and customizable features make it a great choice for startups. However, it's crucial to explore and choose a platform that aligns with your specific business needs.Mobile Responsiveness:
Ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. With a significant portion of internet users accessing websites through their smartphones, having a mobile-friendly design is imperative for a positive user experience and search engine rankings.Quality Content:
Content is king! Create compelling, relevant, and high-quality content for your website. This includes product descriptions, blog posts, and any other information that adds value to your audience. This not only engages your visitors but also contributes to better search engine visibility.SEO Strategies:
Implementing strong SEO strategies is essential for driving organic traffic to your site. Focus on keyword research, meta tags, and creating SEO-friendly URLs. Regularly update your content and stay informed about the latest SEO trends to stay competitive.User-Friendly Navigation:
Make sure your website's navigation is intuitive and user-friendly. Visitors should be able to find what they're looking for without any confusion. Clear menus, a logical site structure, and a search bar can significantly enhance the user experience. -
What you need to know when you start a big startup. We have the means to launch, as well as an approximate idea. But we haven't got to the point of developing and finding investors yet; we want to work through all these stages correctly.
-
yes you can use so many options to do this task like you can add some blog posts about it you can learn more about it here.
-
Hey guys
Just wanted to thank you all for your suggestions and let you know that all of your suggestions are included in the final blog post here.
I've thanked you all at the end
Thanks again, I really appreciate it.
Anthony
-
Great shout Craig. Every now and then I'll find a "#" link on live websites. Looks careless and lazy!
-
Hey Dirk
Great advice! I'm a big fan of Screaming Frog too. A handy free tool especially for small startup websites.
Thanks for commenting
-
This is a good point. I am working on a group of sites on wpengine. So dev was using something like name.staging.wpengine. When they went live the directories etc switched to the live domain but scattered throughout the site within the content the URLs remained the same. ScreamingFrog is your friend.
-
When I prototype a website I use a lot of # href links. I would suggest a search through the source code for "a href="#"" thus removing any of these "dead" links before you go to production.
Note to self: remember to actually do this yourself.
-
Do a full crawl of your site with a tool like Screaming Frog. If you configure the spider to respect robots.txt & canonicals it will behave like google bot you will see if all your pages are indexed properly. The tool also gives you valuable info on things like H1, Title, Meta descriptions (and standard filters to check if they are missing, duplicates, too long/short,...). It shows your internal site structure (number of clicks needed to get to each page) and the size of your images. You can even use it to check if the analytics tag is present on each page using a custom filter.
It's not free if you use it in spider mode (the free version only spiders 500 URI's) - but if you have a sitemap, you could also do a crawl based on the list of your url's (which is free, regardless the number of url's). Limitation is that you don't get the structure and the internal links, but if it is a brand new site and not too big, that shouldn't really be a problem.
rgds
Dirk
-
Not forgetting our own personal mobile devices too
-
We've used all of those
Others we use are Bootcamp, Virtualbox and we also use inspect element in chrome to emulate devices and remote inspect element using Safari.
-
BrowserStack is the one we use--it seems to work pretty well.
-
We have a few tools that our developers use when they need to - BrowserStack, Virtual Box, VM Ware, iOS simulator, etc. - most of which are pretty standard. Do you all use anything different?
-
Love all of these Fuel Interactive! All of which we do here too so it's pleasing to hear other agencies doing the same
I think cross-browser and cross-device QA is extremely important given the browsing habits of the modern day consumer.
Do you use any tools for cross-browser and cross-device QA?
-
Hey Michael,
Yes, an incorrect robots.txt is definitely more common than you would think.
I guess the overarching tip to the fetch and render function would be to register your site with Webmaster Tools and make use of their tools.
Thanks for sharing!
Anthony
-
Linda - awesome tips!
Especially number 1. User testing is something that just isn't on some people's radar, yet it can unveil plenty of unforeseen usability issues.
Thanks for sharing
Anthony
-
Definitely agree with the "check robots.txt" comment - it really does happen more often than people like to admit.
I would also be sure the website has any relevant schema markups implemented to give search engines as much information about your site as possible.
Check the website in different browswers / different devices to make sure nothing looks wonky and everything functions properly.
Double check / audit title tags & meta descriptions (this can easily be done by using a crawling software like Screaming Frog or something similar)
Be sure any tracking you want to use (Ex: Google Analytics) is properly in place. Also make sure the site is verified with Google Webmaster tools if that is something you want to monitor (which you should). Submit sitemap to Google Webmaster tools - will need XML version.
Check for any broken links and check to be sure the site has any redirects / canonical tags needed in place.
Also definitely recommend user testing and getting feedback from people not involved with the website.
Some of these might not be user-specific, just wanted to give a general rundown of things we often check.
Hope this helps!
-
"Check your robots.txt, meta noindex, and other exclusions to make sure you are not blocking your own content (once you are live)."
Yes, this is far more common than people like to admit. I'd also add it can be useful to use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to check what Google can see once live. Occasionally robots.txt needs a tweak to stop blocking a particular resource.
-
-
Invite test users who were not involved with the development to try out the website and see what they find.
-
Check your robots.txt, meta noindex, and other exclusions to make sure you are not blocking your own content (once you are live).
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My big and famous website is ranking worse than unknown sites, what to do?
I have a major, popular and well-established website in my niche (lil peep merch) (lilpeepmerch.net) in my country, known as the largest, or one of the largest. But even with 12 years and loads of quality content, my website ranks WAAY worse than unknown ones, most of the time not even showing up on the searches at all, or ranking like page 7 in Google, while my rival, who does the same thing I do (and sometimes worse than what I do, like just publishing news when I publish news, and information, in-depth articles) ranks page 1 in Goo. I use Yoast SEO, try to do everything I can (but I'm no developer and have no access to my site codes), but my only good result is for one specific keyword.
Branding | | FitBoyAwesome0 -
My question is in regards to possible conflict in creating an additional website under a new domain for our company.
Our companies, Vulcan Information Packaging and ATC both live under the domain “www.binders.com”. This is a great thing as far as us dominating in the binder industry. However, in the next 2-3 years and forward, we want to build our presence as a company who offers packaging products such as boxes, marketing kits, and other forms of packaging. Obviously, the “binders.com” brand/domain does not contribute much to this effort and can be confusing to customers visiting the site. Essentially, we want to build an additional branding for our company in the packaging industry. Keeping this in mind, we own the domain “www.vulcaninformationpackaging.com” and we are considering building a new website using this domain which contains the word “packaging”. This new site would only promote and contain packaging related products. This new website will advertise and direct traffic to our company Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company “binders.com” directs traffic to. So my question is to determine whether doing this might be a practice that Google and other search engines might frown upon. I tend to think it will be fine because we will be promoting and driving traffic for non-binder products where as, binders.com is heavily in binder related products. thank you, Dominic Zaidan
Branding | | dzaidan0 -
My Website is not Coming in Google News. What should I do ? Already verified.
Hello Friends I verified my site in Google News but all articles are not coming in Google News. When I type www.example.com in Google news then only few stories shows but not coming on daily basis. What to do my fellow members ?
Branding | | sourabhrana0 -
Local branding messed up - advice needed
Note: not real names, services, locations used: So we are a single health clinic in Vancouver. Our natural name is GSF Health Clinic. As the most important search term is Health Vancouver by far, we decided to kind of change our brand name to 'GSF Health Vancouver' years ago. Our main competitors name is Health in Vancouver and had had a hard time getting above them in local SERP. But actually, since the change in name, we haven't really improved. As there are also searches for Health Clinic Vancouver, some of our citations are actually GSF Health Clinic Vancouver just to get that keyword in. This variation even happens on our site. Now, looking back, we should have just kept our natural sounding brand name and more importantly, kept the same exact one everywhere. However I'd like advice going forward. So the decision is whether we need city in the brand name - does it make much difference? The options are: GSF Health Clinic Vancouver ("Health Vancouver" is not together, but we still have city name. Current citation on G+ and a few other places. A bit of a mouthful) GSF Health Clinic (Sounds nice, but poor SEO and also no exact citation matches currently so this is a major name change) GSF Health Vancouver (very targeted SEO, sounds okay but not amazing when in a sentence) BTW our domain name is health-vancouver.ca
Branding | | Cooper10 -
Tips For Promoting Content & Contacting Journalists
Hey, After months of working hard we have some great content on our website, and now seem to be getting into a flow of releasing content consistently. I think it's now time to shift a bit of focus onto getting more eyes lookng at it, and importantly the right eyes. Has anyone got any tips or advice? Kind Regards
Branding | | JonathanRolande0 -
Splitting our main website in Two... What is the fastest way for the new sites to become a brand in Googles eyes.
In a couple weeks our main website (which generates all of the revenue) will be split into two because of a long term branding / identity crisis. So my question is, how can i make sure (besides obvious 301 redirects) that these 2 new fresh urls become a brand as quick as possible in googles eyes? So far i am thinking of things like: press releases, blog posts with brand mentions. I am not ignorant and expect this to happen overnight, but we need a strong foundation to build on, which is why i am asking Anyone got a list / case study / advise so I can really blow it up on launch week? Thanks 🙂
Branding | | Hyrule0 -
Facebook Like my website or fan page??
Should I want people facebook liking my website or my fan page? Is there a way to link the two? Here is my dilemma... People liking my website will obviously have an effect on rankings within bing and google possibly. BUT - People liking my fan page will allow me to engage with them in the future about givaways, sales and so on. I'm stuck, is there a way to link these? Or if not, which do you recommend?
Branding | | Hyrule0