While it is important to drive traffic to your website, it is all too easy to forget that a successful digital marketing strategy must contain two different components: onsite optimisation and offsite marketing. Offsite marketing consists of practices like search engine optimisation, email marketing and advertisements, which are some of the most commonly used digital marketing techniques.
However, to ensure these efforts are actually rewarded in sales conversions, onsite marketing techniques must be used, too. The list below outlines some of the most valuable onsite marketing techniques.
Code for Crawlability
Success in digital marketing will impact every aspect of your website’s design, down to its very foundations. The way that a website is coded and structured will affect any potential for search engine optimisation. This is due to the fact that search engines use bots to crawl and index websites before they are added to a database that holds the information on which search engine rankings are based. If your website cannot be crawled, then it will automatically be disqualified from any high rankings as the search engines’ algorithm will have no choice but to view it as suspicious.
Loading Speeds
The speed at which your website loads is likely to impact your digital marketing successes in ways that might surprise you. For example, loading speeds can have an effect on the potential success of search engine optimisation. This is due to the fact that search engines are aware of the fact that internet users are unlikely to stay on sites that take longer than three seconds to load. The knowledge of user behaviour motivates search engines to only show fast loading sites at the top of their rankings and to ensure their customer, the site visitor, is always receiving the best experience.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation is a practice that is focused on ensuring that a website’s visitors actually turn into customers. Digital performance agencies like Sculpt, a Leeds-base Digital & Performance Agency can help businesses with digital marketing techniques like conversion rate optimisation as they are able to offer a service with a dual focus both on driving traffic to your site, and optimising the site for sales conversions.
Aesthetics
The way that your website looks can impact any of your digital marketing efforts, affecting everything from brand image, website retention times, and sales. Research has found that it only takes about 50 milliseconds, that’s about 0.5 of a second, for a user to form an opinion of your site that determines whether they will stay or leave. As this example demonstrates, a website’s aesthetic plays on unconscious parts of the user’s mind, which can be used not only to retain a visitor but convert them into a customer.
Research has also found that a user’s perception of a site is likely to evoke a wide range of emotions and attitudes, which can impact factors related to online purchasing decisions such as attitudes towards credibility and motivation. In order for your website to help transform visitors into lasting and loyal customers, the aesthetics must align with the brand image and the target audience, as well as being easy to navigate.
The way your site is built, looks and functions is likely to have a very big impact on the success of offsite digital marketing campaigns. Therefore, to make sure that you are not inadvertently wasting money on things like backlinking or search engine optimisation, you must also employ onsite optimisation, too.
