My website is finish - now what ?

A lot of people think once their website is done, then they're done and they don't need to think about anything else. And that is wrong. You need to get found. You know, unless you're the 1% of a business who could care less about getting found on a search engine, then don't listen to this. But if you're the rest of us, the 99% of us who want to bring business in from the internet, which is why we're doing a website, then this is important. Every business needs a business Google account, and that is simply an account that you set up with Google. Google has a lot of tools that will help you with your site. So they have Google Analytics, they have Google Webmaster Tools, which I believe they've renamed like 20 times, and I think now it's called Search Console. Those two things together will give you, will answer questions for you as your website gets used. It's like, it'll be things like what kind of a platform are most of your users coming in on? Is it a cell phone? Is it a desktop? Is it a laptop? If it's a cell phone, is it an iPhone? Is it an Android? It'll actually give you all of the specs on all of that stuff. It'll tell you how you're being found, you know, what search words are people actually using to find you. All of these types of things which, as your website matures and you're wanting to grow, you're going to want to know this information. Well, we want to hook that up through your Google account, not mine, not some agency out there, but yours. And the reason for that is you want control. You want to be able to go in and look at this information and analyze it anytime you want. And if you choose to hire a search engine optimization company or a marketing company or something like that in the future, you can give them access to your account. And this is the important thing: if you're a Gmail user anyway, don't use that account. Set up a separate one specifically for your business, because when you do give the, that information, the login information away to some company, a marketing company, whatever, in the future, you don't want to have them have access to all of your emails because your emails need to be kept private. Um, other things that Google offers— this is a huge one— a Google My Business account within your Google account. And what that is, is access to maps. So if you don't have this, you're never going to show up in Google Maps, which is a huge source of traffic for most websites. If you think about the last time that you did a search for whatever business yourself, you would have seen on the landing, you know, the page that shows up, probably a couple ads at the top. And then a map with 2 or 3 dots on it, and in that little box, 2 or 3 businesses listed underneath, then possibly another ad, and then your organic results. So people have to scroll these days to even see the organic results. You need to be in Maps, and you need to be the top, um, 3 in your industry, in your area. In Maps. The only way to do that is your Google My Business account. It's free to set up. Any— it's filling out a form, so anybody can set it up for you, or you can set it up yourself. It's not this huge technical wall or anything like that. Just set it up. Use everything in there. Put your business description. If you sell products, you can put your products in there. If you have services, you can put your services in there. You can put your pricing in there. You can put literally anything about your business can go in this. A lot of people these days are using their phones to find things, and they'll go to your Google listing, and they should be able to get all the information they need about your business without ever visiting your website. And that is key. Technically, this is more important than your website will ever be. That's how important it is. So get all of that in there. Upload images, upload videos if you're a video person, which I encourage you to be if you're not now. Um, use all of the tools within your Google My Business account to highlight your business. And the biggest thing is reviews. Get reviews in your Google account. Way more important than any reviews that are put on your website is to be in your Google account. Other, like, outside things that you might need are other review sites, or specifically for the type of business that you are doing, make sure that you register for whatever that company is. Here's one that I hate, but well, every business owner hates, and if you don't, you will, and that's Yelp. You might think, my industry doesn't really use Yelp, and you know, it started out with just restaurants, and you would be right if your industry does or doesn't use Yelp, but the reality is it doesn't matter because anybody that wants to leave you a review on Yelp can create your business account for you. Yes, you heard that right. It should be very illegal, but whatever. Yelp will allow anybody to create an account, and they don't even have to have the right information. They can put the wrong phone number in there. So you want to go out, claim your business on Yelp, even if you never use it, just so that it has the correct information in there and nobody else can do that. For you. Another one is YouTube. If you're gonna be using videos, get a YouTube account. And YouTube is part of your business Google account. So you can do a YouTube account, you can have— give other people access to it. Other people can upload videos if you, you know, have a team of people that you're working with. But YouTube is critical if you're doing videos. You don't want to put those directly on your site. It will use what's called bandwidth, and the most common thing I can equate bandwidth to is cell phone minutes, which I know a lot of people have unlimited plans now, so you might not even understand that. But cell phones used to be you paid for X number of minutes. Anything that went over that, either your plan shut down for the month until the next cycle or you paid more. And that's the same thing with bandwidth. Your hosting account will come with a specific amount of usage that you're allowed out of this shared environment, and when you hit that limit, your site either goes down— which you guys have probably seen this where it'll, you know, you'll go to a website, they pushed out a big sale and they had way more traffic than they're used to, and bam, the site's down. So that's a hosting limit. You don't want that to happen. If you're using video, put them on YouTube, embed them to your website from YouTube, and then you will be using YouTube's bandwidth and you'll never have that problem. Um, even if you're not going to use video on a regular basis, I highly encourage you to create an introduction video that you can put on your website That one thing, there's the two fingers again, that one thing has got me a ton of business by having that on my website. People feel that I am approachable and that they can call me. I've had a lot of people, you know, every time someone calls, I ask, you know, why did you call me? How did you find me? Those questions. And a lot of times they'll say, I watched your video and I felt comfortable enough to call you. So that, that is a huge thing. Do just a short 1 to 2 minute introductory video that kind of shows your personality, puts people at ease, says a little bit about what you do, and that's good. So do that. And there's, you know, just a ton of other things that you can do online, social media, all these different things. But the two biggest things is your website and your Google properties, Google assets. So make sure you've got those two things together and then you'll be doing great. And as you grow, you can add different things and you can talk to different experts, learn different things, add them as you go. So that's a great place to start.