Websites are pretty much the gold standard in the world of marketing, the one-stop-shop for all product and service information, FAQs and one of your primary methods to connect with your customers. From the primary home page to the ‘Meet Us’ pages describing business owners and their history, you should rely on your website to communicate everything that makes up your brand. Not only would your ideal website capture your brand voice, assets and intention, but it should be high on every target Google SERP to attract the most visitors.
We know that’s a lot of elements to consider and quite a bit of pressure, but don’t let website marketing intimidate you. There are quite a few strategic steps you can take to optimize your content and visibility on every landing page, webinar, case study and blog.
Ready to learn more? Let’s get into it.
In this guide:
- What Is Website Marketing?
- Your Website Is Your Best Marketing Tool
- How To Promote Your Website
- Building an Effective Website Marketing Strategy
- Types of Website Marketing Services
- Content and Online Marketing
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 (SERPs) through the implementation of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, content marketing, social media engagement, and other digital and offline efforts.
In the majority of industries, pages that rank in the first SERP position get more than 50% of the traffic for their target keywords. There’s a steep drop-off for pages ranking in the second and third positions, and pages in positions 5-20 compete for less than 5% of traffic.
Properly managed, a website marketing strategy can help your business attract new customers and ultimately expand your business’s share of the market.
Your Website Is Your Best Marketing Tool
These days, your brand’s website is the primary channel in which users can learn about your brand and take actions that directly contribute to the growth of your business.
Inbound digital marketing strategies are shaped like a funnel. Your customers are on the internet, using search engines, browsing articles and using apps. It’s the job of your inbound strategy to pull people toward your website where they can read and view your content and ultimately make a purchase decision.
An optimized website provides a branded customer experience that answers questions and demonstrates the unique value of your offerings. Every aspect of your brand’s online presence radiates out from your website.
Brand Assets and eCommerce
Not only should each landing page work to attract outside visitors, but your brand assets need to work to keep them engaged. This means every header on every single landing page should be consistent with the fonts you’ve chosen, and that your online business represents your product right down to the final CTA.
Every business owner should consider how their website design works with their marketing plan, acting as the online store that many expect it to be. Think about how walking through an Apple store gives customers a minimalistic, design-forward and curated experience, and then compare it to their website — see the similarities?
Your SEO strategy shouldn’t begin and end with website promotion to social media platforms or through other internet marketing plans. We’ll get into these internal content elements a little bit later, but when it comes to internet marketing it’s always a good idea to use those brand assets to increase user experience.
Keep reading to learn more about how to maximize your website marketing strategy externally.
How To Promote Your Website
To the uninitiated, website promotion can seem like a daunting task.
With an estimated 1.6 billion registered websites in 2019 and more than 4 billion active internet users, standing out feels like an impossible task.
The good news is that there’s nothing impossible about it.
When you understand what your audience is looking for and how search engines identify quality websites, the internet is your oyster.
1. SEO
SEO is a mix of onsite and offsite metrics to help you rank. Onsite metrics include things like how seamless it is to crawl and index the various pages and elements of your site, how quickly the page loads, the absence of outdated content or broken links, etc. You can use free tools like CWVIQ to keep tabs on your core vital metrics. Offsite metrics primarily include backlinks from trusted third-party sources. This help elevate your site’s trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.
“SEO is the set of methodologies used to make websites both accessible to search engines and appealing to readers.”
Modern ranking algorithms like those used by Google are designed to sniff out dozens of signals that make websites useful and trustworthy.
Moz has done a great job summarizing the critical needs of SEO:
If you need a comparison to traditional marketing strategies, then think of SEO like supercharged business listing in a phone book. Rather than paying for a large ad in the yellow pages, SEO tactics can help your business listing reach the top of the page where interested customers can easily spot your information. When customers have a need, one of the first things they do is turn to a search engine. SEO ensures that your business is front and center, enabling a steady flow of traffic to your website.
2. Backlinks
Never forget that the web is a network, and movement between network nodes (websites) is crucial not only to digital marketing, but to the modern global economy as a whole.
If you think about website traffic as a form of currency, it makes sense that you would want to receive it from reputable sources. Just as you wouldn’t want to take money from a shady lender, you don’t want traffic from irrelevant or disreputable sources.
Backlinks – which drive traffic from another site to your own – are extremely important promotional tools. Credible backlinks signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and relevant.
3. Social Media
Nowadays, social media platforms are so numerous that marketers have their pick of strategies. From a brand’s facebook page to a company TikTok, publishing content on other sites is a powerful way to get customers clicking back to your website. There are great processes for lead generation on these sites, including using case studies, fun — and relatable — content and even memes (maybe you will even want to go the humorous, or the bizarre and eye-catching route).
4. Influencers
Influencers are connectors; they are people who have established reputations as knowledgeable experts, trendsetters and entertaining personalities. They have large audiences of social followers who enjoy the influencer’s content and actively participate in online conversations.
Influencers can help you to spread brand awareness to people who may not be exposed to your digital marketing messages in other channels. Plus, getting to know your brand through a trusted third party can accelerate movement through your sales funnel.
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Brands partner with influencers to appeal to new audience segments and extend the reach of their messages. In 2019, influencer marketing spend is predicted to more than double 2017 figures, with 69% going toward B2C campaigns.
5. Email Signatures
The average worker sends and receives 121 emails per day, so why not put those outgoing messages to work promoting your website?
Any email that comes from your brand’s domain name should include a link back to your website. That way, any reader who is interested in learning more about your offerings can easily get to your site without any extra steps.
6. Quality Content
Some have said that content marketing is the only type of marketing left. And while there’s certainly room for disagreement there, it’s true that content marketing is more relevant than ever.
Content provides site visitors with immediate value in the form of new knowledge and insights. For many visitors, it’s the sole reason to view your site. Keep in mind that web design plays an important role here. Great content surrounded by an unappealing user interface (UI) could cause potential customers to head back to the search results page before they can get to know your brand.
If you want people to stay on your site long enough to absorb your messages, you need highly engaging content.
We’ll talk more about that farther down.
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Building an Effective Website Marketing Strategy
Marketing your website effectively requires a deep understanding of several disciplines, including analytics, modern mobile technology trends, human psychology, inbound and outbound methodologies, and more.
1. Conduct a Site Analysis
Everything you do to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site should be measured. It’s the only way to know how effective your strategies are and the only way you’ll be able to identify new opportunities to attract more visitors.
For example, if you implement a content marketing strategy, you’ll want to measure traffic coming to your blog articles, the number of click-throughs each one produces, the amount of time visitors spend reading the content and more.
Thankfully, Google Analytics is free and fairly intuitive to use, though certain types of site analysis are best left to professionals.
But there is more good news: By setting up a Google Analytics account for your website and running monthly reports, you’ll be ahead of 49% of B2B marketers. 😮
2. Consider Mobile Optimization
The internet is quickly becoming a mobile-first environment.
More people are conducting searches, reading content and doing business from their smartphones every day. In Q1 2019, mobile search accounted for 64% of organic traffic, up from 57% in 2018.
In fact, Google began to use the mobile version of webpages for indexing and ranking way back in 2018.
To rank highly, webpages must be able to load fast on mobile devices and display their content in a manner that is mobile friendly. That means image optimization and dynamic site markup are essential for SEO moving forward.
Managed properly, search marketing can increase web traffic significantly without raising costs exponentially.
3. Map the User Journey
How do users move through your website?
Do they find you organically through a blog post and then browse your product pages?
What about when they arrive from your social media page?
Asking these and similar questions will inform your website design and help you develop a user experience that encourages visitors to stay longer and read more.
You may want to consider developing multiple user journeys for distinct buyer personas. Your Google Analytics dashboard can show you where users are currently leaving your site so you can optimize those pages.
In addition to thinking of site utilization as a journey your users take, consider other models, such as the marketing flywheel, that seek to build SEO momentum over time.
Conducting keyword research will help you understand how potential customers seek out information related to your offerings. This step is crucial for getting your website to rank highly in SERPs. You may be surprised to find that your customers use different words and phrases than your sales team. Understanding these fundamental differences can you craft engaging content. If your main goal is conversion optimization, you’ll need to ensure you’re hitting the right keywords at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
4. Develop Email Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most popular and useful forms of web marketing currently available.
From small businesses to the enterprise, email lists are the lifeblood of sales. They can also help you pull in returning visitors with engaging content, special promotions and more.
Cold emails – messages sent to prospects with whom you have no prior relationship – require a personal touch, and a little humor, to fully engage your target audience. Your subject lines should be eye-catching and succinct. The best strategies use content to capture visitor emails, then reinforce that relationship with additional, more relevant content.
5. Leverage PPC
Pay-per-click ads can be an effective way to drive more traffic to your site, but they require a more substantial investment.
As the name implies, businesses only pay when someone clicks on the ad.
These days, PPC is most effective when used in tandem with another effort like content marketing, because visitors need more information than can fit in an ad before they make a purchase decision. Consider targeting different audiences with unique appeals, such as calling out unique value propositions or promoting blog posts that address different audience needs.
6. Create High-Value Content
High-value web content is the opposite of fluff. It provides your audience with meaningful takeaways. Your efforts to promote your website could be in vain if visitors leave immediately. To keep them engaged, you need high quality content that educates, informs, entertains or inspires.
Often, marketing campaigns are structured around a central piece of content such as an in-depth eBook. For example, digital marketers might develop an ebook full of researched data and thought leadership. Then, they will build a campaign of blog posts, paid advertising, email drip messages to build awareness and encourage eBook downloads. Everyone who downloads the asset will provide their email address, providing the sales team with valuable new leads.
Types of Website Marketing Services
Website marketing is a full time commitment.
Brands big and small often outsource some or all of their digital marketing efforts to agencies because they lack the internal resources to run effective multichannel campaigns.
Here are some examples of what might be shopped out:
SEO
Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms that identify which webpages are most relevant to keyword phrases and various other site factors. Marketing agencies maintain an updated working knowledge of SEO best practices to ensure their clients comply with the latest standards and methodologies.
Content Production and Optimization
It’s easy to hire someone to write a few hundred words of blog copy, but marketing agencies can do so much more. Agencies will conduct market and subject matter research, develop written and visual content, promote web content and update assets as needed.
Email Marketing
Though many aspects of email marketing campaigns can be automated with the right technology, someone still needs to write and format engaging content. Agencies can help businesses develop and implement end-to-end email campaigns based around unique campaign objectives.
Managed PPC
Marketing agencies can help businesses create PPC campaigns with eye-catching headlines and text. Consultants can fully manage bidding strategies to maximize the reach and ROI of every campaign.
Content and Online Marketing
Content marketing and website marketing go hand in hand.
Once you’ve attracted readers through your promotional efforts, you need something for them to engage with. After all, if users come to your site only to find a few paragraphs of sales messages, they’re likely to bounce.
However, when relevant users come to your site and find useful information, they’ll not only stick around to read it, but they will also be more likely to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter or contacting your sales team.
Content Development and Publication Requires a Scientific Approach
The content you publish on your site needs to be highly relevant to your readers’ needs; it also needs to be visually interesting and easy to parse. Indeed, there are so many factors at play, and site owners need to take a scientific approach to content production and publication.
Considering 1.2% of all indexed pages are responsible for 68% of all website traffic, it should be clear why a scientific approach is necessary to attract people to your site.
The best content marketers consider many things when approaching every piece of content, including:
- Target audience: Who will get the most use out of the content? What are their pain points? Where are they in the buying process? What content formats do they prefer? What social media marketing channels do they respond to?
- Commercial goals: What conversion action should readers take? How can we measure the impact of our content?
- Keywords: Does the content use language that users actually search for? Do pages competing for similar keywords offer greater depth and breadth of subject matter expertise?
- Tone and branding: Does the content conform to the brand voice?
- Visuals: Does the imagery and typography reflect the brand? Does it align with the written content?
In addition to these considerations, content marketers also think strategically about which platforms to publish content to, what social channels to promote that content on, the best time of day to publish content and much more.
Your website is probably the most important and powerful marketing tool you have. With plenty of care and strategic thinking, it can become your biggest source of business growth. Take what you’ve learned here and put it to good use. Let us know how it goes in the comments!
Editor’s Note: Updated February 2022.
