A website is a great marketing tool as it represents your business on the Internet. It is also one of the most important digital marketing channels you can use to get more traffic or sales.
For a business that wants to succeed online, a clearly defined website marketing strategy is needed in place. A website marketing strategy is crucial to those that wish to survive in the highly competitive online market.
What is website marketing?
Website marketing is the strategic promotion of a website to drive relevant traffic to the site. The goal is typically to attract people who may be interested in a company’s products or services. More traffic coming to a site means more opportunities to put your value proposition in front of potential customers.
The goal of most website marketing strategies is to rank highly in search engine results pages through the implementation of search engine optimization tactics, content marketing, social media engagement, and other digital marketing efforts.
Why is website marketing important?
- Your website is your digital shop window.
No matter what your content marketing, inbound marketing or outbound marketing strategy is, the success or failure of it will boil down to the design, prowess, and intuitiveness of the website it draws people towards. - It’s how people find you.
When someone arrives at your site for the first time, it takes under two-tenths of a second for that visitor to form an opinion of the website, and, by association of the brand it represents. - Your website serves to legitimize your existence in the market.
Beyond getting found and creating a good and lasting first impression, your website serves to legitimize your existence in the market. Whether that happens to be true or not often doesn’t matter, for what does matter is the lasting impression that your website leaves with your potential customers. A good website markets a good brand.
Here are 8 steps to follow for a successful website marketing strategy:
1. Perform a website design review
Your website is your digital shop window which is why the first step is to create a website that accurately represents your business. This is not directly related to the visual aspect of it but on the quality of the information provided. Everything on your website should be organized and in place.
Here are a few points to keep in mind while reviewing your website design:
- It is user friendly and functional – Evaluate your website’s friendliness and try to remove design elements that add complexity or are not needed.
- It’s fast and mobile-friendly – The majority of your users come from mobile devices so test your website on mobile devices and further optimize your site speed for better user experience.
- It has a simple hierarchical site structure – A good site structure helps both users and search engines navigate a website to easily find the information they need.
- It has accurate information about your company and products – Make sure that it provides users with everything they need to know about your company and products. Use infographics and other visual elements to get the attention of your users.
2. Optimize your website for SEO
The next time is to optimize your website for SEO as a well-defined SEO strategy will help increase your search engine rankings and organic traffic from search engines.
SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engines and it consists of a number of aspects, namely:
- On-Page SEO – Making your web pages SEO friendly and your content easy to read by search engine crawlers.
- Off-Page SEO – Promoting your website for the purpose of getting high-quality backlinks from other websites.
- Technical SEO – Making sure that your website is free of crawl errors and other issues that might keep search engines from indexing your website properly.
- Local SEO – Optimizing your website for location-aware searches and for getting more clients to your brick and mortar store.
- Content SEO – If you want your business to grow, you need to make sure you write SEO-friendly content. Optimizing for search engines and user experience is one of the most important things you can do for your content, as search engine optimized websites with authority and a good backlink profile rank higher.
3. Create a content marketing plan
When you promote a website online, you essentially promote the content that is present on your website which is why it is referred to as content marketing.
Now the main purpose of content marketing is to help you create the right type of content that will attract new as well as existing users to your website and keep them engaged.
To create a good strategy here are a few things to note:
- Undertake keyword research in order to discover keyword opportunities that can generate massive traffic and sales for your business.
- Perform a competitor analysis and find out what is working for your competitors.
- Analyze Google search results to find out what type of content Google wants for your target keywords
4. Optimize your website for Social Media and promote your website on social media
In optimizing for social media a webmaster should keep in mind the following:
- Having visual elements on your website that can be shared on social media networks.
- Adding social media sharing buttons on the pages you want to be shared on social networks.
- Making sure that when a user clicks the share button or shares your URL directly, the generated snippet is well-formatted.
In order to start promoting your website on different social networks follow the steps below:
- Create business accounts across social networking sites.
- Ensure that your profile information is complete.
- Link your website and social media pages
- Grow your following by interacting with your users and keeping them engaged with relevant and interesting posts and updates.
- Ensure quality in your postings, by starting to create a social media calendar and by defining the type of content you want to publish and when.
5. Use paid ads to reach more customers
Once you get started with SEO and social media marketing, you’ll realize one thing and that is that it takes time for SEO to work and to get to a decent number of followers on social media organically.
This means that if you want results faster, you need to add one more ingredient to your website marketing and that is paid advertising.
With paid advertising, you can get targeted traffic fast and start making sales and conversions. There are various advertising platforms you can use but the most common are:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
6. Use remarketing to get users back to your website
How you set up your remarketing campaign depends on your business goals and the types of customers that you’d like to reach.
With remarketing you can use advertising platforms to re-connect with users that have visited your website once already through mediums such as Google ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
This has a number of advantages including more targeted traffic, lower advertising costs, and higher conversion rates.
7. Keep your website content up-to-date
There are two things to keep in mind in website marketing, that are crucial to your success:
- To keep your website up to date.
Upgrading your website software to the latest version, ensuring that your website is on a secure server and that is using the latest technologies is crucial. - To keep your content fresh and relevant.
Aside from publishing new content targeting specific keywords and increasing your organic reach, you also need to go back and audit your existing content.
As your website gets bigger and older, some of your content will go outdated and this is not good for users or search engines. The first step of the process is to find thin content pages. (pages that have no rankings, backlinks or traffic.) When that happens you can do one of the three things:- Update and republish them.
- Remove them and redirect the URL to other related pages on your website.
- Merge them with other pages.
8. Measure, analyze and repeat
No marketing strategy is complete without proper monitoring. In the digital marketing world, everything can be measurable and analyzed so it’s important to have the right SEO tools and metrics in place.
In most cases, you can get the data you want from Google Analytics so it is integral to have it installed on your website and properly configured.
The most common goals of a website marketing campaign are to:
- Get traffic to your site.
- Increase conversion
Whatever your goals for your website might be, your goals should be tracked in analytics and analyzed so that you can make the right decisions.
Conclusion
Your website is probably the most important and powerful marketing tool you have. With plenty of care and strategic planning, it can become your biggest source of business growth. Take what you learned here and grow your business to great heights. If you need help, we at Social Pill are happy to do so.
