Website Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

You finally launched your website. Congratulations!

You held a photoshoot, worked with one of the best designers that the industry has to offer, and even reviewed your content. 

And now, the day has finally come. You’re ready to wow your customers by launching your fresh new website.

You can then sit back and relax as you wait for new customers to come and find you.

Well, not quite right. 

Launching a new website can be exciting, but your work is just beginning. What you have is a mere product. What lies ahead is the challenge of driving new, qualified traffic to it.

We’re talking about website marketing. 

A nicely designed website won’t do your business any good if your prospective customers aren’t going to find it. 

You need a well-thought-out website marketing strategy, and luckily for you, that’s what we’re here to help you out with today.

But before we get into that, we’d like to walk you through the basics first.  

What’s Website Marketing? 

Website marketing is the process of strategically promoting your business website with the sole aim of bringing in qualified visitors. 

The goal is to attract users who have shown interest in your products or services, either by searching for them online or by interacting with a similar brand.

You need a consistent flow of traffic to your website, which translates to more opportunities to place your value proposition in front of your target audience. 

The ultimate goal is to get your website to the first page of search engine results. 

Why is Website Traffic Important?

The more people visit your website, the more customers you’ll get. 

Your number of website visitors translates to the number of opportunities your business has at generating qualified leads, giving an impression, building relationship, and sharing your brand.

The relationships you build and the trust you gain in the process will ultimately help you gain more customers and grow your business. 

It goes beyond making more money. More website traffic will also help you grow your business, open more locations, expand your product line, and ultimately develop more products and services. 

Why Do You Need a Website Marketing Strategy?

Here are three reasons your business needs a well-thought-out website marketing strategy:

• It’s Not Just About SEO and social media

The first thing that comes to mind when someone talks about website marketing is SEO. Some marketers may choose to throw in social media, and that’s it.  

But in reality, website marketing has more pillars than that, including content marketing, email marketing, SEO, PPC Ads, and more. 

A well-thought-out website marketing strategy will help you utilize all the available channels for promoting your website.

It’s Your Online Strategy

Your website is to you online what your physical store or shop is to you offline.

Until you bring yourself to sit down and write a good website marketing strategy that includes your business goals and how you’re going to achieve them, then all the effort and resources that you’ve used on your website amounts to naught.

You need a website marketing strategy and plan to understand what tools to use, how exactly you should be using them, and what results are realistic enough for you to expect.  

A good plan will also make it easy for you to communicate your website goals within your organization so that all the departments remain aligned with your overall marketing strategy.

Your competitors are Doing It

Sooner or later every single one of the businesses you compete with will get into the website marketing game. Sorry to say but when they do, they’ll make things even tougher for you.

To stay ahead of the game, you can have your headstart today. It’s time you took online promotion seriously, and what better way is there to start than to work on a well-thought-out website marketing strategy. 

What’s a Website Marketing Strategy?

A website marketing strategy can be defined as a detailed plan to reach your business goals based on your website’s performance.

For instance, let’s say you have people who visit your website to book you for a free consultation. Sadly, you haven’t done enough to attract that many visitors. 

So, you embark on a website marketing campaign focused on getting more people to visit your website.

Here are some of the things a website marketing strategy can include:

• Search engine optimization so that people can find you whenever they search for you or any of your products or solutions online
• Blogging 
• Running a social media contest or giveaway
• Promoting your website in your email newsletter or on social media
• Offering a downloadable education resource, such as eBook, whitepaper, or an ultimate guide for something
• Offering other downloadable sales resources such as posters or brochures
• Offering a sales demo or webinar
• Offering information about your services in a blog post or article
• Running social media ads (on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter). 
• Retargeting those who visit your website and bounce off without taking any action.

You can write an eBook to discuss solutions to some of the problems that your customers have. After that, you want to use a page-building tool such as Instapage to create a landing page for collecting email addresses from your customers before they’re allowed to download your eBook. 

The eBook could be about anything, like “How to Get your First 10K Followers on Instagram.” 

Use bold graphics to explain your key selling points.

The Best Website Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is the best strategy for marketing your website online. All you need to do is create content such as blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.

For starters, content marketing is a timeless marketing tactic that introduces you to new customers and establishes you as an expert in your field. 

The more your content is shared online, the more exposure you gain. 

Content marketing goes beyond getting people to your website.

How to Market Your Website with No Experience

You can start by creating content that your potential customers would want to read. 

On top of that, develop a plan on how you’re going to reach people outside your existing audience. 

You don’t want to keep on emailing your email newsletter subscribers or relentlessly post on your social media account.

Instead, think about how you’re going to get your content in front of an entirely new audience that has never heard about your business or brand. That’s where a website marketing strategy comes in handy.

How to Create a Website Marketing Strategy

You have a pretty slick website. But is the website getting as much traffic as you’d like it too?

If not, follow this guide to create a website marketing strategy to help you drive in more potential customers:

Step 1: Perform a Detailed Website Design Review

You first have to analyze your website and make sure that it accurately represents your business.

We’re not just talking about the visual aspect of the website, but its functionality and the quality of information it carries.

Your website should look exactly like your shop. Your homepage is like your shop windows, and the different product pages the aisle. 

Your shop must look good from outside, and when your customers enter the shop. 

Everything must look organized.

So, before you start any marketing campaign, take some time to go through your website design and review everything. You want to make sure the website meets the following requirement:  

• Has a Simple Hierarchical Structure: A simple hierarchical site structure is convenient for both the user and search engines. 

It makes it easy for them to navigate your website and find the information they want. 

The general rule of thumb is that it shouldn’t take more than three clicks to access any page or information from your homepage. 

• Functional and User-friendly: Do you know the six principles of an SEO-friendly site design? Well, you have to evaluate your website for every single one of them:

• Accessibility
• Site structure
• URL structure
• User experience
• On-page SEO 
• Internal link structure

Note that Google doesn’t care about your site’s looks or color scheme. After all, visual design is subjective and only important to you.

Google is only interested in how the site is structured. How easy is it for search engines to crawl and index the site? 

How easy is it for the user to access its content?

Most importantly, does the site provide the right ranking signals? 

• Accurate Information: Your company website must be as accurate as possible with every little piece of information it gives, starting with your “about us” and product details. 

Where possible, use visual elements to grab your users’ attention. 

Your website must also provide all the necessary information about your company or products. 

• Fast and Mobile Friendly: It turns out, a majority of the users you’re likely to get will be accessing your website from a mobile device. 

So, be sure to test your website for speed and responsiveness. Make sure the website is fast, on top of offering the best mobile experience. 

Step 2: Optimize the Site for Search Engines

It’s hard to think about marketing your website without considering SEO. You need a well-defined SEO strategy to propel your site through the search engine ranks and get your search engine traffic to swell. 

SEO can be defined as the practice of increasing your search engine visibility. 

It’s a wide concept, consisting of the following components:

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO prepares your site for search engine bots. It includes all the things that you do to your website to make it more crawlable and easy to index. 

It tries to eliminate crawling or indexing issues on your site.  

• On-page SEO: While technical SEO focuses on making your website more crawlable and easy to index, on-page focuses on making your website more readable for the user and search engine crawlers. 

It restores the balance. 

•  SEO Content: Your website will also require SEO content. 

SEO content refers to any content you have on your site that satisfies the user’s intent.

• Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO covers the link-building aspect of your website. It’s where you specifically promote your website content to get high-quality links from other relevant websites. 
• Local SEO: As the name suggests, local SEO focuses on getting your website ranked for location-aware search. It’s where you get more customers or clients to come to your physical, brick-and-mortar store. 
• Modern SEO: SEO continues to evolve. In addition to performing all the above SEO practices, you might also want to optimize your site for modern SEO, like optimizing your website content for rich snippets and adding schema markup. 

Step 3: Create a Content Marketing Strategy

A content marketing strategy will help you create content that your customers might be interested in reading. 

Here are two things you should do when creating a content strategy:

• Research on the keywords that your customers use when searching for your products or solutions online
• Make sure your website is among the results that show up in the search results that show. 

Before you do any of this, it’s important that you first try to understand who you want to sell to. What problems do they have and how do they relate to your business?

Who’s Your Target Audience?

You obviously aren’t targeting random people online. You’re eyeing a specific type of audience.  

The last thing you want is to pour your hard work into attracting people who aren’t even remotely interested in what you’re offering.

You can create buyer personas for each audience group you’re targeting. Read this article to find out more about buyer personas:

• The Role of Buyer’s Personas and The Buyer’s Journey in Your E-Commerce Success

You’ll also need to research your audience. Here are a few research options you have:

• Check Out Who’s Already Visiting your website

Before you start digging for more information on your target customers, look into your existing customers to find out more about who they really are or what drives them. 

Here are the tools to use:

Google Analytics (GA): GA has a lot of data on your current customers. But it can be a hard tool to learn if you’re new to this whole online marketing thing.

It’s a free tool with a steep learning curve. Just give yourself enough time to try and understand it.

W3 Counter: W3 is a free alternative to Google Analytics. You can use the tool to find out the following: 

• Your visitors’ location
• How did they find your website?
• What content do they check out the most when they visit your website? 

For instance, you can check the audience report to find out where your site’s visitors are located (like what state or city they’re coming from) and what language do they primarily speak. 

Snoop Online Groups and Forums

Start spending time in the online groups and forums commonly frequented by your customers.

Listen to their problems to understand the nature of their problems. Write down the issues you see, as well as some of the words they commonly use.

Here are a few places to start:

• Facebook groups
• Quora
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Amazon reviews
• Google business reviews
• Angie’s List
• LinkedIn Groups

Step 4: Optimise Your Site for social media

The next thing you want to do is optimize your site for social media.  Note that this isn’t the same as running a social media marketing campaign (more on that later). 

Rather, it’s about making a few necessary tweaks to your website to make it more social media-friendly.

It basically calls for you to do the following:

• Creating visuals elements such as videos and images on your website that you’ll be sharing on social media
• Adding social share buttons to your website pages
• Making sure that the generated snippet when a user clicks on your share button or opts to share your URL directly is well-formatted. 

This may mean adding all the necessary open graph meta tags, using the right image sizes, and using the right format for all the social media networks.

This might be the most overlooked aspect of marketing your website, and one that could negatively affect your social media marketing efforts if not done right.

Step 5: Promote Your Website on social media

After optimizing your website for social media, the next thing to do would be to go ahead and promote it on different social media networks.

Here are the steps to follow:

• Create Business Accounts on all the Major Social Media Networks

You can begin by identifying all the social media networks you suspect your target audience can be found. The next thing you want to do is go to each of these social media networks and create a business account (not a personal account, get the difference). 

Start with the social media networks that you’re sure your prospective customers can be found. The most common suggestions include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedln, and Pinterest. 

• Complete Your Profiles on Each of these Accounts: Complete what you started. 

Carefully fill in all the required information. You also want to make sure all your business pages are well-configured.

• Link Your Website to the Social Media Pages: Figure out how to link each of the social media pages to your website. Remember to also add your social media links to your website (especially in the footer).

You also want to add the relevant schema so that search engines start associating the pages with your website. 

• Grow Your social media Following: It hurts your image to only have a handful of followers on social media. So, figure out how to increase your list of followers.

We’re not talking about buying fake followers. But organically growing them from scratch by running a series of promotions. 

• • You need to find and connect with people who might be interested in what you’re offering. 
  • Remember to also run a series of ads targeted at getting more people to follow you. Even more important, try to identify the influencers in your niche and see if you can partner with a few of them. 

• Create a Social Calendar: Your social media success, for the most part, depends on the quality of your posts. 

You need to master the art of curating high-quality content for your social media campaign. 

Focus on growing a relevant brand audience, one that’s interested in what you’re offering. 

Be sure to create a social calendar, where you specify the type of content to post and when to post it.

While at it, you want to remember the 80/20 rule, which dictates that only 20% of your content should be promotional, whereas the rest should be focused on educating, informing, and generally offering value to the user.

Step 6: Run Paid Ads to Reach an Even Bigger Audience

As you’re soon to find out, it takes time for social media marketing and SEO to yield tangible results.

For SEO, you have to give search engines time to crawl, index, and rank your website. Depending on how competitive your industry is, it can take up to 12 months for your SEO effort to pay off.

It’s the same with social media. Growing a decent following on social media doesn’t happen overnight. 

So, be prepared to see your followers grow in drips, and that’s with you doing the right thing.

The only way to generate faster results is to add more ingredients into your website marketing strategy, such as paid advertising.

Paid advertising allows you to speed things up. Get the results you want faster. It an excellent strategy for getting people to convert and purchase your products almost immediately.

Here are a few advertising platforms to start with:

Google Ads:  Google Ads allow you to target search engine users based on the queried search terms, especially those with commercial intent. You can use Google Ads to display your ads on Google, YouTube, Gmail, and all the websites that are signed up with Google AdSense. 

Facebook Paid Ads: You can run paid ads on Facebook. You can run the ads to promote your Facebook page or post on either Facebook or Instagram, if not both.

Both of these two advertising options are effective at promoting your website. But you want to analyze the results generated by each to understand which advertising option generates the best results. 

Start with a low advertising budget as you measure the effectiveness of each campaign and work on drawing the most value from your advertising campaign. 

Step 7: Use Email Marketing to Engage Your Existing Audience

Not every visitor you get will convert.

But the fact that they found their way to your website shows that they’re (even remotely) interested in what you’re offering.

Email marketing allows you to collect your visitors’ contact details so that you can follow them up and gradually reel them in until they’re warm enough to make a purchase.

It’s a great sales generation strategy that you certainly don’t want to miss.

If anything, one of your website marketing goals should be to grow your email list.

Maintaining an active email list is one of the strategies that companies use to get people back to their website, inform them of new website content and directly sell to them.

Email marketing is far from being dead, and you’ll be doing your business a huge disserve by not running with it. 

To make the most out of your email marketing campaign, here are a few tips you might want to observe:

• Try to Make it as Easy as Possible for Your Site’s Visitors to Subscribe to Your Email List

You first have to make the signup box or form easy to spot when someone lands on your website.

Place it where it can be easily seen. You also want to minimize the information that you collect from them. Stick with what’s relevant and useful to you and leave the rest out. 

• Offer them an Irresistible Incentive: It’s quid pro quo. You have to give your visitors an incentive they can’t resist to get them to willingly hand in their contact details. You’re simply appreciating them for their time and willingness to heed your call.

You can offer them a free eBook or any other free resource. Another approach would be to grant them access to your premium content.

The freebie you choose will determine how many of your site visitors agree to sign up for your newsletter. 

• Make True of All Your Promises: Make true of all your promises. If you promise your visitors weekly updates, don’t be tempted to send them more than two emails a week or to skip a week or two before sending them. 

Discipline is of the essence here. 

• Don’t Take Your Visitors’ Trust for Granted: Your site visitors trust you enough to hand you their contact details. The only reason they’re doing this is that they know you’re a credible brand they can trust.

The last thing you want is to start swarming their already busting inboxes with promotional emails. 

You also don’t want to betray their trust by selling or transferring their emails to a third party, unless they agree to it.

Step 8: Use Remarketing to Bring Back Customers to Your Site

By now you should have heard about rule 7. 

It goes like this: a potential customer or client has to see your ad or read your marketing message at least seven times before they can make up their mind and decide to buy from you. 

In website marketing that may be translated to mean potential customers have to revisit your website a couple of times before they can proceed with any action.

In other words, you’re not going to get your site visitors to convert the first time they land on your site. A few may, but it’s highly unlikely that that will be the case with many of them. 

Publishing a new post every now and then on your blog and social media might get quite a good number of them to proceed with the intended action, but there’s one highly effective method that you’ll just have to throw into the mix – and that’s, remarketing. 

Remarketing allows you to use advertising platforms such as Google, Facebook, or Twitter to reconnect with people that have visited your site at least once and left without taking action. 

Remarketing campaigns are recommended because of their higher conversion rates, lower advertising costs, and how targeted the generated traffic tends to be. 

Step 9: Keep Your Content Fresh and Your Website Updated

When marketing your website, two things are important:

• Your Website Must Stay Up to Date

Your website must always be updated to the latest software. This will not only ensure its security but that it’s also running on the latest technologies. 

We suggest you consider using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

To find out more about Accelerated Mobile Pages, here’s an article you want to read: 

How Does Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) Affect SEO?

• Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant

Your work doesn’t end with you publishing a new post. It helps to develop a habit of going back to your old posts to update them where necessary and make sure every single one of them is relevant to your readers.

The more your website grows, the more your content becomes outdated, and the more their ranks plummets.

You can begin by identifying thin content pages or pages with no traffic, backlinks, or traffic. Find out why this is so.

It could be that these pages are really good, but they’re not ranking for anything because they’re not offering any value to your website. 

During the auditing process, here’s what you can do to those pages: 

• You can update them and republish
• Remove them and redirect their links to related pages
• Merge them with your other pages

Next, use Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) reports to find out how the different web pages are performing. What pages do your site visitors frequent the most?

Bear in mind that a page that ranks high today might not maintain the same rank tomorrow. 

Your competitors are also working hard to claim the same spot, and the only way to beat them is to always update your posts and try as much as you can to get more sites to link back to them. 

Step 10: Track, Measure, and Analyse

Everything is measurable in the world of digital marketing. 

With the right tools, you can monitor your results to see if you have made any real progress. 

You should begin by installing Google Analytics. Go through its data and analyse everything to see if you’re headed in the right direction.

Here are the two most important goals to track:

• Your website traffic: How many people is your website attracting?
• Increased Conversion: How many sales have made so far? How many people opted into your email campaign?

Google Analytics will be tracking all these goals for you, and it’s upon you to figure out what to do with the information provided. 

For instance, if writing about a particular topic generates the best results, then perhaps you should consider directing more of your marketing effort to writing about that topic.