Treat your web site as a marketing tool.
Before the social web, your focus was just on your one web site. Now companies need multiple sites to be effective, and the plan involves all your pages; that’s your Yelp page for reviews, your YouTube channel for video marketing, your Twitter feed and your Facebook page. Optimally, your web site is one part of an internet marketing plan. If you don’t have a fully elaborated internet marketing plan or don’t know how to craft one, get a little consulting.
Treat your web site as a lead generator.
Content additions are now more important than initial content. Search engines now care far more about seeing a pattern of adding fresh, original content over time than they do the content the site actually starts with, especially, since the new Google rules came out in 2013. Anything you can make a blog post will generally have more value than anything that becomes a static page on your site. So prefer posts over pages, and this means an emphasis on simpler navigation as well, instead of cluttered menus – with blog posts actually standing in for pages for some of the anchor content that you want most of your leads to find easily.
Treat your web site as a presentation.
Conversion is just as important as leads; just because you start earning lots of visitors to your site, by implementing an effecting internet marketing plan, doesn’t mean they’ll follow through by contacting you. Your homepage needs certain things to be effective:
- Qualifying info helps visitors quickly identify what you do and where you do it
- Effective differentiators set you apart from other search results without consisting of fluff or sounding salesy.
- Avenues for action include a contact form on every page.
- Integration with social media means that, since more than half of web site visitors are just browsing and not ready to act,you can keep them in your orbit until they’re ready.
Treat your web site as an investment.
Sustainability as a lasting investment, and the ability to update the site easily are key.
- Style sheet based design means the designer can update fonts or colors quickly on a site-wide basis without a complete overhaul.
- A grid layout means that content is laid out in a modular fashion so we can pull a piece out and stick something in its place without tearing down the whole page and starting over
- A search indexable site means text-based navigation and search engine prompts, instead of all the text being graphical, so search engines can actually index the site effectively.
A web site is a marketing tool, a lead generator, a presentation and an investment. Viewed that way, you can make more effective decisions on building or overhauling your web site.
Search Engine Watch ran this article mentioning similar points: It’s Time to Update the Definition of a Web Site
To turn your web site into an effective tool for your digital marketing, contact us for a web site audit and let us work with you to craft a digital strategy.
