WordPress, Content Management Systems and increasing organic website growth

There have been a few articles on the web this week of interest.

The first article of interest is in Ground Report Why you should choose WordPress. Having developed many websites (initially in good old HTML) and in latter years most of my work has been in Joomla or WordPress, I have to say that for many reasons I am a WordPress convert, but for just as many I do find it limiting in what I want to achieve. I totally agree with the writer that WordPress is great for making sites immediately responsive with the right template, i.e. it changes the sizing for you automatically so that the viewing experience is enhanced on mobiles and tablets, it provides you with easy to use plug-ins for SEO and sharing information on Social Media, however sometimes I find the template approach too restrictive. I also don’t like the way that a lot of sites look like WordPress Sites (if that makes any sense). Websites are a company’s shop window and sometimes they can look same old same old!

The Adeo Group wrote a blog this week about which Content Management System to use (Which CMS is right for you?). The fundamental crux of the article is that ultimately it depends on what you want your website to do for your business. I would take that a step further and say that it also depends on the skill set of the person developing the website. If you are designing and writing it yourself, then even if you are a development virgin, it is possible to produce a very basic website from WordPress….plus there is a raft of support articles out there that can lead you through the stormy journey. Possibly you don’t want it to sing and dance and do acrobatics as your website is literally just a page of information telling your clients about who you are, what you do as a company and how to contact you. It can be as simple as setting up your Facebook page and so fundamentally there is no excuse for you not having a website at all. However, if you want to use your website to really market your company and design it so that it can be used as a marketing tool in itself, then use a professional. I guess it’s the difference between putting your own window display up…..it may look nice, but does it draw customers in and does it help you stand out against your competitors?

Obviously it wouldn’t be a week in the digital world without some sort of reference on how to increase your voice and gravitas in the ever expanding world wide web. Marketeers spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to keep up with Google’s positioning algorithms and just as soon as it seems that one has it right, the goal posts change yet again. However, what is re-iterated again and again in all the articles I have read (including this one 7 ways to boost your website’s organic traffic) is that firstly make sure your website is responsive and secondly make sure your content is good and relevant to your target market.

There are various ways to incorporate key words into your web pages so that Google picks them up when it sends its search bots out to find you, but if the site doesn’t appeal to your customers, then there is little point in people being able to find you. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking through to broken links and Google now penalise you for this anyway. So the first step to good SEO is to look at your website from the eyes of your consumers……in fact even better, get an unbiased colleague to look at it for you. Does it make sense, does it make them want to buy your product/service and does it facilitate that purchase?