How to promote your Squarespace website with digital marketing
Your website is a place to gain trust, introduce people to your products and services, get potential leads, and often where people contact you or complete a purchase. As such, it's critical to think about how you'll drive traffic to your website.
Here are four popular buckets used to drive website traffic:
Social media (paid & organic)
Email
Google Ads (search, display & shopping)
The right solution for one business may not be a good fit for the next. It's essential to think about your goals, budget, and audience when deciding on the right marketing channels for you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On-Page SEO: Potential customers want to achieve something like learning more about a topic, securing a service, or purchasing a product.
Google wants to provide the most helpful result for someone making a search query. Paying to drive traffic to your website can add up, so businesses often feel pretty motivated to improve their search engine ranking to gain more organic website traffic.
On-page SEO refers to optimizing your web pages for search engines and potential visitors to improve website visibility. On-page SEO includes content, keywords, heading tags, internal links, alt tags on photos, appropriate title tags, etc.
Off-Page SEO: When other websites promote you and link back to your website, be it due to great content you've created, sponsored content, or press releases, you gain backlinks. Backlinks, depending on the source, can suggest increased trustworthiness and quality of your content to Google.
However, ranking in search engines isn't about stuffing your website full of keywords or headings or gaining spammy links. It is about empathizing with a potential customer and considering how you can best solve their problem.
To learn more about making your website more visible in search engines, visit this article.
Social media (paid & organic)
Social media offers a great way to drive traffic to your website. Several social media platforms offer both organic and paid social media options.
You can create content to share with your community and use paid ad targeting to reach more people you think will be interested in your products and services.
Picking the right channels for you will depend on your business, success on current platforms, and customer demographics. For example, if you're a realtor targeting a professional audience, you may find yourself driving traffic from LinkedIn to a white-paper with email opt-in on your website.
On the other hand, if you're a gym with a millennial audience promoting a free virtual fitness class, you might use Instagram stories and encourage people to swipe up to visit your website and register.
A quick Google search will give you greater insight into these channels and how they might make sense for reaching and growing your audience.
Email campaigns
Email is a powerful channel for growing your audience and engaging with your community and previous customers.
Email allows you to segment your messaging to ensure you provide personalized and meaningful content to a given audience.
For example, someone running a sporting goods store may want to send an email about their new winter running gear to people who bought running shoes in the last six months. This message may resonate with people more than a laundry list of updates such as a discount on golf balls.
Email is also a fantastic way to grow your audience and collect potential leads. For example, the sporting goods store could create a free guide about the best running trails in the area and have someone subscribe to their email list to download it.
Google search & display ads
Search Ads: You know when you make a website search, and the first part of the page displays results with a little "ad" symbol next to them in the corner?
Those are Google Search Ads. Search ads are often used for people who want to capture a searcher's intent. Many people use search ads because they don't appear high enough on organic search results. With search ads, people bid on keywords or phrases related to their business. When people click on the ad associated with the keyword(s) you bid on, you pay Google.
Google search campaigns can be an effective advertising method, but you must think carefully about the budget. You want to think about what you are selling and how much you need to spend before someone makes a purchase.
Display Ads: Display ads are visual-based ads you have no doubt seen while visiting a blog, watching a YouTube video, or reading the news. While search ads are more related to intent, display ads will surface while you are busy doing other things.
Display ads can reach a large number of people across the Google Display network, and as such, are useful for expanding reach, brand, and staying top of mind.
Google Shopping Ads
Open a tab in Google and search for a product like "trail running shoes" or "organic coffee." You'll most likely see a list of images come up with vendor information and a small "ads" text in the top left corner. These are Google shopping ads. Shopping ads are the product ads that appear in Google search results.
Shopping ads require a Google Merchant Center account where you provide details about your products, and a Google Ads account to run your campaigns (budgets, bidding, etc.). Your Merchant Center feed provides Google with the information it needs to display your products in results.
Shopping, or product, ads work differently from search ads with regards to how Google decides to show them in a search query. Rather than bidding on keywords, Google will crawl your Merchant Center feed and your website to determine your product's relevancy in a search result.
Because of the highly visual nature of shopping ads, they can be an excellent choice for retailers. There are both paid and free shopping options available that are worth exploring.
Resources for promoting your website:
Promoting your website
Search engine optimization (SEO)
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