For Digital Content Managers, WordPress is a Win in a Web 2.0 World
Unless your brand is a household name, it’s not enough to simply have a professional-looking website, especially if you want that website to drive customers to your business. Your business website has to work for you by allowing you to leverage content to inbound potential clients and facilitate interactions with existing users.
Unfortunately, if your website’s platform doesn’t easily facilitate content management, social integration and analytics, you will be at a major disadvantage for implementing an effective inbound marketing strategy.
How WordPress Helps with Inbound Marketing
The main way WordPress helps facilitate your inbound marketing efforts is by making page, post, meta content, menus and taxonomy easily accessible to your content managers and copywriters within the core installation of WordPress, the themes and via plugins.
That means you can further your digital marketing strategy without having to incorporate a developer or technical expert every time you need to make an update to a page.
Following are some specific benefits of WordPress for digital marketing professionals:
Google “likes” WordPress websites. WordPress tends to address SEO-related issues by default. For example, it’s easy to generate custom URLs for your pages and posts, and blog commenting and management is baked in. Giving search engines what they need in order to effectively index and display your site means your site has a better chance at ranking in a search engine results page.
View Google Analytics metrics easily. Measuring and analyzing the traffic to your web pages as well as actions taken on your site, and making updates based on these metrics, is an important part of effective content marketing. The SEO Yoast plugin makes it easy to add your Google Analytics UA code to your website.
In addition, the Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin can make it convenient and easy to see your Google Analytics data right in your WordPress admin dashboard. The data includes real time events and reports. https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard-for-wp/screenshots/
WordPress makes it easy to implement a pre-made or custom responsive theme. More and more, your potential clients may be accessing your website via their tablet or smartphone so it’s imperative that your digital marketing strategy take mobile users into account. Make sure your website is accessible, readable, and usable on different devices by using a responsive theme for your website. WordPress responsive themes makes this relatively straightforward.
We’ve pulled a few of our favorite plugins that can make the life of a digital marketing professional easier:
Lead capture and customer support ticketing. The free version of Gravity Forms can facilitate basic lead capture on your site and push notifications to your email inbox. In addition, WordPress integrates with common help desk services like Zendesk.
Newsletter opt-in. Plugins exist for just about every newsletter service available, making it quick and easy to manage your email lists as users opt-in on your WordPress website.
Local strategy. For small, locally owned and operated businesses that need visibility to get customers through the front door, it’s important to make sure the website is optimized for local search. There are a number of plugins that can be used to help with local optimization, many of them covered in this great blog post. http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-optimize-your-wordpress-site-for-local-search)
On-site SEO. SEO Yoast makes it easy to write custom meta titles and descriptions, and provide page-level handling directives and side-wide xml sitemaps without requiring a deep technical knowledge of server configurations or code. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
The Redirection plugin makes it easy to implement 301 redirects when migrating a website and for ongoing content management, as well as monitoring 404s. https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Social integration and sharing. Tying your social accounts to your website is an important part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. A variety of social sharing plugins make it easy for users to click to share your website content on their social feeds, and also make it easy for you to format your social posts. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpsso/screenshots/
Schema on your website for prominence in SERP. Schema is markup for certain types of website information to help search engines understand what it is. In turn, this allows search engines to serve up that information for relevant queries.
