Website Strategy

Without strategy, you might just get a great looking website that doesn’t work. At Marketpath, we realize that any successful website begins by first understanding our client’s business and brand strategy, their objectives, and the market. We do strive to create great web designs, but great design is not only about visual appearance. Great website design is about creating business value for our clients and their customers.

Client strategy determines how each of our projects is different, but at Marketpath, we rely on three principals or pillars of website marketing strategy during every project:


Website Visibility	Website Engagement	Website Conversion

These three foundational elements are critical, not only for every single website, but for every marketing initiative for that matter.

Visibility

Whatever your website goals are, you must first find a way to get your audience to your site or your success will be limited. This can be done in any number of ways including traditional marketing, online or Pay-Per-Click (paid search) advertising, social media strategies, or natural search engine optimization (SEO). Regardless of how you drive site traffic, understanding and building for visibility will be critical to your overall website strategy and design.

As a foundation for successful website visibility, Marketpath performs on-page search engine optimization (SEO) services for the majority of our clients. Before we can optimize any site, however, we must first develop the client’s SEO and keyword strategy, beginning with keyword research to develop a list of targeted phrases for each specific organization. Well-developed keyword research is the starting point to great on-page SEO, a necessity for any great website; but it is only the beginning. Content creation, blogging, and social media integration are just a few of the other considerations we’ll discuss in regard to your site’s visibility.

Engagement

What do visitors do on your site? What would you like your audience to do? These simple questions relate directly to your overall website (and business) strategy. When you have a well thought-out strategy, that is executed well, you’ll also have more engaged visitors. But how, specifically, do you get engaged visitors? To begin with (and end with): strong content! Design and usability are important in that they guide users to easily find what they want, but ultimately, you must have content that adds value to your audience. The type of content will differ (case studies , videos, blogs, events, podcasts, webinars, etc.), but no matter the type, you must have a content strategy.

When you consider engagement, you’ll also want to think about how the site is being used, ongoing monitoring and measurement, and a plan for content creation and updates. If you do not have an analytics package in mind, we’ll integrate your site with Google Analytics, so that you can easily understand what is working or not working, and how to enhance your site over time. Understanding data such as the bounce rate, which pages and content are consumed the most, or which links are being clicked, will allow you better leverage your content management system and to have a living, breathing site that is never stale!

Conversion

Though all three pillars are important, and intertwined for that matter, the most import element is the conversion. This is where you get the lead, the new advocate, or the sale. If you are not providing conversion mechanisms on your website you are wasting your money and your visitors' time. Visibility and Engagement are great, but they should ultimately be driving conversion goals that support your organization.

And we don’t mean having just a small “contact us” link. Your site should include various calls-to-action and conversion goals (phone call, fill out form, download, etc.) connected to specific services and content. And with our easy-to-use CMS, you can test different call-to-action, to see what works best for your business.