Why website optimization is out and website marketability is in.
Read how Crain’s Detroit Business lays out Website Marketability, explains SEO, and defines the value of a website as being related to it’s structure, content, and evolution.
Of all articles in our blog, this is the most important to us as it explains how internet marketing works in 2015, noting that this precisely matches TotalWeb Partner’s value proposition.
“Building a site is not an end game, it is just the first step… and all of TWP’s standard offers include ongoing support, updating, and marketing to meet the requirements of marketing on-line in 2015.”
Defining Website Marketability
From Crain’s Detroit Business April 17, 2015
After being in the Internet industry for 20+ years, I am giving myself the prerogative to create my own terminology. To the best of my knowledge I have not heard this term – website marketability – being used other than by me. I searched Google for this term and the only occurrences in the search results are those by our web marketing agency, SmartFinds, or myself.
As Google’s algorithm changes have evolved and matured, the requirements for businesses have increased when it comes to managing web presence. Search Engine Optimization is no longer the only task needed for a website to get traffic on a business website. It is not reasonable to only seek traffic from search engines either. The activities needed for website traffic have grown to require monthly and on-going work, which has no end point – particularly when the digital medium keeps changing.
Monthly website marketability activities include: (All are Functions within TWP’s SEO Offers)
- Add new web pages with a minimum of 300 words to your blog. If this is new to you, try and start with weekly.
- Check the readability scores of your web pages using website tools or manually checking the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests. There are websites where you can copy/paste your web page content to check if the scores are for a narrow or broad audience. If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins to help you with this activity.
- If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins to help you with the keyword density of your web pages.
- If you’re using WordPress, the plugin SEO by Yoast will be very helpful for the optimization of your web pages.
- Review Google Webmaster Tools for your website’s health reports.
- Search Queries and determine if there is a growth in search terms. This includes impressions, clicks, and average ranking position.
- Fix broken links reported in Webmaster Tools.
- Correct any page optimizations based on the results you see in Webmaster Tools.
- Disavow back links of low value websites.
- Make adjustments to the website for mobile recommendations
- Make adjustments to the website for structured data recommendations
- Make adjustments to the website for security
And here is more information here to help you better understand improvements to your website’s health. (All are Functions within TWP’s SEO Offers)
- Review Google Analytics for website visitor activity
- Interpret results to help you improve converting website visitors to leads or sales.
- Review traffic activity
- Review content activity
- Review website visitor behavior and flow
- Review mobile visitor behavior
- Review source activity driving traffic
- Review heography website visitor
- Identify significant traffic changes or patterns
- Identify significant web page visits
- Make website adjustments based on the results.
- …and there is more information here to help you better understand improvements to your website’s visitor behavior.
Website marketability has many ongoing activities. They are brought together through a process of work, measurements, and improvements.
If your company is a novice to web marketing then you have to set your expectations as to when you will start seeing reasonable traffic from search engines. This is a marketing process taking time and riddled with changes along the way.
Some ideas may include:
- Start with your website blog and connect your blog to your social communities.
- Actively engage in a social community appropriate to your business. For manufacturing companies, LinkedIn will be your target community.
- Develop a newsletter marketing program at minimum once a month.
- Seek out industry websites where you may have become a guest author to submit articles to show your authority in your topic.
- Consider inviting prospects, customers and partners to webinars. The webinars are recorded, posted to YouTube and shared amongst social communities.
This list can be longer and has to be specific to each company’s business, products, and services.
How Website Marketing has Changed in 15 Years
The implementation of Google Panda, Google Penguin and Google Hummingbird algorithms by Google in the past few years has moved businesses towards a variety of new approaches to web presence, their website marketing, and web brand marketing.
First and foremost: Website marketing and web marketing has no end point.
Although this concept has been true forever, in case it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now. An RFP suggesting there is an end point to a website project was the first red flag to the understanding of web marketing by this manufacturing company.
Some items to consider for website optimization include:
- Optimizing for conversational search.
- Answering questions in their optimization strategy.
- Insuring there is a minimum of 300 words for the web pages.
- Looking at the readability scores of the web pages.
- Check the keyword density of the web pages.
- Checking the keyword linking strategy between pages within the website.
- Ensuring the website is mobile friendly, ideally setup with responsive web design and parallax scrolling. Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Tester to determine how Google perceives the website.
- Insuring the website uses structured data, which can be reviewed in Google Webmaster Tools for any problems.
- Building out the density of the website with daily or weekly web pages, which are focused on educating website visitors. This is best accomplished with a blog.
While this list can keep going, probably the one item that redefines an RFP to build a new site, is the last bullet point. Daily or weekly, new pages to the website via the blog. Not only are we building out the density of the website, but we are also feeding the social communities with updates.
