How do you ensure you get the most out of your WordPress website? These little marketing tricks will guarantee you improve your return on investment.
What makes WordPress the ideal content management system (CMS) for your website?
For starters, it’s an open-source platform.
This keeps your initial installation costs low while also ensuring you don’t have to get tied to one developer. With a proprietary CMS, you’re unable to move on if your developer isn’t working out.
But with WordPress, you have your choice of tens of thousands of developers all over the world.
WordPress is also one of the easiest CMS to use.
Its simple navigational features and the wide array of options mean you don’t have to struggle to get your content online. And the sheer range of plugins means you can customise WordPress and create the perfect website for your business.
It’s also scalable. No matter how much your business grows, WordPress can grow right along with it.
These are the reasons why WordPress powers around a third of all websites in the world!
But let’s assume you’ve built your WordPress website. You’ve got it up and running and it does exactly what you want it to do.
This is only the first part of the puzzle.
Now, you’ve got to figure out how to market that website so that it gets in front of as many people as possible. And this involves optimising it and using the right plugins to expand its reach.
This is something that the developers at Automation Agency can help you with. But to give you an idea of what you need to do, here are eight marketing hacks for your WordPress website.
Hack #1 – Use a Responsive Theme
You’ve searched through hundreds of themes to find the one that’s right for your website. Working with a developer, you’ve adapted that theme so that it suits your branding. Finally, you launch your website into the world.
But you soon find that there’s a problem.
The theme looks amazing when displayed on desktop computers. But when you pull your website up on a mobile device, it’s a mangled mess. Website elements are all out of place and the site feels difficult to navigate.
That’s a huge issue in an increasingly mobile world.
According to the World Advertising Research Center, 51% of people solely use their smartphones to access the internet. The same organisation predicts that this number will increase to 72.6% by 2025.
On top of this, internet marketing guru Neil Patel says:
“It’s no secret that Google loves mobile-friendly web pages.
“With their most recent algorithm update, Google has been cracking down on any and all sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.”
If your website doesn’t display well on mobile devices, that’s a huge portion of your audience that you’re missing out on.
This is why it’s so important to select a responsive theme for your WordPress website. Look for themes that tell you they’re mobile-friendly. When you launch, keep an eye on your mobile traffic. If you have a high bounce rate, this suggests the theme isn’t working for your mobile users.
Hack #2 – Use Appropriate Plugins to Enhance Your Lead Generation Efforts
WordPress offers you the ability to customise your CMS using a range of plugins. Your goal is to select the plugins that help you to generate more leads for your business.
Yoast is the first one you must implement. This handy SEO tool helps you handle title tags, meta descriptions, and a host of other smaller issues. It also comes with a readability checker that examines your content for keywords and quality. Using it allows you to quickly and easily optimise your pages for search engines.
Akismet is another great tool, as it allows you to easily monitor your blog for spammy comments. It automates the monitoring process and flags troublesome comments. This ensures that the user-generated content on your website doesn’t end up tanking it in search engines.
Aiming to use forms to bolster your email list? OptinMonster is a handy plugin that offers a range of form templates that you can place anywhere on your website. The plugin also links to most major email clients and CRMs, including MailChimp, Infusionsoft, and Campaign Monitor.
This is just a small selection of plugins that you can leverage for your website. At Automation Agency, our developers can help you to choose and install the right plugins for you. Send your task to the Concierge Service to start building a more powerful WordPress website.
Hack #3 – Enable Comments (To Create User-Generated Content)
We talked about comments in our last hack.
The comments section of your website is an ideal source of user-generated content. When used well, it allows you to spark conversations that result in a constant flow of fresh content. When search engines see this, they recognise that your visitors engage with your content and each other.
The result?
Higher rankings in search engines.
Unfortunately, many website owners disable comments because they don’t want to deal with the hassle of monitoring them. While this saves some time, it also means their websites miss out on this user-generated content.
Don’t make that mistake. Encourage your visitors to leave comments and use a tool like Akismet to get rid of the spam.
Hack #4 – Optimise Your Website’s Images
Having beautiful images on your website is a great way to catch the eye of visitors. But those super high-quality images you’ve uploaded bring some problems.
They slow down your website’s loading time.
The larger the file, the longer it takes for your website to load. And if a visitor has to wait too long to see your content, they’re going to bounce away.
The stats reflect this, too.
A one-second delay results in a 7% decrease in conversions. What’s more, 79% of people who say they’re unhappy with how a website performs will never buy from that site again.
You also have the search engine issue to consider. Slower loading times affect your rankings, as Google explains on its Webmaster Blog:
“Faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”
Simply put, you need to find a balance between quality and loading times. The brilliant designers in the Automation Agency team can help with this. We’ll create images that look the part and load quickly. Send your task to the Concierge Service to learn more.
Hack #5 – Consider Syndicating Your Blog
The content in your blog can be one of your company’s most powerful marketing tools. However, its impact gets diminished if nobody’s landing on the blog in the first place. This is a particular challenge for new websites that haven’t built a following yet.
So, how do you get your content in front of the people who can benefit the most from reading it?
Syndication may be the answer.
This means that you allow other, more reputable sites to post your blog content.
But there’s a balance to strike here.
Syndication raises the possibility of Google punishing your website for containing duplicate content. Look for syndicators that leverage metadata to reduce the risk of this happening. You may also see syndication as a short-term option until you’ve built enough traffic to have your blog stand on its own.
Hack #6 – Check for Bad and Broken Links
In Google’s SEO Guide, the company points out how harmful broken links can be to your website. In fact, there’s a specific section in the guide that says you need to avoid…
“Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.”
So, it’s clear that bad and broken links can damage your standing in search engines. However, they also damage the perception of your website among your visitors. If somebody keeps landing on non-existent pages while trying to search through your website, they’re likely to leave.
Implementing customised 404 pages can mitigate the problem. However, it’s best for you to keep the links on your site updated so that broken links don’t become a problem in the first place.
Some WordPress plugins can help you do this automatically, with Broken Link Checker being the most prominent. Send a task to our Concierge Service to find out what that is and how to install it.
Hack #7 – A/B Test Your WordPress Landing Pages
You’ll likely use WordPress to create landing pages for your marketing campaigns. The goal here is to optimise those landing pages so that they generate the highest possible number of conversions.
This is where A/B testing comes in.
Also known as split testing, this involves comparing the performance of two versions of your landing page. You’ll have your original page and a page that has one key element altered.
For example, you may change the headline or alter the form. You then run campaigns to these pages to see which performs best. If the altered page gets more conversions, that becomes your new standard landing page.
Then, you run another test with a different element altered. Eventually, you’ll end up with a landing page that’s fully optimised for conversions.
However, A/B testing is a time-consuming process and you may not want to handle it yourself. Again, your Automation Agency team can handle it for you. Send a task to the Concierge Service to find out how.
Hack #8 – Connect Your WordPress Site to Social Networks
There are so many ways to use social media to bring more traffic to your website. These include the following:
- Posting links to new content pieces across all social media channels
- Incorporating sharing buttons into your website so that visitors can quickly share your content
- Leveraging as many types of content as possible to attract all types of social media users
- Not limiting yourself to a single social media platform
Hack Your WordPress Marketing
You already have the WordPress website.
Now, it’s time to use these hacks to make sure more people can see that and your amazing content.
Many of these hacks involve using plugins to make WordPress more effective as a marketing tool. And that’s where Automation Agency can help you.
We have an in-house WordPress development service that can help you create, launch, and market your website. Not only that, but we also offer in-depth support and easy access to an array of useful plugins.
Send a task to our Concierge Service to start your journey to a more powerful WordPress site.
But perhaps you want to find out more about us first.
If that’s the case, check out the array of services that we offer to agencies today.
