A Big Agency Built Our Website – so why do we have no traffic?
Last week I met with a fantastic organisation that is providing a service to a niche community. I was called in to help investigate the lack of traffic to the website. I have a couple of insightful workshop activities I like to run prospective clients through to give them an opportunity to understand the issues with their website. One of them is called “Madonna and the Menu” where we use our arms as Madonna did in the Vogue video clip, blocking out the logo and the main banner and we ask the client to read out what the menu says – and it went like this:
Home | About | Activities | Resources | FAQ | Contact
Any clues as to what services they provide or their niche target audience?
Essentially the navigation menu said nothing about the services offered. What’s worse the banner didn’t say anything either and instead had a very editorial line and only if you scrolled further down the home page to a block of copy did you even begin to get a clue about the services offered.
The CMO then said to me – “We got a really big well-known agency to build this site”. Which translates to “We spent a lot of money on this so why is it not working?” To which I replied – “I hope you are really happy with the design because they obviously know peanuts about digital marketing.”
I can seriously understand the frustration though. When you invest more by using a larger well reputed agency you should be getting the best, right? I wish the answer was yes – but more and more there seems to be a disconnect between design and marketing and marketing and business outcomes. The foundations of the business are just continually missed.
What is the point of a website if its not even indexed in Google?
Menu navigation is one of the simplest ways to communicate your core offering and give clear contextualisation to Google and your site visitors. Not only that the menu navigation and information architecture of the site underpin the URL structure and ultimately builds on your SEO.
What should they do now?
A Digital Marketing Performance Audit is the best way to reveal where you need to focus to improve your digital assets – especially if built by a “big agency” 😊
We will run this site through the audit criteria – come back with the task list of foundation fixes and then ensure the site is well optimised for indexation in Google and start accurately measuring and optimising the site and marketing to reach the desired outcomes.