Here at Blue Lacy SEO we keep telling prospective clients how important digital marketing is to their business. This includes web design, search engine optimization, and customer experience. This claim is backed up by data.
According to Magna Global USA, global digital marketing expenditures in 2019 was $304 billion. Alright, you’re convinced that marketing on the Internet is important. So, you create a Facebook, submit your website to a few online directories, and make a website. You’re all done.
The crown jewel of all your efforts is your website. This is the main point of entry for new and potential customers. But, according to Ryte, a provider of website quality management software, all URL’s have at least one website quality issue. This could be broken pages that don’t load, pages that load painfully slow, broken links, etc. According to Ryte nearly 40% of these issues are critical in nature.
I have seen this problem many times when analyzing websites. The result is a loss of marketing potential as much as 20%, according to Ryte. This could lead to losing thousands of dollars a month.
Because of COVD-19, the shutdown of most retail stores in the U.S.A. has caused most industries to rely on online sales. But, many companies are not aware of the flaws on their websites and the impact of the problems they cause.
Research from Boston Consulting Group and Ryte shows a strong correlation between the number of website errors and the number of visitors. This could be in the form of customers aborting a transaction, leaving a web page, or even moving to your competition. The more serious problems can lead to ranking problems with the search engines, which means your site will be seen less often for searchers.
It was found that most companies do not have an established mechanism is place for checking and dealing with website problems and errors.
So, What’s Broken?
Boston Consulting Group, along with Ryte teamed up to analyze more than 350 websites across 177 industries. They gathered data from all the URLs of the websites they analyzed; that totaled to more than 4 million web pages! They then selected the most significant issues and grouped them into 3 categories: mandatory fixes, recommended fixes, and optional fixes.
Mandatory Fixes
The group found that 37% of all website problems fell into this group and accounted for the most problems overall.
- Pages over 1MB in size
- Pages that take over 1 second to load
- Broken pages
- Missing SSL encryption
- Broken images
- Duplicate content
- Duplicate page titles
- Broken redirects
- Important non-indexable pages
- Broken canonicals
- Blocked CSS in Robots.tx
Recommended Fixes
These problems need to be fixed but are not as serious as the mandatory ones. In the study, they accounted for 33% of all the issues.
- Indexable pages missing from the sitemap
- Pages lacking compression
- Pages with Nofollow attribute
- Hreflang tags with errors
- Duplicate H1 titles
- Orphaned pages
- Pages with low word count
- Cross domain canonicals
- Duplicate meta description
- Blocked javascript in Robots.txt
Optional Fixes
30% of the problems fell into this category. These problems do not directly cause problems for visitors, but they could impact the website in some way.
- Pages with a long click path
- Pages with few internal links
- Non-indexable pages in the sitemap
- Broken outbound content
The group analyzed website issues by industry, across five broad groups: beauty and personal care, business and industrial, food and grocery, home and garden, and travel and tourism.
It was found that corporate and branded sites had more problems than e-commerce sites. Business and industrial sites had the fewest issues because they have less functionality and are generally less complex.
What Do All These Problems Cost?
The group came to the conclusion that most companies are losing valuable revenue as a result of website issues. It was found that server load time and number of visits are closely correlated. In other words, the slower the load time, the fewer visits to the website. For business and industrial websites, there was on average a 7.5% reduction in marketing revenue.
Is it Worth Fixing These Problems?
The simple answer is yes. In addition to analyzing the hidden costs of key website issues, the group looked at the value of optimizing the effects of page size and server load times only. They found that optimizing page size and server load time can boost marketing spending effectiveness by an average of 21% across all sectors. Add on any other problems and the return on investment (ROI) increases.
The Solution
While it is clear that companies need to fix any technical errors on their website, it was found that very few had any process in place for coordinating and overseeing the quality of their site. New content and projects get priority over systematically overseeing the quality and maintenance aspect of the website.
The solution is to fund the marketing department to provide regular maintenance and upkeep of the website. Many companies do not employ people with the necessary skills to oversee, pinpoint, and actually fix any website problems.
We know that many of the problems plaguing websites are technical in nature and requires a certain level of expertise. At Blue Lacy SEO we encourage our clients to sign up for one of our Support Plans after we build their website. For a small monthly fee, we can provide updates, backups, regular maintenance, and other services.
Even if we didn’t build your website, we can find and fix any errors which may be causing problems (on WordPress websites only). We do this by first doing an audit and analysis of your website. This audit is absolutely free.
Call or write Blue Lacy SEO today.
