Marketers are constantly looking for new ways to engage with their audience.
The internet allows marketers to reach a wider audience, but it also provides many distractions that can make it difficult to keep the user’s attention on your website.
To help get you started with creating engaging content that drives results, we put together 10 tips for making a website for marketers.
The first thing you want to do is identify who will be using your site, the purpose of the site, and what they expect from it.
Then use this information as a guide when deciding how best to present relevant content in an accessible way.
One way that has grown in popularity over the years is through content marketing.
Content marketing is when you create and share relevant, useful information with your target audience in order to establish yourself as an authority on a particular topic or niche.
It’s not about pushing sales at your customers, but rather giving them something they really want – information!
If done correctly, this can lead to increased trust and loyalty from your followers which will result in more traffic to your site and even better conversions.
You’ve got an awesome business website, but would you know if it was up to snuff?
Even with a stellar design and great content, there are still elements of your site that need improvement.
Ready to get started?
Be sure to check back next week when we’ll share another must-have element list for business websites!
Follow this checklist and swim in a bigger pond!
Planning Your Website
This is about setting your site up properly so that you can:
Maximize your online profile
Generate high converting traffic
Measure and tune your traffic and website for optimal sales
I am going to try and keep this as brief as possible, creating a simple checklist of the major areas you and your site designer should be aware of.
The Checklist
1. Keyword Research
Proper keyword research is essential upfront, and will help you:
- Find search phrases used by customers
- Define market niches and relative competition
- Develop your search engine marketing program
One of the best tools is the Google Keyword Tool – and it’s free!
2. Assess Competitors and Similar Sites
You can learn a lot from looking at the websites of your competitors and related businesses.
- What strategies are they using to find customers and close sales
- What other websites link to them?
- How do they rank for relevant keywords?
Here is a list of free tools.
The paid service we use is Raven Tools.
Raven provides an excellent framework for competitor research.
A terrific feature is the side-by-side search engine rankings for any sites you want to compare.
3. Your Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress CMS is free.
It is state-of-art, with the greatest adoption rate of any CMS in the world.
There is a huge range of free and paid plug-ins available.
They cover everything from SEO, to ecommerce and social media.
As WordPress is everywhere, support is easy to find.
It is best to go for a self-hosted WordPress website so that you have all options available and are not dependant on any third party.
It is relatively easy to move or upgrade your hosting arrangements.
If you are using another CMS it needs to be a mainstream one such as Joomla or Drupal, otherwise you may be at a tactical disadvantage in the SEO and content publishing war.
Go to WordPress.org for more info.
WordPress design and layout are determined by templates called themes.
One of the most popular and professional is the Thesis Theme.
It is not free but favored by many as it is highly customizable – even by non-web designers.
4. Domain Name, Hosting, Security
Web hosting is something of a commodity, but you get what you pay for.
Avoid the cheapies – you will need good technical support and a fast server if you want to compete.
(Google uses site download speed as one criterion in determining where it will rank a site for search.)
Avoid reseller arrangements – they are often not well supported – and ensure that you have all the account logins under your name and in your possession.
5. Content Creation
Your website content needs to be:
- Relevant to your business
- Of value to your customers
- Correctly structured with keywords from your research
Think about creating a blog and posting one new article every week or so.
A drip-feed like this appears more natural to the search engines.
You should also look into posting different versions of your articles on websites that rank well and are relevant to your own.
6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
You should have programs to cover the following areas:
- On page SEO
- A backlinks program
- A content creation program
Having a quality content creation program is the key to SEO.
If you really want to kick start your SEO program and keep it on track, you can’t go past a search engine marketing toolset like Jarvis.
This is what we sometimes use to provide a logical framework for the management of online marketing.
7. Ecommerce
Here the situation becomes more complex.
If you want to run a simple shopping cart simply to sell downloadable products, then a WordPress plugin would be the way to go.
If you want to sell real products and cope with such things as freight, postal zones, and product options then you may need something more robust such as Magento or osCommerce.
We often recommend Shopify.
If you get a full-featured version of Shopify, you will get a bunch of options pre-installed such as vouchers and coupons and a template system.
Shopify is also very actively supported.
8. Social Media
There are many social media sites, but those that get the most focus are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Integrating social media into your website provides benefits beyond simply getting additional traffic.
Links from your social media accounts to your website will also assist your site’s search engine rankings.
Also, consider automating the linkage between your website and your social media accounts.
For example, with the right plugins – such as Wordbooker – you can automatically upload blog posts to the business’s Facebook page.
9. Paid Advertising
There are many options for getting paid traffic, including:
- Pay per click advertising (PPC)
- Banner advertising
- Micro media buys
- Social media advertising
- Google AdWords
- Facebook Ads
- Twitter Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
We recommend starting with pay-per-click advertising with Google Adwords, for the following reasons;
- You get immediate highly targeted traffic to your site
- You obtain valuable market intelligence
- You will back up your keyword research with real traffic data for your website
10. Analytics and Tuning
One of the most important of all the points on this list.
- Use Google’s state-of-the-art and free tool to monitor all your site traffic, sales and significant events.
- Monitor the ROI on all your content and advertising initiatives.
- Set Goals and SEO Performance Metrics*.
SEO performance metrics include things such as the number of searches on keywords that do not include your business name or your own brands.
(It is easy to rank well with the search engines for your business name, but may not be so easy for generic keywords.)
Here’s the link for Google Analytics.
If you can check off an action plan including all 10 of the above points, you will soon be swimming with the big fish!
