If you are looking at launching a corporate blog for SEO purposes, you likely understand that the quality of the writing is critical to its success. You need to move beyond bland SEO copywriting and create content that is unique, educational and helps readers understand the industry that your business is in. But having a successful corporate blog is about more than just the content. Much of your blog’s success will depend on the four steps you take before you write a single word of copy.

Branding: You want your blog to be memorable so that people come back to it. Along with creating compelling content, you can do this with the branding of your blog. Come up with a creative name that goes beyond COMPANY NAME Blog. Create a logo that is fun and will tell readers what to expect from your blog. Use color schemes in the design that are eye-catching (and match your corporate branding if you do this). You can often do this while choosing the theme of your blog if you are using a popular blogging service such as WordPress.

Develop a Content Strategy: Depending on your line of business, you might be overwhelmed with potential blog post ideas or trying to figure out how to create content on a regular basis. Having a content strategy in place from the beginning will help you determine the right topics to pursue with your writing. Do research on the content already on your site to see what topics, keywords or types of content is most popular with your visitors. You can use this as a guide to help you determine where to focus your blog writing energy.

Build Social Media Hooks Into Your Blog: If you want your blog posts to spread and potentially “go viral,” you need to give readers a way to share them. Making it easy for readers to share links to your blog posts via social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit is a must. Make sure that every post ends with a way for people to share your story with one click – there are several services you can use to automatically generate this at the end of each post. It’s also important to give readers a way to subscribe to your blog so they automatically receive new blog posts.

Set the Tone of Your Blog: As much of the success of your blog will come down to how you say something versus what exactly you are saying. The tone of your blog should match the expectations of your readers. If your company is a retail business selling fun items, you can have a quirky, humorous tone that will get people to laugh. Blogs that are aimed toward a more technical audience will need to be drier and be straightforward. No matter what your tone is, the blog needs to provide useful and educational information about your products and your industry.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

Although some people are unfamiliar with A/B testing, it’s actually a very simple concept to grasp. It’s a frequent tool used in landing page optimization to test potential changes to your existing home page. In this version of landing page testing, visitors potentially see one of two pages: the current one or the new, experimental page. This gives you the ability to get real-world data in a short amount of time to determine which page works better and the strengths and weaknesses of various elements of your site.

Even people who understand what A/B testing is all about often don’t do it frequently enough. Often it’s something that is done when a website first launches or a business first undertakes a campaign of optimizing landing pages. However, what they don’t realize is that A/B testing can be a powerful tool throughout the life cycle of your website. In an article at Quick Sprout, Neil Patel recommends running an A/B test at least every one to two months for websites with more than 10,000 monthly visitors. Patel runs A/B testing twice a month for his business and claims that one out of every four test yields results that increase landing page conversion rates by 20 percent.

A/B testing isn’t just for elements on your website. You can also perform basic tests on the ads as part of your PPC advertising campaigns. Even if your Pay Per Click advertising campaigns are having success at the moment, this doesn’t mean that they are as successful as they could be. Trying out new elements in your campaign and comparing them to your existing elements can help you to understand what is working and what can work better. It doesn’t have to be a major overhaul – according to Patel, even some minor tweaks can provide major benefits to your Pay Per Click advertising conversion rates.

Here are three tips from Patel that you’ll want to consider during A/B testing:

People Love Free Things: Simply adding the word “free” to your advertising can have a huge impact on click-through rates. People are attracted to the concept of getting something for nothing and generally want to read more if something is offered to them for free. If you are already using “free” in your PPC ads, consider highlighting the word through colors, font or sizes.

Place a Value on Your Free Things: People also want to know just what a great bargain they are getting. If you can, make sure you place a dollar amount on the value of the free item or service you are “giving away” on your site.

People Also Love Videos: Many people will click on a video to learn the same information available in text form on a website. Simple videos can be cheap to produce with a provider of PPC advertising services but pay huge dividends.