Digital marketing is vital to any business under the new normal. A study by Magna Global USA, shows that digital marketing spend in 2019 reached $304 billion. Is your business also dedicating more resources to search engine optimization (SEO) and digital customer experience to stay ahead of the competition?
Although marketing leaders are doing every effort so their business will be on the radar of their target customers, they might be ignoring (possibly) their most important digital asset, which is their website, and its optimization.
A website is a business’s main digital representation for new and potential customers. But a webpage or URL could have one of these common critical issues: slow page speed, broken pages (404 errors), unorganized internal page linking. If website issues are left unchecked or worse neglected, businesses not only lose website visitors, but also lose the opportunity to connect to their customers because of poor website quality.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has resulted to global closure of many brick and mortar shops and also resulted to less website traffic, especially for non-essential industries. Although the situation may seem bleak, the Covid-19 mandatory health measures propelled online purchasing, and for that reason, marketers should ask themselves if they are paying enough attention to the flaws on their website and are they really aware of the impact of these unresolved issues? Like the negative correlation of the number of website errors and the website traffic. Why are customers aborting transactions or bounce rates are high?
If the marketing and tech teams work together to monitor and fix these issues, the problems can be prevented or resolved and ultimately protect the digital marketing investment of their business.
What needs to be fixed on the website?
The website development and marketing teams should list and categorize the website issues into critical, significant and optional.
- Critical website issues are the urgent problems that need to be fixed, like slow webpage loading, oversized pages, broken/404 pages, which can cause higher bounce rate, less e-commerce sales and lower web page ranking in the search engine result pages (Google or Bing)
- Significant website issues are necessary to be fixed but not urgent. These can be missing URLs in the sitemap, low indexing because of wrong webpage attributes or webpage compression.
- Optional website issues are unorganized internal linking or long click path, which affect the user’s experience of navigating the site or doing a web transaction.
Other tasks or issues that the tech team should also check are legacy codes, slow server/web host, SSL certificate installation.
Impact of your Tech Team’s Efforts or Negligence
According to a research by BCG and Ryte, based on a sample of 351 websites and 4.5million URLs, there is a 7.5% reduction on digital marketing spend effectiveness because of slow load time that results in website traffic decline due to website maintenance/SEO issue negligence.
On the other side, if websites are well maintained and issues are addressed quickly, such us improved page size and loading, a business can reap up to 26% gain in the effectiveness of their digital marketing spend.
Quality Control Pays
Just like in website development wherein different teams work together to launch the website successfully, the same high-level team collaboration or team cross-functionality should also be put in place for website quality management. Website monitoring, problem identification, fixes, reporting, team coordination should be properly delegated to selected members of the webDev team, devOps, UI/UX, content marketing team and quality managers.
In today’s setting, your company’s digital assets are more important than ever and with the right team setup and process for website quality management, you’ll minimize lost opportunities and appreciate more what you invest for digital marketing.
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