What is website marketing?

While you might have a sense of what website marketing is, this article will make it clear for you. 

It’s important to know how all aspects of your marketing work together, and understanding how you can use your website as a tool and marketing platform is key to it fulfilling its potential. 

You want a website that’s more than a pretty brochure, and we’re going to talk about how to make that happen here.

Website marketing is the overarching way your website supports the visibility, lead flow, and conversion of your products and services. 

It can include individual landing pages, focused on one offer, one message, one call to action. We would also group:

• • Product pages that are built with search intent in mind

• • The optimised copy on each page

• • Clear messaging that the right people identify with, because they’re clear about who you help, and how

• • How you optimise your service pages

• And more…

You’ll finish reading this and know:

• • How online marketing works using your website as the marketing tool

• • How search engine optimisation can boost your marketing efforts

• • Why you should focus on it as part of your digital marketing strategy

• • How to best apply it in the grand plan of marketing your business

 

What does website marketing mean?

It’s the action of using your website to attract potential customers. There are lots of ways to utilise your website to enhance your brand, gain visibility, generate revenue and increase the traffic that lands on your website.

When done properly, your web marketing efforts should combine a strategy that supports long-term growth, reviewing the customer’s experience and the quality of your content, making it accessible for LLMs and humans alike.

Here are a few of the ways your website marketing strategy can help you convert visitors to customers:

Content marketing

Creating content in either video, written or infographic format with the aim to attract, engages and inform your visitors when they land on that page of your website.

Search engine optimisation or SEO

Incorporating technical aspects of website accessibility, functionality, user experience and purposeful, human-first content to ensure the best experience for visitors from the search results through to your website.

A lot of websites simply exist online, with many brands unsure of the true potential they have sitting in that rented space and domain they pay for, year-on-year.

This is exactly the type of thing I connect with clients on, to help them integrate SEO naturally, so they can reach their true, untapped organic potential. 

Depending on the size of the business, the priority might be improving the user experience so they don’t leak leads when sending people from paid ads to their website.

For smaller clients, it could be everything from crafting an SEO strategy that fits to technical audits and regular content writing!

Building a dedicated home for your target audience

If your customers and/or clients have a place that they can use again and again, to find a satisfying and accurate solution, they will likely come back.

If your product or service offers, blog posts and customer journey help to answer their questions or offer a problem solution, you’ve successfully implemented some of the most important aspects of brand-building and customer retention.

People love transparency, support and trust signals when trying to make a purchase, take an action, and make a change. There is a lot of research out there about how important trust is in order to make sales!

Supporting your Google Ads with organic efforts

Whether you have Google Ads currently running, or you’re considering it for the next stage of your business’s growth, SEO and organic marketing are always a clever complement.

This is because whether your ads are going to send leads back to your website, a standalone form or a freebie: if they opt-in, they probably want to know more about you. 

That search often starts online, looking for legitimate signs that you know what you’re doing. A website is part of that social proof.

Why is organic marketing and SEO important for paid ads?

Not even big businesses want to spend on advertisements as their marketing strategy forever. 

It costs money, more than organic marketing ever will, and it can leave huge deficits to invest in other parts of the business.

This is especially true if you don’t have someone who knows what they’re doing when they set up your ads, which can leave you with a paid marketing campaign that isn’t actually generating you any leads, yet costing you thousands!

Can you use organic marketing and paid ads?

Website marketing is key to supporting your paid efforts. You would usually expect your ads to lead people back to a landing page or your website. 

Not only that, but when you invest in SEO marketing, organically ranking content and pages for keywords that would require a high investment for the paid equivalent can save your budget, redirecting to other competitive keywords that are hard to rank for organically.

The two tools should be used in conjunction with each other. If you’re lucky enough to have a paid and organic team, these two teams must work alongside each other to learn from the insights they’re gaining and save you money in the long run.

Building your email list:

Your website supports your brand’s credibility and visibility online, with many marketing tips telling you to focus on building your email list. Your website is one of the primary places to achieve this conversion!

Visitors can be nurtured over a lifecycle and beyond. From sign-up forms on your homepage to call-to-actions within your blog articles, if people opt-in to hearing from you, it’s a sign that they are giving you their trust.

Email marketing done well can provide a regular email opportunity to keep your brand and it offers top-of-mind. 

You can add automations that welcome them to your list and use them to keep your potential and current customers in the loop.

Another often overlooked advantage is that it gives your email readers a space to share more about what they might like to see from your brand. It is a two-way engagement tool after all!

Improving conversion rates:

Many business owners miss the point when talking about targets for their conversion outcomes.

“Average customer spend alone does not a business make!”

While the customer spend is a top conversion desire for many business owners, it’s important to recognise that many other important conversions can happen on your website. 

There are many actions people might take that you can attribute to a valuable step in building a relationship with them.

When we think about conversion, it could be measured by several actions visitors take. Here are a few you might have overlooked:

• • How many people are starting sessions on your product pages

• • How many people click from the Google SERPs to land on your website in the first place

• • The length of time visitors stay and browse your website before opting in to your email list

• • The number  of them that download your free lead magnet

• • The number schedule a call to find out more about what you do

Note: Helpful tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are great here to help you measure these kinds of outcomes.

Repurposing for social media posts

Social media marketing is a die-hard tool since Google started to pull social media posts from Instagram into the search results!

I highly recommend using a social media channel to support your business’s visibility, but with caution!

It can be difficult to quantify action taken by followers and outcomes against the high churn-over volume that you use to create content for these micro-sites.

Is SEO or Social content more important?

My advice to clients is to always write it once, write it well, and repurpose your OG website content onto any other platforms. 

This saves your duplicating work and time for micro-content that requires constant adaptation across the sea of algorithms.

While there may be more trends than a D&G spring catwalk collection happening over on socials, SEO and content marketing is where content really can ascend to become king as it matures, adapts, and you write with impact and expertise as your lens.

Get started on your own website marketing strategy

Set your marketing goals

It might seem obvious, but as a business owner, sometimes we just get on with doing what we think needs to be done without thinking about where it will take us.

Whether you have mini-goals each week, targets for the month, or goals for the quarter that feed into your master plan of where you expect to see your business one year from now. 

Set goals not as a tool of measuring performance, but to have something to check in with internally to make sure all the work you’re putting in is leading you to what you truly want!

Connect with your audience to align

Where do your ideal customers come from, and are you in those spaces too, or should you be brushing up your intro and lining up some social events that allow you make an impact in more ways than a clever hook could on your latest reel?

Just like dating, you kind of have to put yourself in the spaces you expect the ideal clients to be. 

That doesn’t mean a crazily full calendar that pulls you away from your actual paid work, but do make time to connect with an intention in different professional or conversion-focused circles.

Review what’s currently working on your website

It can feel overwhelming if you have lots of things you want to change about your website, but prioritising what will make the most difference for a user when they visit is usually a good place to start. 

That might be, making sure buttons work, payments can be made and that your content is indexed on Google Search Console before you change the brand colours again!

Plan your marketing

If you’re in a position to implement your website marketing strategy solo, it’s a great opportunity to ask for some objective eyes of friends and family to give you some feedback before you start, about how they navigate your website.

If you’re guilty of becoming the bottleneck in your own business when trying to juggle everything, and you want some help, finding a company or freelancer that can help you with the specific aspects of your plan is essential.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions about how they’d improve your website and execute a plan to take your website to the next level.

Promote your content

You still need to share what you’ve been cooking up over on your website by sharing it in the other places you market your business. 

Whether you share it in your regular updates to your list or share the title and a bit of context over on social media.

Let people know what you’ve been working on, or it’s all for nothing!

Reflect on what works with your content

Metrics are never sexy, but they’re bloody useful, so how often are you going to track your results? 

Good or bad, it’s important to know how things are going on a financial and an energetic level, because if you don’t feel good about what you’re putting into your marketing, or the results you’re getting out, something has to give.

Repeat the things that drive great results

Feeling good about your goals and like your efforts are going somewhere? Great. Think about what you’ll repeat, continue and repurpose.

If you have a team (or a willing partner) to talk this through with, it could help you reframe anything you think isn’t going well and give you further perspective. 

Ready to use your website as your marketing MVP?

I love helping businesses go from metric-shy to achieving sky-high results with SEO! 

Whether you need training, regular content creation, or something more in-depth, I’d be happy to help. Prefer to sneak a peek behind the scenes of an SEO strategist’s mind? Jump onto the mailing list.