GoDaddy upgrades its website builder with customized marketing action plans

GoDaddy’s website-building product GoCentral is getting an upgrade today — and along with new features, there’s a new name: Websites+Marketing.

As you can probably guess, Websites+Marketing isn’t just a website builder. After all, as Senior Director of Product Management Heidi Gibson put it, a small business website is now part of a “a whole ecosystem that comprises your online presence.”

These are issues that Gibson said she’s experienced directly, as the chef/owner/”Commander in Cheese” at The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen in San Francisco.

“Our typical customer, our target customer is not just a small business — they’ve got one to five employees … they don’t know what they’re supposed to do, they don’t know what’s effective,” she added. Complicating matters is the fact that “where you need to be will not be the same answer for every kind of business.”

So GoDaddy Websites+Marketing — which Gibson described as “an evolution of GoCentral” — includes tools to manage email marketing and search engine optimization, and it syncs up with Facebook, Yelp, Instagram and Google My Business, so that it’s easy to read the latest reviews and comments, respond and post other updates directly from your Websites+Marketing dashboard.

It also includes a new feature called GoDaddy Insight, which relies on anonymized data — aggregated from all the businesses using GoDaddy and GoCentral — to provide entrepreneurs with a score on how their online presence and marketing compares to similar businesses, as well as an action plan recommending the next steps for improvement.

The website-builder looks pretty slick, too. Gibson acknowledged that some of the features will look pretty similar to anyone who’s used a competing product, but she said even here, GoDaddy has taken steps to make things easier.

For example, the Site Makeover feature allows businesses to get a quick view of how their content might look laid out on each of the 20-plus website templates, rather than making them click through each one. And thanks to GoDaddy’s recent acquisition of Sellbrite, businesses also can manage their product listings across online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart and eBay.

GoDaddy Websites+Marketing is available in four pricing tiers, ranging from $10 to $25 per month.