Imagine you’re having a housewarming party. What if I told you I could set up a way to know what each of your friends thought of your new place, how they moved through your house as they showed themselves around, how many of the people you invited actually came and what they are saying about your house to your face and behind your back? Wouldn't you be interested in learning about this?

With the digital tools in today's marketing environment, the potential is there to do this with your digital house: your website. Like your home, your website is the digital representation of who your organization is and what it stands for.

A lackluster website can stop even the most well-planned marketing campaigns from working as well as they should. Even before they are launched.

If you want to be able to get everything you can out of your digital efforts, or you want to integrate your digital with your traditional marketing, or use all of the latest tools, it all starts in one place: your website.

Create A Great Website Experience First

Like houses there are multi-million dollar “mega-mansion” websites, one or two page “apartment” sites and everything in-between. Just like in the physical world, size of the house will dictate the size of the get together and the tools available to use to create a great housewarming party.

Imagine one of those single-family houses you see on the remodeling TV shows. One where the structure is sound and the utilities work, but the design and the appliances are dated and it's clear that the house has been empty for a while.

Let's say you just bought this house and within week of moving in you throw a housewarming party. Your friends walk in and as they're taking off their shoes they're faced with having to say something nice about a living room that's half pink and half wood paneling.

As they are walking around it’s clear that the carpet needs replacing and fresh coats of paint need to replace the peeling wallpaper. The potential for an awesome house is there, but there’s a lot that needs to be upgraded. Would you say that this impression is what you want to be communicating to your friends?

Unfortunately, websites similar to this fixer-upper are being used for many digital campaigns today. The problem with this is that you wouldn't necessarily want to invite everyone you know to this type of house, or website, without putting some work into it and making sure it was an accurate representation of what it is your organization stands for and your brand.

If your website is not an accurate representation of your organization, or it gives off the wrong impression, why would you spend time and money to bring people to it?

Optimize Your Website, It Affects Everything

As I stated before, what you're able to do with your digital marketing is wholly dependent on the type of site you've created to represent your organization or brand. Optimizing your site’s content for specific keywords is not only important for your organic search rankings, but also influences how well your paid search ads perform and how much you pay per click on the various keywords your organization is targeting.

However, it's also important to optimize your site for visitors. Without good website content and navigation people will leave, sending cues to Google and other search engines that your site may not be relevant to the query that brought them there. Other things like freshness of content and signals from social media platforms all factor into your website’s relevance and authority around particular topics and keywords.

It's not only important to optimize for search engines and your potential visitors, you must also consider the devices people are using throughout their journey with your organization and your content.

If you do not have a responsive website yet that's optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences, you may have already turned your prospects away. Stop and focus your attention there before you attempt anything else from a digital perspective.

Across the board, mobile and tablet traffic continues to increase. Even if the final conversion takes place on a desktop or laptop, in many instances much of the research leading up to the decision occurred on a mobile phone or tablet.

Earlier this year, Google even updated its algorithm to decrease the likelihood of a non-mobile-friendly site from showing up in mobile or tablet searches. Subsequently, we have seen mobile and tablet traffic drop significantly on sites that are not mobile-friendly.

Call the Experts For Help

Just like your house, when you're rebuilding or remodeling your website it can be tempting to do it yourself, but don't be afraid to call the experts to help. Whether you need your digital plumbing fixed, some design tips or a few walls knocked down, we're here to help. We love helping our clients get their digital house in order to ensure their marketing efforts are doing all they can.  

[This post originally appeared on the Risdall Marketing Group blog and has been posted with a rel canonical]