The SiteRoot team7 min read
You pressed publish. The site is up, it has your name on it, and there is a strange flat feeling about an hour later when nothing at all has happened.
Nothing was going to happen. A website is not a switch that starts a queue of customers. It is somewhere for people to land when they go looking for you, and the work in the first week is making sure they can land there and that everything pointing at you actually points at the new address. Four things: prove it works from the outside, put the address everywhere your business already appears, claim your map listing, and tell the people who already know you.
None of it is marketing in the expensive sense. It is an afternoon of unglamorous admin that decides whether the site earns anything.
Day one: prove it works from the outside
You have been looking at this site in a preview on your own machine for a week, which is the worst possible vantage point. Check it the way a stranger meets it.
- Open it on your phone with wifi off, on mobile data.
- Type the address without www, then with www. Both have to work.
- Tap the phone number and confirm the call screen comes up.
- Fill in the enquiry form as a customer and confirm the email lands in an inbox you read, not in spam.
- Look for the padlock in the address bar.
- Hand your phone to somebody else and ask them to find your prices, or your suburbs, or your hours. Watch where they look. Do not help.
That last one is worth more than any other check. You cannot un-know your own site, and thirty seconds of watching a real person hunt for something tells you what a month of staring at it will not.
Week one: put the address everywhere you already exist
This is the highest value hour in the entire launch, and it is almost always the part people skip because it is boring.
Most of your early visitors will not be strangers who searched. They will be people who already heard your name, from a neighbour, a sign, an invoice, a group post, and went looking to check you out. Every place your business name already appears needs the address next to it.
- Your Google Business Profile, in the website field.
- Your Facebook page: the website field, the bio, and a pinned post.
- Instagram bio, LinkedIn, any social account you actually use.
- Your email signature, on every device, including the phone one that says "sent from my iPhone".
- Invoices, quote templates and receipts.
- The van, the ute, the trailer, the shopfront, the A-frame.
- Business cards, flyers, and the magnet you hand out.
- Your voicemail greeting. "Leave a message, or everything is on our website at..."
- Any trade directory or association listing you already pay for.
- Supplier and stockist pages that list you as a local installer.
- The sponsor board at the footy club, the school newsletter, the community noticeboard.
Work through it as a list in one sitting. It takes about an hour.
Claim your Google Business Profile
If you serve customers in a specific area, this is the single most useful free thing you can do after the website itself, and a lot of small businesses either have not claimed theirs or claimed it in 2018 and never went back.
It is the listing with the map pin, the hours and the reviews. Claiming it is free, and verification usually involves a code by post, phone or video. Once you are in, fill in everything: the right category, your service area or address, your hours including public holidays, your phone number, and the link to your new website. Add real photos of your work, not stock ones.
Two rules about reviews, and the second is not optional. Ask real customers, at the moment they are happy, in person or with a short message. And never write reviews for yourself or have staff or family write them. Fake reviews are misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law, the ACCC takes them seriously, and businesses have been penalised for it. Reply to the reviews you get, including the ones you did not enjoy, because the reply is read by everyone who comes after.
Tell the people who already know you
One message, not a campaign.
Your existing customers, your suppliers, the trades you subcontract to, the local community group if it allows it. Say the website is up, say what is on it, and say the thing that is actually useful to them: prices, hours, the form for booking, whatever they would have rung you about.
Do not announce a relaunch or apologise for how long it took. Nobody was waiting. Just make it easy for the people who already trust you to send your address to someone else, because that is the mechanism that actually moves in month one.
What to expect in the first month, honestly
Search engines have to find the site, read it, and work out what it is about. That takes weeks rather than hours, and nobody can promise you a position in a result for anything, us included.
What you can expect is smaller and more reliable. People who already know your name now find something when they check. Enquiries that used to arrive by phone during business hours start arriving at 10pm. And the questions callers ask get shorter, because the page answered the first three.
In the meantime, the address-everywhere list above is what brings people, not the search engines. Month one is your own network, month six is everything else.
What to watch, and what to ignore
Watch three things:
- Enquiries, and whether you answered them fast. Speed of reply beats almost everything else in a small local business.
- Phone calls, and what people say when they ring. Add one question to every call: how did you find us? Two weeks of that is worth more than any dashboard.
- What people could not find. If three callers ask a question your site answers, the site answers it in the wrong place.
Ignore, for now: visitor counts, bounce rates, and any number that goes up and down without telling you what to do next. In the first month the numbers are too small to mean anything, and treating them as a scoreboard is how people talk themselves into rebuilding a site that was fine.
The three month job
Put a date in the calendar for twelve weeks out, and do three things.
Update anything that has changed, especially prices and hours. Add answers to the questions you have been asked most on the phone since launch, in the customer's words. And replace the two weakest images with real photos of your own work, which you now have three months more of.
That is the whole maintenance rhythm. It is not a content strategy and it does not need to be.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
Some of the launch list is handled for you and it is worth knowing which, so you do not do it twice.
The file that tells search engines which pages exist is refreshed every time you publish, and there is an llms.txt file, which is a plain-language summary of your business that AI tools can read directly rather than infer. Your phone number is a tap-to-call link and your enquiry form emails your own inbox. We watch whether the site is up and whether the certificate behind the padlock is close to expiring, which are the two things that break silently.
What is not handled for you, and we would rather say so plainly, is everything in the middle of this post. Claiming the map listing, asking for reviews, putting the address on the van: that is yours. We are self-serve software, not a marketing agency, and the hour of admin above is the hour that decides whether the rest of it matters.
Do the list. Then go back to work.
