We’re finally at the last instalment of our digital marketing crash course! Now we're discussing the core of your digital marketing campaign: your website. You've spent all this time and effort driving people to your site... but if they arrive and it's slow or confusing they're going to be still unlikely to convert.
It’s really important to put time and effort into optimising your website!
When building a website, remember the following: no one will convert if it sucks.
Firstly, you need to carefully choose your CMS platform (Content Management System). This is what you'll build your website with. The typical choices are WordPress or Shopify, but many other options are available like Magneto or Drupal. When picking a CMS decide what integrations you'll need and ensure your choice is compatible. If you're an e-commerce site Shopify is a great option, if you're a blog you might prefer Wordpress.
It's also really important to track users on your website. Google Analytics should be the first thing you install. It allows you to see how many people go to your site, how long they stay, what they're looking at and how many add-to-cart but don't purchase. You can also track non-purchase conversions like lead forms. Facebook Pixel is another important analytics tool that should be installed as soon as possible. It will allow you to work out who your users are and re-market to them.
There's no point in doing digital marketing if people are being sent to confusing or slow websites. Even if your website has a good user experience it doesn't mean it can't be improved. Often clients come to us wanting to double their spend in order to increase conversions. However, optimising their website is often the better choice. If you improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2% then you've doubled conversions without increasing spend.
As mentioned, one optimisation is speed. Test the speed of your website using Pingdom's Website Speed Test. Ideally, you want your website speed to be no more than 1.5 seconds.
Use Pingdom to test whether you website speed is up to scratch!
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving your organic rank on search engines like Google. We talked about SEO in more detail in Part 4 of this series. SEO is a long term game, it's not going to happen overnight. But there are a few good habits to be aware of when building your site. Naming images with titles like "Buy Chocolate Brisbane" not "Image_1" for example will improve your rankings. Including keywords in your copy and meta tags is also a good idea. Here at Devote Digital we can actually use tools to scrape your website and determine where issues are.
We really want to stress the importance of building up your owned assets. Google and Facebook can change the game at any time and they regularly do. A holistic view to digital marketing is the best choice to reduce your vulnerability. You should now know more about Digital Marketing then 90% of the population!
