Last Updated on April 5, 2021 by Sunny Staff
A great deal of emphasis is placed on the value of developing a finely optimized WordPress website and for good reason. Especially if you’re using it to run a business, your website is the core of your online presence and heavily determines what people think of you. You’ll come across as competent if it’s slick and polished. If it’s mediocre, well, take a guess.
That said, it’s far from the only thing worthy of your time and effort. Here’s the key example: without a strong marketing strategy, the website you worked so hard to perfect will always fall short of its potential, wasting countless opportunities to stand out and get ahead of your rivals. These things go together — and in this post, we’re going to go into more detail about exactly why the nature of your marketing effort is just as important as your website build. Let’s begin.
WordPress has Incredible Potential for Rich Integrations
One core reason why it’s so important to focus on marketing when you’re using WordPress is that it’s such a great platform for integration. Immensely popular and fundamentally modular, it warrants attention from all notable SaaS providers, ensuring that they develop (or at least implicitly support) fully-featured WordPress plugins. But why does this make marketing more important for you? Quite simply, because it expands the options available to everyone else.
If you run a site on a simpler CMS with fewer options, your marketing isn’t as important because you need to put in more effort to get somewhere. Using WordPress, you can quickly take advantage of free integrations for numerous marketing tools, picking up cost-effective improvements in brand recognition and lead generation. If you’re not doing it, your brand will soon fall behind those comparable brands willing to invest in promotion.
In truth, it’s practical to factor marketing into the site build process itself. When you’re choosing which plugins you’ll use to tweak your UX elements, you should also think about how you’re going to handle email marketing and social media posts. The more you plan at that stage, the easier you’ll find it to promote your site when it’s up and running.
The Internet is Packed with Convenient Marketing Resources
As noted, WordPress makes it relatively easy to draw upon marketing integrations, but surely there’s still some challenge involved — and yes, there certainly is. It’s only relatively easy. It’s always difficult to figure out what content you should create, how you should distribute it, and what you should do if you’re not getting the results you want.
Conveniently, the internet is full of free marketing resources that can steer you in the right direction, again eliminating a possible excuse for overlooking the field. You don’t even need to spend hours poring through articles and roundups: remembering to leave a suitable marketing podcast (well, ideally a marketing and SEO podcast — more on the latter next) running while you work on other things, and you’ll soak up some decent ideas without even noticing.
Fail to do this, and you’ll be trying to get ahead in a crowded field of ambitious entrepreneurs soaking up all available resources and using every feature WordPress brings to the table. Why hamper your efforts when it doesn’t take that much effort to keep up with them?
Sites Don’t Actually Get Found Due to Their Quality
It was vital to touch upon SEO because the quality of your site build doesn’t dictate how successful it becomes. If you scour the internet, you’ll inevitably find plenty of great sites that don’t get much traffic and many more weak sites that perform fairly well. Indeed, good sites rank better on average, but that’s because site quality tends to correlate with SEO quality.
For a website to rank well you need to start with an understanding of how Google works. In short, Google wants to provide its users with relevant and high-quality content. Google’s crawlers (Moz has more on this) are constantly indexing the web with all the content it can find. When a user enters a search query, the Google algorithm scans the index and matches the query with the content. So if you have a great piece of content that Google can access and understand, you’re more likely to rank well in the results. You also need to focus on specific elements such as page speed and internal navigation: elements that do matter to user experience but ultimately matter more to search rankings.
Failing to put suitable effort into SEO is akin to creating a great piece of music but never actually playing it to anyone. If people can’t find your site, it won’t matter how good it is. Draw upon the rich array of marketing features built into and supported by WordPress, and you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your site goals.
Give us a call if you want your site to look great and be optimized for search. We’re WordPress experts and love to help our customers get the most from their sites!