It is easy to assume that the answer to slow sales, fewer enquiries or a lack of website traffic is simply to do more marketing. You might consider increasing your advertising budget, posting more regularly on social media, producing more content or trying another platform, but before you start spending more money to bring people to your business, it is worth taking a proper look at what happens once they arrive.

A good website marketing strategy is not only about getting more people to your website; it also needs to consider what those visitors experience when they get there. If your website is difficult to navigate, unclear about what you offer or missing important information, increasing your traffic may not solve the underlying problem.

Before you put more money into marketing, here are five areas worth checking.

1. Can someone understand what you do within a few seconds?

Imagine that someone has landed on your homepage without knowing anything about your business, your products or your services, and ask yourself whether they could quickly work out what you offer, who you help and what they should do next.

Your homepage does not need to explain absolutely everything about your business, but it should give visitors enough information to understand whether they have come to the right place. If your headline is vague, your services are difficult to find or your website relies on visitors already knowing what your business does, you may be losing potential customers before they have had a chance to explore further.

Clear website copy is an important part of any website marketing strategy, particularly when you are using paid advertising or SEO to bring new visitors to your site. The people arriving through those channels may have never heard of your business before, so the website needs to do some of the work of introducing and explaining your offering.

There is nothing wrong with giving your brand personality, but the personality should support the message rather than making visitors work too hard to understand it.

2. Is your website easy to navigate?

Once someone understands what your business offers, they need to be able to find the information that matters to them without clicking through page after page trying to work out where they are supposed to go.

Take a look at your main navigation and consider whether the important pages are immediately obvious. Depending on your business, this could include your services, products, pricing, about page, FAQs, contact information, booking system or other key resources.

It is also worth checking whether your links still work properly and whether the pages they lead to are still relevant. Businesses change over time, which means websites can easily end up with outdated information, old services or links that no longer lead anywhere useful.

Navigation may not sound like the most exciting part of a website marketing strategy, but it has a direct effect on how easily people can move through your website and find the information they need before deciding whether to contact or buy from you.

3. Does your website work properly on mobile?

It is surprisingly easy to forget about the mobile experience when you spend most of your working day looking at your website on a laptop or desktop computer, particularly when the site appears perfectly fine on the screen in front of you.

Open your website on your phone and use it as though you are a potential customer who has never visited before. Scroll through the homepage, open the navigation menu, visit your service or product pages and try to complete your contact form.

As you do this, look for anything that makes the experience unnecessarily difficult, including text that is hard to read, buttons that are difficult to tap, images that do not display properly, pages that take too long to load or forms that are frustrating to complete.

A website can look polished on a desktop while still providing a poor experience on a smaller screen, which is why mobile usability deserves a proper place in your website marketing strategy rather than being treated as an afterthought.

4. Can Google understand what your business offers?

Your website has another important visitor that does not browse pages in quite the same way as a potential customer, and that is Google.

Search engines need to be able to understand what your business does, which products or services you offer and which searches your individual pages are relevant to. If your important pages contain very little useful information or use vague headings that do not explain what the page is actually about, you are making the job of understanding your website more difficult.

This is where your SEO foundations become particularly important.

Look at your main pages and consider whether each one clearly addresses something that your potential customers might search for. If you offer website design in Durban, for example, a page called “What We Do” does not provide much useful context for either a visitor or a search engine, whereas a dedicated website design service page can explain what you offer, who it is for and what someone can expect when working with you.

Good SEO does not mean filling every paragraph with keywords, and it certainly does not mean writing for search engines at the expense of the person reading the page. A better website marketing strategy uses relevant keywords naturally while making sure the content remains genuinely useful to the people you are trying to reach.

5. Is there an obvious next step?

Imagine that someone has visited your website, found the information they were looking for and decided that they are interested in working with you. What happens next?

A surprising number of websites leave visitors to figure this out for themselves, with a small contact link hidden somewhere in the navigation or footer and very little guidance elsewhere on the page.

The appropriate next step will depend on your business, but it might be requesting a quote, booking a consultation, making an enquiry, viewing your services, shopping online, calling your business or sending you a WhatsApp message.

You do not need to fill every section of your website with sales messages, particularly if that does not suit your brand, but visitors should be able to recognise what they can do next when they are ready to take that step.

A clear call to action is therefore another important part of a website marketing strategy, because there is little value in bringing someone to your website if they have no obvious way to move from being interested to actually contacting or buying from you.

So, should you spend more on marketing?

There is a good chance that your business could benefit from more marketing, but it is worth checking your foundations before increasing your budget, particularly if you are already investing in SEO, Google Ads, social media or other forms of digital marketing.

Your marketing may be doing its job by bringing people to your website, while the website itself is making it harder for those visitors to take the next step. In that situation, increasing the amount of traffic can simply mean that more people encounter the same problems.

This does not necessarily mean that you need to rebuild your website or start again from scratch. In many cases, some relatively straightforward improvements can make the existing site more useful, including rewriting unclear messaging, simplifying the navigation, updating outdated information, improving mobile usability and making your calls to action more obvious.

How your website fits into your wider marketing

A website marketing strategy works best when your different digital channels support one another rather than operating as completely separate activities.

Someone might discover your business through Google, come across your social media profile a few days later and eventually click through to your website after seeing an advert or reading one of your posts. Each interaction contributes to the overall impression they form of your business, which means your website needs to make sense alongside the other marketing activity you are doing.

SEO can help people discover your business through search, Google Ads can put your services in front of people who are actively looking for them, social media can help build familiarity and content can answer questions that potential customers have before they are ready to buy.

A website is an important part of the wider marketing process, particularly when it supports other channels such as search, social media, email and paid advertising. Salesforce also discusses website marketing as part of a broader approach to reaching and engaging customers online.

Salesforce website marketing resources

Your website then becomes the place where much of that information comes together.

That is why a website marketing strategy should consider more than simply how many people are visiting your site. It should also look at what those visitors see, how easily they can find information, whether they trust what they find and whether the website makes it straightforward for them to take the next step.

Before you increase the budget, check the basics

Marketing does not always need to mean doing more, particularly when there are already areas of your digital presence that could be working harder.

Before increasing your advertising spend, publishing twice as much content or adding another marketing platform to your workload, spend some time looking at the website that all of those activities are ultimately supporting.

Check whether your message is clear, your navigation makes sense, your mobile experience works properly, your important pages have solid SEO foundations and your visitors have an obvious next step when they are ready to get in touch.

A strong website marketing strategy is not about throwing more money at every available channel; it is about making sure the different parts of your digital presence are working together and giving potential customers a clear reason to continue their journey with your business.

Sometimes the most useful marketing improvement is already sitting on your website. Visit our services page to find out how we can help you with your marketing strategy.