No one of us can deny the usefulness of a website to start and develop one’s business. A website is a great marketing tool. It represents your business on the Internet and it’s one of the most important digital marketing channels you can use to get more traffic or make more sales. Every business that wants to succeed online needs to have a clearly defined website marketing strategy. This is no longer optional but a ‘must-have’ for businesses who want to survive in the highly competitive online market. In this post we will show you how to promote your website online, and boost your sales by adapting website marketing strategy into your business.
Here are guidelines to help you out in making a successful website marketing strategy step by step:
Step 1: Perform a website design review
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. Your website is the same as your shop window. It should look good on the outside and when customers enter your shop, everything should be organized and in place.
Before starting any campaigns, take some time and review your website and make sure that:
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. As a rule of thumb, any page on your site should be accessible from the homepage in 3 clicks or less.
It’s user-friendly and functional – Evaluate your website’s friendliness using the principles of SEO-friendly web design and try to remove design elements that add complexity or are not needed.
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. Make use of visual elements to get the attention of your users.
It’s fast and mobile-friendly – The majority of your users will come from mobile devices so test your website on mobile and optimize the experience of the user in the best way possible.
Step 2: Optimize your website for SEO
The next step is to start thinking about your SEO strategy. A well-defined SEO plan will eventually increase your rankings and traffic from search engines. SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engines and it consists of a number of steps:
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.
On-Page SEO – Making your web pages SEO-friendly and your content easy to read by search engine crawlers.
SEO Content – Writing content that satisfies the user’s intent.
Off-Page SEO – Promoting your website for the purpose of getting high-quality links from other websites.
Local SEO – Optimizing your website for location-aware searches and for getting more clients to your brick and mortar store.
Step 3: Optimize your website for social media
The next step is to optimize your website for social media. This is not the same as social media marketing, but it has to do with:
Having visual elements (images, video) 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. Adding the necessary open graph meta tags and using image sizes and formats supported by all major networks is recommended.
Step 4: Create a content marketing plan
The next step in your website marketing plan is to design a content marketing strategy. When you promote a website online, you essentially promote the content of your website and that’s why it is referred to as content marketing. The main purpose of content marketing is to help you create the right type of content that will attract new users to your website and keep them engaged.
To create a good strategy, you first need to:
Do your keyword research and find out which SEO keywords to target with your content.
Perform 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 (length of content, images/video, etc.).
Once you have a list of topics/keywords you should then create a content marketing calendar to specify when each piece of content will be published, who will write it, and how it will be promoted after publication. In addition, companies that manage to have an ongoing content marketing campaign, have more chances of succeeding online than companies that publish content occasionally without a plan.
Step 5: Promote your website on social media networks
Now that you have a constant flow of content being generated, the next step is to start promoting your website on different social networks.
Follow the steps below:
Create Business Accounts on Social Networks: Your first action is to create business pages in the social networks that are relevant to your business. These are the networks that your potential customers might be using. The most common suspects are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Complete your Social Profiles: Make sure that your business pages are properly configured and all information is properly filled in. Link your website and social media pages, then add links to your social pages on your website (in the footer) and also add the relevant schema (this will help search engines associate your website and the business pages together).
Grow your social media following: Having a business page with no followers does not provide any benefits to your business. You need to spend some time finding and connecting with people that might be interested in your business and also influencers in your niche.
Create a social media calendar: Social media success is based on the quality of your postings. You need to fetch your social media networks high-quality content on a regular basis. That’s the best way to get the attention of users and create an audience for your brand.
Step 6: Use Paid Ads to reach more customers
As soon as you get started with SEO and social media marketing, you’ll realize one thing. It takes time for SEO to work and to get 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 or conversions. There are various advertising platforms you can use but the most common are:
Google Ads – Target people based on the search terms they use on Google or show your ads on other Google properties (YouTube, Gmail) and websites that participate in Google AdSense.
Facebook Paid Ads – Promote your Facebook page, social media postings, or ads to people using Facebook, Instagram, or Facebook messenger.
Step 7: Utilize email marketing to engage with your audience
One of the most effective sales channels is email. In fact, one of the goals of your website marketing campaign should be to grow your email list. Having an active email list is a great way to get people back to your website, let them know of new content, or directly sell them a product. Make no mistake, email is not yet dead. To make the most of your campaigns, follow these email marketing tips:
Make it easy for users to subscribe to your list – add the newsletter sign up box in places that are visible while users are browsing the website
Give them incentives (like a free book, free resources) – Freebies can make a big difference in how many people will sign up for your newsletter
Keep your promises – if you promise weekly updates, make sure that you send an email with new tips on a weekly basis.
Don’t abuse their trust – Users trust you with their email address and while you can use automation to send personalized mass emails don’t abuse their trust. Everyone’s inbox is already full of promotional emails so think about when it’s best to send them another one.
Step 8: Use remarketing to get users back to your website
Do you know what the rule of 7 is? It’s a rather old marketing rule which states that a potential client should see or hear an ad (or message) at least 7 times before they’ll take an action to buy a product or service. This is applicable to internet marketing as well. In website marketing terms, this means you need to get users to re-visit your website a number of times before they proceed to the next step of your digital marketing funnel.
Publishing new content on a frequent basis and using social media marketing and email marketing are all great ways to achieve this but there is one more method that is highly effective and this is remarketing. With remarketing you use advertising platforms (either Google Ads, Facebook, or even Twitter) to re-connect with people that visited your website at least once. This has a number of advantages including more targeted traffic, lower advertising costs, and higher conversion rates.
Step 9: Keep your website and content up-to-date and move forward
When you do website marketing, you should not forget two important things:
First: To keep your website up-to-date. This means upgrading your website software to the latest version, ensuring that your website is secure and that is using the latest technologies.
Second: To keep your content fresh and relevant. Besides 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 become outdated and this is not good for users or search engines.
The first step of the process is to find thin content pages. These are pages that have no rankings, backlinks, or traffic. Maybe the content on those pages is good but since they don’t rank for anything, they don’t offer any real value to your website. As part of the audit, you should decide to either:
Update and republish them
Remove them and redirect the URL to other related pages on your website
Merge them with other pages
A page that has high rankings now does not mean that it will maintain those rankings forever. The competition is big and chances are that new pages are published on a daily basis targeting exactly the same topics. To make sure that you will not lose your rankings, you need to review your top pages once every few months and ensure that the content is still relevant and up-to-date.
Step 10: Measure, Analyze, Rinse 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 tools and metrics in place. In the majority of cases, you can get the data you want from Google Analytics so you need to make sure that you have Google Analytics installed on your website and properly configured.
The most common goals of a website marketing campaign are to: Get traffic to your site, and increase conversion (makes sales, get new email subscribers, etc.). These goals should be tracked in Google analytics and analyzed so that you can make the right decisions. For example, if you notice that posts covering certain topics perform better than others, you should focus your marketing efforts on creating content that is around those topics.
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