Updated: March 2026
When we start discussing your website and marketing strategy, everything can be distilled down to traffic and conversion.
For traffic, your website can be a driver, i.e. organic search traffic, or a hub for traffic from paid ads, social media, email campaigns, etc. Either way, if you don’t have traffic coming to your website, there’s not much point in talking about how else the website fits into the overall marketing strategy.
Once we have traffic, the next step is conversion — how do we get those strangers to take action and convert into either leads or ideally paying customers. That journey can be relatively quick for an e-commerce brand, but when it comes to more expensive, customized service businesses, it can be more complex and require multiple steps.
So at the most basic level — your website needs to get traffic, and convert that traffic into new leads/customers.
Let’s dive into more detail.
Website Marketing 101: Traffic
There are two main ways your website contributes to generating traffic:
- Your website itself drives traffic through content and SEO.
- Other digital marketing channels drive traffic to your website — like paid ads, email marketing, and social media.
We’ll look at the pros and cons of each, and how to utilize them in your marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
There’s a common myth among business owners when it comes to websites: “if you build it, they will come.”
Not quite. Without a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, your ideal customers won’t just stumble across your website. SEO requires keyword research, content creation, and ongoing optimization to be effective.
Keyword Research
At its core, SEO is about understanding your customers’ search behavior and aligning your website content with what they’re searching for. Keyword research is the first step: what phrases are people using to find services like yours? Tools like Google Keyword Planner, SpyFu, or SEMrush can show you not only what people are searching, but how competitive each term is.
Example: While “website design” gets around 28,000 monthly searches, it’s extremely competitive. A more niche term like “custom website design” might only get 360 searches — but it’s more targeted and easier to rank for.
Creating Content
Once you identify your keywords, you need to optimize your website content around them. This might mean updating existing pages with better headlines and meta descriptions, or creating new blog posts and landing pages that address specific search queries.
Over time, Google crawls and ranks your site based on how relevant and helpful your content is. The higher you rank, the more clicks you’ll get. Studies show that users rarely look past the top 10 results of their search. Not only that, the average click through rate (CTR) for organic search is about 3%.
That means that for every 100 users that see your page in search, 3 will click to your website. These same studies show that the #1 search result for a given term gets, on average, a 27% CTR. That’s over 10x higher than the #10 result (which gets about 2.4%). Position matters, and it’s an SEO’s job to help you climb the ranking to get more clicks to your website.
Ongoing Optimization
Getting a keyword on your website to rank is a great feeling! You’ll usually see a spike in impressions on Google Search Console first — this indicates that people are seeing your page in the search results, but maybe aren’t clicking it.
As your website continues to gain impressions and clicks from search, you can start to see whether your keyword research was correct, or if you need to optimize your content further. For example, if you wrote a blog about “how to get my website to show up on google,” but that page was ranking for terms like “how to learn SEO,” you might rework your content to be more inline with the term search engines are picking up.
The point to keep in mind is that SEO isn’t a one-and-done thing; it’s a process of continually updating your website to stay inline with what people are searching for.
External Traffic Sources: Paid Ads, Social Media, Email, and AI
While SEO builds organic traffic over time, paid ads, social media, and email marketing are great ways to quickly drive traffic to your website.
Paid Ads
Platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram) can get you in front of people actively searching for or interested in your services. These ads are especially effective when targeting users at the bottom of the funnel — people ready to buy. But it’s also one of the most expensive ways to generate traffic, since everyone wants those high-intent users.
You can also use paid ads to build awareness, but unless you pair them with a strategy to nurture that traffic, you’re likely to be disappointed in the results. That’s where your website comes in — to move those users from awareness to decision.
Social Media
Organic social content can build community and brand recognition, while paid social ads help amplify your message to new audiences. The key is to drive people back to your website where you control the full user experience. Whether it’s through lead magnets, landing pages, or blog content, your website helps nurture those followers into future customers.
Email Marketing
Your email list is one of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing toolkit. Whether you’re sending newsletters, product updates, or sales alerts, your goal should be to get subscribers back on your website to take action. Because your website is where conversions happen.
AI
One of the newest channels sending traffic to websites is AI. While it’s still hard to attribute traffic to AI and the technology is progressing at a rapid pace, it’s a good idea to start optimizing your website for AI to get ahead of the competition.
Designing the Customer Journey
A critical reason to drive traffic to your website is so that you can design (and control) the buyer’s journey from start to finish. Once a potential customer is on your website, you have the ability to guide them through the three stages of a marketing funnel:
- Awareness – People have to be aware of your product or service and how it solves their problem before they’ll buy it
- Consideration – They’re comparing options and evaluating yours against others on the market
- Decision – They’re ready to buy a product or sign up for a service
Your audience can enter the funnel at any stage, so your marketing efforts need to meet them where they are. And your website needs to support that journey.
Common Pitfalls
We often see businesses focusing their digital marketing efforts specifically in one area.
For instance, they’ll focus on running ads trying to generate awareness of their product or solution. That’s definitely a component of a solid marketing strategy, but oftentimes, the business is disappointed by the results they see — why aren’t they getting a proportional number of new clients from their tactics?
The problem with just running an awareness campaign is that you still need to nurture users through the consideration and decision phases. To do all of that through digital ads would likely blow your budget.
Similarly, another pitfall we see businesses make is focusing a campaign only around the bottom of the funnel. For instance, someone searching for “real estate agent near me” is likely close to hiring an agent to buy or sell a home. Those users are likely in the consideration or decision phase of the funnel, and if they find you at the right time, the sales cycle is likely going to be faster and the likelihood of closing a new client is higher.
The downside is that everyone is targeting the bottom of the funnel users. All businesses want leads that are ready to make a decision ASAP — it’s the ideal. So naturally, acquiring this kind of traffic is more expensive. Depending on your budget, it might be difficult to scale effectively.
How Your Website Shapes the User Journey
Since focusing on only one aspect of the sales funnel can lead to disappointing results, or worse, skyrocketing costs, it’s important to have a website that can guide users through the funnel.
A well-structured website allows you to:
- Capture awareness-stage visitors with valuable content and clear messaging
- Help consideration-stage users with case studies, FAQs, and comparisons
- Drive decision-stage users toward strong calls to action (like booking a call or making a purchase)
Using your website this way is more cost-effective than trying to nurture every stage through paid channels alone. Content like blog posts, landing pages, or email opt-ins can guide users along the path — and do it at scale.
Measuring the ROI of Website Marketing
A key aspect of using your website as a hub is being able to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. A website allows you to see:
- Where your traffic comes from
- What content users are engaging with
- What pages are converting well (or not)
You should always get analytics and reports natively from whatever platform you’re engaging on for digital marketing — social media will have impressions, likes, and other interactions; digital advertising will have impressions, clicks, and potentially even purchases if you’re an ecommerce business; email will have open rates, clicks, and more that they track.
Ultimately, you should be able to validate those metrics with the analytics on your website, and also additional metrics that will give you insight to how to act on the data. What is the value of a click from a Facebook Ad if the user just spends half a second on your website and then goes back to scrolling their feed? On the flip side, a single click from an ad could be worth a lot if the user ends up looking through every product/service page on your website, and spends 20 minutes engaging.
It’s important to be able to see that kind of behavior to really understand the value of your marketing efforts.
What’s the Next Step For Your Website?
Websites can be overwhelming if you don’t keep up with them, and especially if you’re not comfortable working on them yourself. But the role they play in your overall marketing strategy is huge, so it’s important to have a website that works well.
If you’re not sure where to start, that’s okay. Whether you want help with a couple updates or it’s time to rebuild your website from scratch, we’re here to help. We always start with a call to learn more about you and your business goals, and will walk you through ways we can help.