If your goal for 2022 is to start an online business, you need to know the best practices for marketing your website online…
Creating a website is only the beginning of your marketing journey. Once you launch your site, your next goal should be to market your website to drive traffic. Luckily, you can promote your website in various ways without breaking the bank. If you’ve been wondering how to market my website online, here are six tips to help.
Table of Contents
1. Put SEO front and centre
It goes without saying that SEO is the first place you should start when promoting your website. Search engine optimisation covers all the changes you can make to your site pages to make them more appealing to search engines. This helps your website rank higher in search engine result pages, allowing it to attract more organic traffic.
With Google introducing new ranking factors every so often, SEO can seem unachievable, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Here are the most effective SEO aspects that you should focus on:
• High-quality content: Google pays special attention to content quality because they want to provide fresh, unique, and helpful information to web users. To create content that Google likes, focus on improving your EAT score.
• Website loading speed: Your website’s speed has a direct impact on SEO and conversion rate. Slow load speed increases your bounce rate, causing your site to rank lower in SERPs. Use Google’s page speed insight tool to optimise your site’s speed.
• Search intent: Understanding the ‘why’ behind a search query allows you to create content that consumers are looking for, increasing your chances of conversion.
• Backlinks: Backlinks are a vote of confidence for your website. Google takes backlinks very seriously, so if you want to rank higher, get high authority websites to link to your website. That said, earning backlinks can be pretty difficult, and that brings us to our second point.
2. Work towards link building
As mentioned earlier, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. So, how do you get other websites to link to your new site?
• Guest blogging: Guest blogging allows you to write a post for a high-authority website in your industry or adjacent industry to showcase your expertise. With every guest post you write, you will be able to subtly direct traffic to your website.
• Participate in online forums: Participating in online forums such as Quora is a great link building strategy. However, to drive traffic to your site, ensure that you provide valuable insight and avoid being overly promotional.
• Reciprocal linking: This is the easiest way to earn backlinks. It involves the exchanging of links between two or more websites. As with any other link building strategy, prioritise quality over quantity. A link from one high-ranking website will benefit your site more than twenty links from spammy, low-quality websites.
3. Create high-quality content
Content is probably the most important ranking factor. If you want to improve SEO and attract traffic to your website, you must create high-quality content that will resonate with your target audience.
Blogs and articles are a great form of content, but they aren’t the only type of content you can produce. Incorporating video into your content strategy can help you attract new visitors and make your site more engaging. Information retention is significantly higher in visual materials, so if you want to make a long-lasting impression, video is the way to go.
When creating marketing content, the biggest thing to remember is that your content needs to be useful, relevant, and engaging. Doing plenty of keyword research before getting started will help you create content that answers customers’ queries.
Utilise tools such as Answer the Republic to find relevant topics. This tool will show you different statements, and questions typed into search engines by simply searching a word or phrase. Content marketing doesn’t work in isolation, so to get the best results, promote your content through other channels.
Read More: How to create a keyword strategy
4. Get active on social media
Social media is one of the most-effective ways of promoting a new website. It allows you to connect with a diverse audience, build brand awareness, and promote your content. However, before you get started with social media, it is crucial that you identify your brand voice and zero in on your target market. This will help you choose appropriate platforms for your type of business and its needs.
For example, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer great results for B2B and B2C companies trying to increase visibility and showcase their expertise. For best results, ensure that your social media posts link back to your website, where customers can shop or read more about your product or services.
5. Incorporate email marketing
Email triumphs as the most effective communication and persuasion tool for ecommerce businesses and website owners. In fact, 89% of marketers use email marketing as their primary channel for lead generation, brand awareness and customer retention. Therefore, if you just got your website up and running, use email marketing to promote your website directly to the customers.
The first thing you have to do when creating an email marketing strategy is to come up with an email list. An email list is a database of contacts who have expressed interest in receiving marketing emails from you.
The easiest way to build an email list is to create a lead magnet that your target customers would be interested in. It could be a coupon or a special offer.
Once you make an email list, get an email service provider to help you manage your email marketing campaigns.
6. Utilise PPC advertising
Paid search and paid social allow you to put your website in front of your target market. They are very effective at increasing traffic and even improving conversion.
When creating Google Ads and Facebook Ads, keywords are of the utmost importance. Ensure that you conduct keyword research to find the most relevant keywords for your business. Targeting long-tail keywords can be more affordable and typically have a higher conversion rate as they are much more specific.
When tailoring your campaign, you maye also wish to include negative keywords to prevent your ad from matching irrelevant search queries.
✏️A great way to boost your online presence is with a blog. Find out why you need to start a blog in 2022 and beyond
Header image: Avel Chuklanov
Embedded images: Merakist, Bram Naus, Brett Jordan