website,marketing powerhouse,content management system,privacy policy,ADA compliance,wordpress,link building

Making your Website a Marketing Powerhouse

Making your Website a Marketing Powerhouse

10 STEPS TO CONVERT YOUR WEBSITE INTO A MARKETING POWERHOUSE

1. Ensure that your website is hosted on world-class infrastructure.

Ensure that your website is hosted on a reliable platform such as Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean, AWS or Google Cloud. These services offer VPSs or Virtual Private Servers. A VPS will give you much greater control over your website as well as being faster and more reliable than shared hosting. The above mentioned hosting services provide free SSL certificates to keep your visitors secure and when coupled with a CDN service like Cloudflare you are in good shape. You are not competing with other websites on the same server. As they say in the industry, “no noisy neighbours”.

2. Use an open source Content Management System to ensure flexibility & support.

Ensure that you use a reliable well supported CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress, Joomla, Magneto etc. These are all open source platforms with a diverse community both providing solutions and support. Many of the DIY website builders seen on TV are walled-gardens and do not offer the choice and flexibility of WordPress.

3. Let’s Keep it Legal

It is particularly important to follow laws, both domestic and international, when it comes to data collection and usage. You should be aware that very heavy fines can be levied against website owners for failing to comply. Unless you are a lawyer we suggest using a service like Termageddon to ensure that you stay on the right side of the law. However at least you should have a cookie consent popup and a privacy policy. Templates for the later are available online and plugins for the former are available from WordPress on wordpress.org


You should also be aware of ADA compliance or creating a site accessible to those with disabilities. While not mandatory, failure to do so can open businesses up to lawsuits. So to avoid the cost of defending lawsuits or just the bad feeling and loss of market share it is advisable to ensure that your site works with assistive technologies. These may be designed to help those with hearing loss, visual impairment, mobility-related disabilities, and cognitive impairment.

4. You don’t get fined for SPEED on this super-highway!

Your site must be fast. Not just on your device – on all devices world-wide. Your site must not take longer than 3 seconds to load completely, or both visitors and search engines will leave. We have taken care of some elements that affect speed by ensuring that we are on our private server and that we have a CDN storing our site all over the world but we can further optimize a website for infinitely greater speed using a service like NitroPack. If you want to take a benchmark test to see how fast your site is running right now you can go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ or run our web report.

5. Build a fence around your website to keep out the “bad actors”.

Next ensure that your site is secure and hack-proof. We use Wordfence for general protection, however you should be aware that no security plugin can protect you from insecure passwords.  Make sure that you reset your passwords every 90 days and that you use a long password made up of numbers, letters, both upper and lower case, as well as punctuation. Eg: EURi*nogpZTL. Using a password generator will create a truly random password – Google “password generator”, there are many choices.

Additionally make sure that all your themes and plugins came from reputable sources. The only free source of plugins and themes for WordPress, that are vetted for safety, come from the WordPress Repository at https://wordpress.org.  If you have a premium plugin or theme make sure you have a valid subscription so that you will get updates, ensuring security.  Make sure WordPress core files, themes and plugins are always up to date. An out-of-date site is an insecure site!

6. It’s not just what you see it’s what the search engines see.

Your next step to ensure that your site is getting noticed is to ensure that you are adding all the on-page elements, most of which are seen only by search engine crawlers. The fastest way to accomplish on-page compliance with modern search engine protocols is to install a plugin such as Yoast, AIOSEO, SEOPress, RankMath and there are many others. You will need to go through the plugin filling in all the information that it asks about your business and your website. These plugins will then generate metadata as well as schema that will help search engines index your site and create a greater chance of being found online.


I would say that all the above steps are relatively inexpensive and can be carried out by anyone with the will to spend some time on the journey. I would also say that any website where the above steps are not fully carried out will never be a true marketing powerhouse. However that is still really only the beginning.


7. Content is like bread, stale doesn’t cut it!

The next step is the creation of fresh content. Not just once –  but weekly. This is where your website ties in with your social media. I always tell clients that once they have created a new blog post on their website, wait a day or so to let search engine crawlers catch up and understand that this is your content. Then write a teaser, basically a header and a few sentences to describe the new content on your site and a link to the content on your site. This way you are building a following not only on social media but also on your own site. Please realize that content posted on social media benefits the platform more than you. It should also be pointed out that dependence on a social media platform is putting your business future in the hands of companies who owe you no duty. In fact if they choose to remove you from their platform you have no recourse. In most cases you can not even contact them or appeal.


However, on the subject of social media, don’t forget video is a hot way to get noticed on the web and the popularity of video seems to be increasing. You can post videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc. YouTube is still by far the most popular choice for business.

8. Getting known in the www-hood.

The next step on the web marketing journey is one of the most expensive. That is link building. This involves reaching out to other webmasters and asking them to link to your content. This is an involved topic and it is both difficult and expensive. I will discuss this in greater detail in my downloadable e-book below.

9. Beginning the Marketing Journey.

Once you are starting to get traffic you need to convert visitors to leads and leads to customers. Lead Magnets are free information downloads, coupons, or offers that help you collect potential customers’ email addresses and permission to continue the marketing conversation with them. Gone are the days when visitors will “Signup for your Newsletter”, you have to very specific about what you are giving them and ensure that they see value, otherwise you will find that you aren’t getting email signups.

10. Leveling up your Game!

So you have created a great website on a VPS, you have used a recognized Content Management System, you have secured it, and you have promoted it, you are winning links for your great, new, fresh content … what next? Well have you noticed that many web-based companies such as Noom, Peleton, Hello Fresh and many others advertise extensively on the TV. While you may not be able to afford TV advertising there are other options that are not quite as expensive. Most of the search engines and many of the social media platforms offer PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. This means they show your ad and when someone clicks through that ad to your site, you pay the agreed upon price. This can be anywhere from 50 cents to 20 dollars and more depending on your business category. Some business owners choose the PPC advertising route before trying to get links and create organic placement on the search engines. This will tend to be the route to choose if you are new and in a time crunch to get noticed and get leads, or if you are in an industry where new clients are worth more money .


Does this seem like a lot of Work?


Well that’s probably because it is! So if you want the benefits of all the above, but you are too busy to do it yourself, why don’t you scroll up to the top of the page and sign on for your FREE WEB REPORT and consultation.  We can determine what you need to turn your website into a marketing powerhouse and provide a no-obligation quote for your consideration.

I can help you with hosting, moving your website to Wordpress, increasing your website security and load speed as well creating new content, and building search results.