With 1.3 billion websites, WordPress is by far and away the top choice for website creation across the world. The platform’s popularity comes from allowing users to easily create personal sites, purchase domain names and customize the site with easy to use, no-development-needed plugins. Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has made the world of site creation accessible for everyone.
If you have created your own WordPress site and customized it to your personal preference, your next step will probably be figuring out how you market and drive traffic to your brand new site.
This can prove to be very challenging. You could have the greatest idea and site in the world, but without the right marketing, it could remain essentially invisible and un-visited. Luckily, we have 5 of the best tips for successfully marketing your WordPress site.
1. Use the right plugins
WordPress allows you to easily integrate plugins so you can make improvements to your website without having to code them yourself. Plugins are extensions that add features, data analytics, and other resources to assist your website. However, you may not know how to choose the plugins that will be best for your site.
Choosing the right plugins for your website comes down to identifying exactly what needs improving, or where you can get a competitive edge on your competitors. For example, you can find plugins that offer features such as these:
- Improving your SEO (making it more findable).
- Allowing you to resize and compress images on your website ( making it faster).
- Gathering, collecting, and adding email addresses to your newsletter (making it easier to connect with your visitors).
- Are tailored for e-commerce (making it easier to sell products on your website).
WordPress allows you to easily find popular plugins that others use. You can also search for specific plugins in the internal WordPress search engine – you should have no problems finding the right plugin to address issues or provide changes for your website.
2. Optimize your website
Internet users today expect any website they visit to load almost instantly and provide quick answers. Due to this expectation, it is essential you optimize your website and reduce load times so people can quickly access it. Even a few seconds can make the difference between someone staying on your site or leaving.
Every second counts when it comes to website loading speed. The image above shows how the bounce rate increases by 32 percent after visitors are forced to wait three seconds for the website to load. This continues to grow and become worse as more time passes. So, if you want to reduce the number of people that leave your site, you need to lower those load times.
Some options to improve your loading speed include purchasing a private or shared hosting service, removing unused plugins and optimizing your images. Even small optimizations like these can help your site to load slightly faster and retain more visitors.
3. Use A/B testing for landing pages
Effective marketing requires you to collect data so you can implement the right changes to your website. Many companies use the A/B testing approach to accomplish this, meaning that websites will display two different versions of landing pages to visitors. They will then collect the data for both (for example; session time, click rates, click map) so they can see exactly which elements are working well and which are not.
The image above shows how a company can improve their metrics with A/B testing. This method can also be used in multiple ways to help improve your pages, emails and other resources.
- Testing colors will let you know which ones appeal most to your customers.
- Trying out different email formats and subject lines to get more clicks.
- Showing different landing pages will help you to find the one that draws in most leads.
A/B testing works because it allows you to see which idea performs the best. This way, you can effectively test your pages and optimize them to their maximum potential.
4. Integrate pop-ups to gain contacts
If you’ve been on the internet before, then you will no doubt know about pop-ups. They usually appear on your screen as soon as you go on a website or if you’re about to leave. Even if you do use popups on your site, you might think that they could cause people to leave as they can generally be seen as annoying. So are they worth the risk?
Looking at the data, you can see that popups have no noticeable effect on your bounce rate but they can double your subscription rate. This suggests that typically you needn’t worry about pop-ups causing people to leave as it has no discernible impact on user behaviour. The benefits of popups seem to heavily outweigh the drawbacks.
There are a few best practices to follow with popups:
- Whether you choose an immediate popup, or an exit-intent popup, choose one or the other and don’t overdo it. It can feel spammy otherwise.
- Target your popups to be relevant to the page content. This makes it feel more native to the content that your visitor is already engaged with.
- Make it so that if a visitor closes a popup, they won’t see it again for a certain amount of time. 30 days is usually a good benchmark for when you can re-show a returning visitor, but test that time frame for your own site.
Remember that you can use popups to encourage certain actions from your visitors. For example, you can invite them to follow your social media pages, make an account on your website, or sign up to get emails or SMS notifications from you. Experiment and find the best approach for your popups.
5. Optimize your blogs
If you want to improve your website’s SEO, then you should focus on your blogs as they can help your business grow in various ways..
- Provide high-quality content on your website.
- Encourage people to visit your website regularly to read articles.
- Include keywords in your articles to improve your search engine rankings.
- Create fresh content that updates frequently, something which Google prizes highly in its search engine algorithm.
But what parts of your article should you focus on to improve your site’s SEO?
If you don’t know where to start with blog optimization, then use the data above. Headline optimization works well because your titles will draw in clicks from outbound links and search engines. Additionally headers and body text allow you to incorporate keywords that can help improve your search engine ranking.
As you improve your blog SEO, you can gain more traffic on your website which will hopefully develop into more leads and conversions if your sales funnel is well-optimized.
Final comments
Remember that creating a website is only the first part of establishing your online presence. After providing a place for people to make purchases or interact with your business, you need to work on marketing. By using the five tips mentioned in this article, you can improve your site and allow your business to meet its marketing goals.
