A Beginner’s Guide to Website Marketing

When it comes to marketing and the digital landscape, web and SEO (search engine optimization) may be the hardest for the average person to grasp. Social media and television are relatively easy to understand at a base level: creators make content, audiences are shown content, and audiences consume it if the content speaks to them, whether on a deep or superficial level. Despite the complexity, the same can be said for website marketing. Whether you’re a business owner, a marketing strategist, or just curious, let’s break it down in the most basic terms. 

Creators Make Content

On any website you visit, someone has to develop the code, write the content, and take the photos. For our purposes, we’ll call them the creator. Whether that’s the business as a whole or an employee, they have a goal: bring people to their website. This is true for nearly all digital marketing, the number one goal is to bring people to their content. Now, let’s apply this to your business. 

If your business already has a website, great! You have a basis to work off of. Take stock of your website and what’s already there, ask yourself a few questions.

• Is this information still relevant? 
• Is it engaging? 
• Is it easy to navigate and find information? 
• Does it answer a consumer question? 

Without content that answers a question, your audience will have no reason to visit your site. After looking through your site, you may realize it no longer aligns with your modern business goals. Don’t worry, changes are welcome. If your business does not have a website, you have a clean slate. Nowadays, there are plenty of inexpensive, user-friendly website builders to help you out, such as WordPress and Squarespace. Start slow, no great websites were built overnight. Discuss your marketing goals, the questions your consumers want answers to, and anything else you may think is relevant to formatting your website. Clean, well-put together websites are not just for show, they keep visitors longer and encourage them to revisit. 

Audiences Are Shown Content

Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. Unlike other digital mediums, the web has its own way of serving up content to your target audience. Web and SEO are never static, they keep moving and keep changing. For finding and serving content, Google in particular uses three functions: crawling, indexing, and ranking. In layman’s terms, these functions do the following:

• Crawling: How Google and other search engines find websites and analyze their information.
• Indexing: While crawling, Google will store the page and it is able to be shown to audiences as a result of a search. 
• Ranking: Determines where the site will be placed as a result of search queries, the ‘rank’ it is listed in on the search results page.

Ultimately, you want your website to rank highly in order to get the highest amount of clicks. The closer it is to the top of search results, typically the more clicks it will get. When determining ranking, search engines look at the relevance, quality, freshness, usability, location, and a variety of other factors to perfectly serve up a result to a query. This being said, you will want to curate your website to both user and algorithm preferences in order to rank higher. 

Audiences Consume Content

As mentioned previously, optimizing your website for both user and Google preferences is the goal. Attracting traffic often means attracting a higher search ranking, it all benefits from itself the more returning users you gain. So, how do we attract audiences to consume your website content? There are multiple ways to make your website better for ranking and for audiences, let’s go through a few. 

• Write informational, long-form, keyword rich content such as blogs. 
• Add high-quality, meaningful images to rank on images as well as basic search.
• Make your website easy to navigate with clear navigation bars and tables of content.
• Match content to common searches to answer questions users have. 

While this is just scratching the surface, these are common, relatively easy practices to make it both easier for users to consume your content and Google to give your site a higher ranking. Website marketing is complex and requires fine tuning for each unique company, but utilizing this information should give your website a head start. If you are still struggling to grasp web and SEO, get in touch with AdVentures Media Solutions. We’re dedicated to website and SEO building, and can help you get on the right path towards higher search ranks.