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Having an online website has become a necessity for business owners, publishers, writers, bloggers, and other individuals, who are serious enough to make their online presence felt in an impactful manner. A website helps in establishing credibility, offers an avenue for online marketing, creates a favorable image for your brand — personal or professional. All that stands in the way of realizing this necessity is the arduous process of conceptualizing, planning, and executing the development of a website.

If one were to start building their website from scratch, the expertise required to write the code itself is mind-boggling, especially for people without a background in coding. There are various other logistical and technical challenges that keep one from successfully developing a website. To solve this problem, users depend on a Content Management System(CMS). A CMS is an application/platform used for managing web content — it provides a platform to users for creating, editing, and publishing content. Effectively, a CMS helps users to create a ready-to-use website in simpler steps without having to worry about the technicalities involved in building and running a website.

WordPress is arguably the most popular and used CMS in the world at the moment. WordPress is omnipresent on the web because of its ease of usability, having a robust database for storing and organizing all user data — content, pages, media, user accounts, URLs, etc. Owing to its multidimensional usability and reputation, WordPress has emerged as the CMS of choice for digital marketing management.

If you want to learn more about the role of WordPress in marketing, keep reading.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of WordPress as a CMS and the reasons why WordPress enjoys a spectacular reputation among a vast majority of internet users. We will dive into the benefits of using WordPress for digital marketing, followed by some tips and tricks that can make your WordPress marketing journey easier to navigate and more fruitful than ever before. Let’s begin.

Why is WordPress the Most Preferred CMS out there?

Although there’s no dearth of capable CMS in the market, WordPress takes the lion’s share of the pie when it comes to choosing one. It is used by business websites, small-medium scale websites, and blogs alike. WordPress provides the options of changing the content, layout, and functionality of a website built on it whenever needed. No prior knowledge of coding or complex programming languages is required for building a fully functional, beautiful-looking, and easily navigable website on WordPress.

It’s not like WordPress has no other alternative in terms of the ease and features it provides its users. Today, it is easier than ever to find a CMS from a plethora of options, most of which provide all the required tools for making a pretty solid professional website in just a couple of hours. But for a new user looking for a CMS to build their blog or website, choosing between these plenty of options is equal parts confusing and challenging. If we compare WordPress with all other CMS available out there, some crucial factors stand out in differentiating it from the competition while putting it ahead of all of them. But before we discuss those factors, let’s get a basic understanding of what a Content Management System platform does.

A Content Management System (CMS) serves as a platform where one can create, edit, and manage content for a website, using simply navigable steps, without coding or learning the technical expertise required for it. There’s no need for possessing any working knowledge of concepts like CSS and HTML — which are essential for modifying the appearance of a website. It allows placing videos, images, and graphics with text for making a website attractive and pleasing to look at. Having a good-looking functional website attracts more users to a website, making it a hit on search engines — a recipe for marketing success.

Now, it’s time that we learn about the factors that set WordPress apart from other CMS:

Starting right from installation, WordPress is the easiest to install CMS — it takes 5 minutes to set it up. Out of all other CMS, WordPress offers the easiest options to create a website without the need for any technical website-building knowledge. Its dashboard is super easy to use.

Search engines are known to crawl WordPress websites more than the ones built on other platforms. The simpler code of a WordPress website allows search engine algorithms to understand and index its code easily. The Ping feature on WordPress instantly notifies search engines whenever any change is made to a WordPress site. All of this makes WordPress an SEO favorite.

• Pocket friendly with design flexibility

It offers a wide range of free themes and designs to choose from while deciding a look for one’s website. Unlike other CMS platforms, it charges a minimal amount of money even for the paid ones, making it pocket-friendly.

• Makes Website Management Easier

It’s very easy to make changes to a WordPress website by using uncomplicated tools provided by WordPress. A user doesn’t have to depend on any website manager for taking care of small or big changes to content, design, or practically any other element of their website. WordPress also provides the multi-user capability for allowing multiple users to work on the same website at the same time.

One of the best parts about WordPress is its ability to offer scalability to websites by not having any effect on the speed of a website with an increasing number of pages or posts.

• It has a dedicated community of users

WordPress boasts of one of the largest communities of regular users who are always ready to troubleshoot the problems faced by their fellow community members. It is a dynamic and ever-growing community, where users can avail help from WordPress Forum or agencies specializing in WordPress web design.

Benefits of using WordPress for Digital Marketing

Now that we have learned why WordPress enjoys the reputation it does, it’s time to understand the benefits provided by WordPress and how businesses can leverage its easy usability, cost-effectiveness, easier management, the option of scalability, and SEO friendliness to achieve their digital marketing goals. Major marketing benefits provided by WordPress are as follows:

• Setting Up, Executing, and Managing Content Marketing

Content has emerged as a new currency in the digital world. Knowing your audience well enough to design and publish consistent and quality content according to their needs paves way for more traffic and increased opportunities for achieving marketing goals. WordPress is a platform where businesses can easily publish and manage their content which can be promoted on social media, paid platforms, email, and other channels, to reach the target audience.

The ease of publishing valuable content provides an opportunity for building backlinks via sharing options readily available on WordPress. Targeted phrases and keywords used by marketers can attract more target audiences by improving search engine ranking. Having started as a blogging tool, WordPress has come a long way and established itself as an ideal candidate for content marketing.

• Utility Marketing through Website Portal

WordPress makes available plenty of customization options for building a website, adding to its already massive functionality. A business can turn its website into a custom resource as per the requirements of its users. WordPress provides a variety of plugins for managing most needs of users like accessing payment options, sale of merchandise, managing interests, scheduling events, etc.

WordPress allows for turning a website into a digital marketing portal that provides access to relevant information, actionable goals, and more with the help of the multitude of plugins on offer. Having such a diverse set of tools to make a dynamic marketing website is called Utility Marketing.

• Increased Visibility with Search Engine Optimization

Without adequate online visibility, no marketing campaign can be effective or remotely successful in achieving goals set by the website owner. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website for better visibility in google search results. Based on specific phrases and keywords, the Google search algorithm can be influenced to show a website in the topmost results of the first search results page. Users are known to click on the top few links, and therefore, SEO is a vital part of digital marketing.

WordPress is useful for customizing page titles, META descriptions, and adding relevant keywords & phrases for optimizing a web page. Many online keyword tools like ‘free keyword research tool’ can be used for finding relevant keywords to be added. It also removes content obstructions and allows for regularly updated content — which helps in improving rankings.

• An Opportunity for Community Building

WordPress websites and blogs help in building a community of customers, clients, members, and other factions of the target audience. A well-established community can help with the social media promotion of the content of your choice. Discussions about website content, merchandise, and events result in content sharing among the community members and their extensions. Therefore, a dedicated community of users helps in providing a better reach to informational posts on the website — which helps in generating more leads.

The next step in the marketing process is converting the leads generated through various channels into customers of a service or product. WordPress is a one-stop solution as a CMS for keeping track of shares, visits, comments etc., based on which a business can make relevant changes to underperforming content. Better performing content attracts more leads and increases the chances of conversions. WordPress provides a vast selection of calls to action for aiding the conversion process. It also helps in gauging the success rate of various calls to action used on the website — based on this information they can be tweaked or changed for a better conversion chance.

Some Tips and Tricks for Effective WordPress Marketing

Knowing the importance of the visual elements on a website for making it more appealing to the incoming visitor, images are an essential means of making text easier on a webpage. One picture can tell a story worthy of a big chunk of text. The issue with images is the slowing down of a website because of the large size of an image. To mitigate this problem, always optimize an image or an infographic before adding it to your website.

• Be Mindful of Making Perfect Links

Links are an essential part of affiliate marketing and citing useful resources. Therefore, some things must be kept in mind while adding links to your WordPress site:

• Be cautious of broken links: Broken links can be detrimental to your website’s search rankings as Google flags pages and decreases their ranking if they have errors in links. Use one of the various available plugins to check for broken links and correct them.
• Make Permalinks Shorter: A permalink is nothing but the simple address of a page on your website, automatically generated by WordPress. What you need to do is remove any redundant characters from these links — to avoid confusion for visitors and search engines.
• Work on Page Speed

Page speed is a crucial metric in determining user experience. User experience is the criteria based on which Google ranks pages in its search results. Therefore, improving page speed is a must for increasing the chances of ranking on the top page of search engines. Refer to Speed Up WordPress for finding out possible ways of increasing page loading speed on your WordPress site.

In the effort of improving search ranking, overall SEO performance can make a huge difference. Along with better quality, greater informational value, and usability of the content you post on your website, also add some of the widely available SEO plugins on your website. Plugins can help with SEO score, heading lengths, readability score, image quality tips, etc.

Shares on social media help generate a considerable amount of traffic. Social media integration is an important feature of WordPress. Integrating social media handles allows visitors to share content and increase its visibility even more.

Conclusion

WordPress is a powerful and cost-effective CMS that is suitable for designing and executing a successful digital marketing strategy. Finding the right tools can make all the difference in making the best use of WordPress. WordPress plugins are designed for simplifying marketing, and therefore, one must be mindful in adding relevant plugins to their website. Overall, if one follows the steps mentioned above, WordPress can do wonders for their business.