3 Pillars of a Successful Website

When starting a project to create or redesign a website, you must always have this single goal in mind : attract new customers and retain existing ones. The whole marketing strategy must focus on this one and only target.

The success of a website is based on 3 pillars:

• Brand popularity
• Content
• Technical factors

To make the project a success, you mustn’t overlook any of these 3 pillars. Indeed, a website of a very popular brand with quality content will not meet its priorities if it is too slow or poorly built. The most beautiful website with the best content will not be visited if no strategy is being implemented to attract traffic. Finally, if the content you present has no originality, you will disappoint the visitors and the conversions will never happen at the expected level.

How to develop its popularity?

Here, it’s all about the echo you receive on the Internet. You must create a positive background noise around your brand. In tourism and hotel industry, brand identity is based on :

• Your customer reviews on websites such as Trip Advisor, Booking and Google Local Business
• Articles on blogs or the online medias
• Your presence on social media networks and how you interact with your community

You have to work these three channels on a daily basis because they are inexhaustible sources of reassurance for your future potential customers.

Beyond e-Reputation, the quality of the backlinks that you can get from other websites is a strong signal for Google. Today, when it comes to backlinks, it is not about quantity but strictly about quality. It is therefore essential to attract good backlinks that won’t be toxic for your SEO. A Public relations plan including influencers is one the multiple ways to obtain backlinks and improve your websites search engine optimization.

As a reminder, a toxic link is a backlink made by a site that has been penalized by Google. A site may be penalized by Google for several reasons, especially if its links are not natural, if they use optimized anchor texts, if its content is of very poor quality or if they participate in a network of sites whose sole purpose is to do SEO.

Popularity is an essential factor that Google uses to rank one website over another in search results.

But if your brand isn’t popular, do not panic, by allocating an advertising budget, you will improve your visibility. Well-conducted Facebook Ads and Google Adwords campaigns (search engine advertising) can help you quickly gain visibility. Therefore, we have to allocate a budget for these campaigns. Depending on the area, the goal and the target audience, the budget will vary from a few hundred to tens of thousands of euros per month.

Content marketing strategy

It is too often the poor relation when creating or redesigning a website. Writing quality editorial content takes time and costs money. It is therefore necessary to define a content marketing strategy prior to the website design.

Implementing an inbound marketing strategy will allow you to explode your volume of organic traffic. The organic traffic is the free traffic sent by Google to websites ranking in search results on a target query.

As a case study, let me show you the curve of traffic for the website of one of my clients. I have defined and implemented a comprehensive content marketing strategy based on inbound marketing :

Before the month of September 2016, his website had only corporate content organized without any logical structure. It peaked at less than 2,000 visits per month. In September 2016, I elaborated a content strategy based on the customer intention. Following that, I created around thirty articles organized within a semantic cocoon. Six months later, the results are there. Traffic was multiplied by 14 with more than 28,000 visits in March 2017!

In this case, the strategy really paid off as the ROI (return on investment) is exceptional. If he had to buy such a volume of traffic on Adwords or Facebook, the monthly cost would have been several thousand euros. The service is therefore quickly amortized. Always keep in mind that on the long run, organic traffic is always cheaper to acquire than paid traffic.

If you’re wondering what you’ll need to write about in order to attract traffic to your website, here are some ideas :

• for a hotel, this could be talking about activities to do around the hotel
• for a restaurant, it could be to put cooking recipes
• for a fashion brand, this could be a guide on how to choose this or that clothing

You will say to me: "Thank you, it's easy! ". Actually, no, it's not that easy. It is necessary to write quality content taking into account the semantic field of the target request and it is also necessary to structure this content in a logical way within the site in relation to the other pages. On a 5-page site, it's pretty simple. On a 200-page site, it's much more complicated. To do this, you need very specialized technical tools for the analysis and optimization. So needless to say that you'll have to hire an experienced copywriter that works with professional marketing tools.

You'll really have to stand out from the competition, get off the beaten track and offer a unique customer experience if you want to raise interest and increase your visibility with a positive impact.

And the technical aspects?

Ten years ago, their importance was crucial. Nowadays, Google knows how to crawl and rank a website even if it has some technical problems. Still, you must not neglect the technical aspects because a well optimized site will always rank better.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of parameters to check :

• Page loading time (including mobile): on a site that does not display quickly, customers will leave and will never come back!
• Responsive aspect of the site: the design of the site must always adapt to the size of the screen on which it is displayed.
• Image quality: images must be sharp but well compressed to load quickly. Their description must be explicit to facilitate their indexation.
• Navigation: too many links kill the link. The user must be able to logically find his way without getting lost in overly complex menus or an over sized footer. You have to go to the basics and always organize the page by thinking as the customer would.
• Duplicate content: The same content must be accessed via a single URL. If it is accessible via other URLs, it is mandatory to de-index these secondary URLs.
• Tags: you must have a title and a description (title and meta description tags) for each page indexed in Google because that is what will appear in the search results. It is also necessary to have one H1 tag as content header, H2 tags and even H3 tags to structure it.
• Content above the fold: The user must be able to quickly access your useful content. It must therefore be placed close to the top of the page.
• Pages with low content or unnecessary content: Some pages have no text content or only automatically generated content from the content of other pages (example of archive pages in WordPress). There is no need to index them because they will only interest very few people and you certainly have more interesting pages to index on Google.
• Sitemap: this file gives the complete list of the pages to be indexed. This allows Google to crawl orphaned pages or pages that are very deep in the structure of your site.

There are many other parameters to check but the purpose of this article is not to give you a complete grid to audit the technical part of a site.

What about the budget?

The budget is a key factor. A common mistake is to allocate the entire budget to the website creation. Indeed, as you may have understood by reading this article, it is equally important to have quality content and a traffic acquisition strategy.

Consequently, a substantial part of the budget must be allocated for the content copywriting and the acquisition of traffic. Otherwise, you may have a nice site but it will not be visited. It's no use having the most beautiful showcase if no one passes the door of your shop.

Another mistake is to under-invest, to say that after all a website is only a website and that we will see later, depending on how it performs. If you do not invest enough money right away, your site will not achieve its objectives. 

But putting a large budget is unfortunately not always a guarantee of success. There is also a need for strong involvement of all parties in the various phases of the project.

Conclusion

To successfully complete a project to create or redesign a website requires good brainstorming around the targets you aim to reach with it. Take the required time to define an effective content marketing strategy that will be the basis for the structure of the future site. You must also improve the website popularity and credibility in order to attract more qualified traffic. Each action undertaken must be carried out with the ultimate goal of conversion in mind.

For many years, via communication agencies or as a freelance, I have accompanied multiple companies in different verticals (law, hospitality, real estate, fashion, wellness, travel) in their digital marketing strategy. From website to social networks, content copywriting and SEO strategy, I help them on a daily basis to increase their turnover thanks to the extraordinary growth opportunity offered by Internet.