How To Set Up a WordPress Website for Local Success in 2017

The days of a simple website are behind us.

There was once a time when all that was needed to succeed online was a website. I remember several years ago setting up websites for clients. All that I did at that time was to build the website, optimize a page for the selected keyword and get some inbound links to the site. Two to three months later, the site was indexed in the search engines and the client was getting customers. Well, that time has long since passed.

With over 1.1 billion websites on the Internet, just having a website is no longer enough. You need to think about not only search engines but your end-user, conversion funnels, mobile phones, social media, your competitors, and much more.

Those websites that are succeeding today have several features already incorporated into them. These features include:

• A professional design
• Responsive design to ensure that your users can view your website in mobile devices. This is important for both the user and SEO.
• A well-defined conversion funnel – This is the path that your users take through take your site to complete your desired action.
• Content that appeals to your target market and search engines
• A site structure optimized for search engines
• Optimized pages, including images
• A fast download speed
• Security measures to minimize the chance of hacks that include regular backups
• A blog

A WordPress website for local success

I have spoken to several clients and friends over the past several months who have argued that they do not need a website to implement a successful digital marketing campaign. I don’t agree with this. Every digital marketing campaign should be built around a website that you own outright.

All of the different forms of media found online fit into three broad categories: owned, paid and earned media.  Owned media is defined as the communication channels under your control and includes websites, blogs, and email.

Paid media refers to traditional advertising whereby your media is displayed as long as you continue to pay the owner of the advertising channel. Examples of paid media include Google Adwords and social media ads.

The last category is earned media. It is only gained through recognition and a following through communication channels. Examples include organic search engines, social media and word of mouth. It cannot be bought or owned and often specifically refers to publicity gained through competition and influence.

Your website should be the center of your online presence because it the channel you control as long as your domain registration and hosting fees are current. In contrast, paid and earned media are subject to the control of others. Advertisers can remove your content from their networks once you stop paying your advertising bills and earned media channels such as search engines can move your content on their properties, theoretically as they please.

A great website is not enough

Just having a beautiful website with the essential components of success is not going to guarantee online success.  Setting up everything outlined in this blog post is just the first step. Success happens when digital marketing is an ongoing process that is designed to keep your target market entertained or informed and search engines fed with fresh content.

In my opinion, a blog is just as important as a website and every business should have one. In some cases, it is an example of ‘owned media’ as well.

A blog will be of little value if it is not used regularly. For that reason, I suggest to clients that they engage in content marketing only if they are prepared to commit the time and resources required to get the job done. Resources consist of either time to produce content themselves or to hire somebody to do it for them.

The importance of a content marketing campaign or blog

According to Forbes magazine, there are several benefits to blogging on your website, including:

1. It increases search engine traffic
2. It humanizes your brand
3. It supports your social media initiatives
4. It builds authority in your industry,
5. It improves conversion rates,
6. It helps generate inbound links,
7. It helps you rank for long-tail search queries, and
8. In increases leads

The benefits of content marketing or blogging doesn’t stop with your users and search engine optimization. There are financial benefits to it as well. The Econsultancy.com blog, ­an online consultant reviews six case studies of companies that generated a positive return on their content marketing activities.

Amongst the findings cited, the blog for online retailer Zagg delivers 10% of the site’s return on investment of 172%. Another study shows that blogging can also benefit an industrial or B2B company. Fisher Tank, a company that makes giant, above ground welded steel tanks produced the following results 12 weeks after the launch of a new website and blog:

• Web traffic: 119% increase
• Organic search traffic: 70% increase
• Social traffic: 4,800% increase
• Lead conversions: 3,900% increase
• Page one keyword rankings: 600% increase
• Quote requests: 500% increase
• Value of new qualified sales opportunities from content marketing: $3.4MM

It is important to note that not all of the results posted above can be attributed to content marketing.

Social media

There are two ways to integrate your website into social media. The first way has to do with social sharing while the second way has to do with making your blog post available on your social media channels.

Social sharing is the ability for people to easily share content on your website and blog on their social media networks. This is often implemented on your site through the social media buttons you see on most websites online. The objective is to make everything as easy as possible for people to share.

The second form of social media integration is posting blog posts to your social media profiles whenever it is updated. By doing this, your social media followers are notified and can link back to your blog to view your content. It also enables them to easily share your content within their social networks, driving traffic back to your website.

The most cost effective and easiest way to set up a small website and blog is with a content management system.  A content management system is a software application that supports the creation and modification of digital content. It is often used to support multiple users working in a collaborative environment. The most popular content management system on the market is WordPress with over 25% of all websites made using the software.

One reason WordPress is so popular is because of the availability of plugins. Plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress website. Plugins are available for both types of social media integrations.

Additional factors important to the success of your website

There are additional things that should be done related to your website that are not immediately apparent. These things include:

• Set up and integrate Google and Bing Webmaster Tools account into your website
• Set up and integrate Google Analytics into your website
• Submission of a site map to the search engines, especially when you first release your website
• Add all of the components to run a remarketing campaign in the future if you so desire.

Google Web Master Tools

Google Web Master Tools, now called Google Search Console is important in that it is the primary mechanism for Google to communicate with webmasters. Google Search Console can help you identify issues with your site as Google sees them and can even let you know if your site has been infected with malware. You can also submit your sitemaps directly for review and see what organic searches your website is showing for.

Webmaster Tools are not limited to just Google. Other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo have their own version of Webmaster Tools. Since both Google and Bing make up over 75% of the search engine market in the United States, the Webmaster Tools from these two giants give you coverage of a large share of the market.

Google Analytics

Having the ability to track your progress and the success and failures of your campaigns is incredibly important. The most popular and cost effective way to do that is with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service that provides basic analytical tools and statistics for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. It is primarily directed at small to medium-sized websites and offers the following features:

• Over 100 different reports including custom reports
• Integration with other Google products such as Google AdWords and Google Search Console
• Email communication and sharing
• Data visualization tools including dashboards and several types of graphs
• Segmentation of data

For most small businesses, a basic implementation of Google Analytics is a great way to get a great deal of information about how your website is doing. It is important to make sure that your conversion funnels are tracked so that you can see exactly how people are progressing through your website.

Remarketing

As much as we would like for every visitor to our website to make a purchase or an inquiry, that doesn’t happen. Remarketing is a smart way to connect with visitors to your website who did not make an immediate purchase or inquiry. It enables you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that has previously visited your website as they visit other websites.

Remarketing ads can be delivered in either or both image display or text formats. There are several remarketing networks to choose from with Google being the largest having over 1,000,000 websites participating in Google’s advertising network. When using Google, your ads are managed through Google AdWords and are shown on web pages visited by your target audience that accepts Google’s advertising placements.

Remarketing is a great tactic when your sales process is long and competitive. Executed correctly, a remarketing campaign can be a powerful tool to improve conversions and raise your brand profile.

Remarketing works by placing cookies, very small code snippets on your website visitors computers when they meet your criteria. Each computer where a cookie is placed is assigned a unique ID number and added to a list. When your list has a certain number of cookie IDs, you can set up a remarketing campaign. When you first launch a new website, it may take you some time to collect enough cookie IDs to run a remarketing campaign. For that reason, I recommend setting up remarketing lists for your site so that you can run remarketing campaigns in the future if you so desire.

Google Integration

Rather than use three different Google dashboards for Google Analytics, AdWords and Webmaster Tools, Google enables you to integrate your Google properties into one view within Google Analytics. While it does not pull all of the data from all three dashboards into one view, it pulls the more important information and makes it available from one location.

Wrapping it all up

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, a beautiful website is not enough to succeed. Success online is really an ongoing process that has several different pieces as a foundation. Hopefully, I have helped lay out that foundation with this blog post.   I will cover ongoing digital marketing activities in future blog posts that hopefully ties everything together for you, the reader.

Our focus is software development and digital marketing pertaining to local businesses. We can help you develop an online strategy or build your website. Contact us to discuss how we can help.