How fast is your website?
It is now Monday morning and over the weekend I spent some time thinking about this week’s marketing priorities for the two Wordpress websites I am currently managing. So therein lies the question. How do you prioritize online marketing?
That is a loaded question because there are multiple avenues of online marketing that ultimately drive traffic towards a website and a businesses success. However, the purpose of this first blog is not to tell you what to do first, more so to show you what methods we are using and how we prioritize our marketing efforts. And it is a long list!
I have come to realize that marketing is unique to the business that is being marketed. Moreover, the ONE AND ONLY METHOD for online marketing that gets promoted around the entrepreneurial circuit is not a ONE SIZE FITS ALL method. Therefore I am going to document my process that has worked for the businesses I am involved in and continue to share which tools and methods are proving successful and which I find to be either a waste of time and/or money. So without further a due, what’s on the agenda for this week?
As previously mentioned, I have two Wordpress sites that I am currently managing and both sites we are working on a complete overhaul of the website performance.
Both websites belong to businesses operating in the services sector — in particular with technology. There is already a solid customer base with a steady stream of new leads being generated as well as returning clients. As we are working on the website performance, we are more concerned with the former and capturing as many new leads as possible.
The first part of the problem is having a presence in front of these potential new leads and the most obvious place to begin is within Google search engine results.
Therefore we must not only create and maintain accurate and relative content. But also ensure the website is performing ‘Technically’ at an optimum speed.
Think of your websites page load speed like a finely tuned vehicle engine. The more it is tuned, the better the ride! Now imagine your walking into a car yard and about to purchase a vehicle. All the vehicles may look similar, they all have wheels, seats, windows and serve for the most part the same purpose. You may be drawn to a particular color and shape which is fine. However, the vehicle that starts up faster and runs smoother it is going to deliver a much nicer experience than a car that coughs and splutters. Moreover, during a test drive regardless of the color of the car, the shape or price, the experience of the drive is what counts most! The car that coughs and splutters is not going to sell and therefore the car dealer will put this car to the back of the sales yard. Now, this is a dramatically simplified analogy of website performance with Google but you get the idea.
Now Google is the most successful search engine for a reason. They want to deliver the most accurate search results for their users and also deliver the best experience for their users (and then use data for dollars!)
It is no wonder then that page load speed is one of the most important factors in website performance and ability to be on the first page of Google (Note: this is only ONE ranking factor, I will cover more in another post).
Because these two websites are already performing at a satisfactory level, we want to focus on the low hanging fruit first by fixing technical errors within these websites and this is known as On-Page SEO.
First, we use a website audit tool call SEMrush.com. This gives me a complete breakdown of the ‘technical SEO’ issues and what do you think is the top priority? Page load speed!
Second, we use a free tool Pingdom.com to test each pages speed and identify what the issues are related to load speed.
Thirdly, I send each error to a task list within the project management app Trello.com (and begin delegating each technical task to the corresponding team member responsible for rectifying the issue.
So this is the week’s priority and in the next post, I will cover exactly how we addressed each issue.
For more information about Keyword Research take this quiz https://dgmedia.biz/quiz-lead-generation
