Fellow entrepreneurs share their stories so that us so that we can build a better business.
Hi - mine name is Jim James and I'm your host. In 2019 I started this podcast to help entrepreneurs learn from one another. When I started the Entrepreneurs Organization chapter in Beijing, I realized that the best insights came from people who had already done the work.
If you're running a business; this show is my gift to you. It's hard enough as it is, and I hope that this podcast solves just one problem to help you on your way.
Most websites perform very badly, and if they were buildings would be shut down or renovated. I'll discuss practical tips for evaluating the performance of a website including using the GTMetrx free tool, and ways to improve them. Importantly for PR, I share services which enable the provision of a virtual press office without any digital asset management skills in-house.
Vuelio, PressArea, and Cision are three big established providers of virtual press centres which can be integrated directly into a site and moreover offer distribution and media relationship management too. PressArea publishes their prices and start at a reasonable GBP395 per month for upto 500GB of storage.
SPEAK|Pr is for leaders to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.
Websites are the fundamental building blocks of any communications strategy, but they're also not that easy to get right. Today, we're going to talk about how to improve performance of a website and more importantly, how to get a virtual press office up and running on your website so that if the media are interested in what you're doing, they can find out all the information, releases, and images quickly and without even troubling you. The website is the cornerstone of any marketing program, but the challenge is that our websites often gets built and then left to its own devices. One of the first questions I ask clients when we're talking to them about public relations is the metrics of their website. People will often ask, "How will public relations impact my business?" My response is, "Tell me what your web traffic is like now." I do that because when people have read about a company or seen them on TV or heard them on the radio, the first thing they do is go to a search engine to look for that company, and then the next thing is they'll click on the link to go to the website. The website has a number of metrics which I will go through. I'll give you tools as well where you can analyze the performance of your own website, both against itself in absolute terms, but also in relative terms against your competition. I'm also going to talk about some ideas for improving the performance of your website, and then look at the online press centres that are available as plug and play, so that you don't have to try and build out whole new platforms of content management systems. First of all, let's look at the the metrics that we've got on our website. We're all familiar with this idea of page views, but how many of us look at the average time spent on a website? This will give us a clue as to how interesting our website is and also give us a sense of which pieces of content are most valuable to those visiting our website. One of the issues with a website is the speed that it takes to download it first. So, what we have to look at is the total time on the website divided by the total number of visitors to the website, and that gives us a time on-site. The speed to download can be checked by a tool called GTmetrix, and that gives us an analysis of how long it's taking to load a website. If a website takes a long time to load, then it's not going to be very productive, and people are going to get off it quite quickly. If they only look at one page on our website, regardless of how long they're there, that's going to give us the bounce rate. If someone comes to the website and they only look at one page and then leave, you could have a high bounce rate, but what we want is to get people to click through to more than one page. My website bounce rate's at 43%, which means that 43% of visitors are coming and only viewing the homepage and leaving again. Those could be bots checking out my website. Those could be people that have found out about EastWest PR and then when they visit the website, it's not what they're looking for. There is no right or wrong to what the bounce rate should or should not be. What we are really looking for is a trend over time. On our own websites, what we can do is measure the bounce rate and see whether it's getting higher or lower. It is possible to see some industry average benchmark by looking on Google Analytics. Today, for example, I had 1,363 page visits. In September, I've had some 75,000 sessions. In other words, people have opened multiple pages on my website and spent seemingly quite a lot of time. In May, I had 135,000 sessions. That's people coming and opening a session on my website. But there's a snag. I didn't get that many inquiries. So, I'm doing something right, and I think that's because over 25 years, I've had the same domain name, and so I'm listed on a lot of directories, and I have a lot of content. But then when I look at my GTmetrix score, my page speed is a B, and it's taking just under four seconds to load fully, which is not too bad, but I have too many images and they're too large. It suggests that I consolidate the images into one and then make them thinner by compressing them. My YSlow score is D out of an A to F, because my website is making a lot of HTTP requests and looking for a lot of domain name setting lookups. In other words, I've got links to other websites and other pages, and that is making the search engines run around and bring back more data to display the full page. In fact, there are some 70 requests being made when someone looks at my one homepage. I can find all this out by looking at GTmetrix. I could look at Google Analytics as well. They can give me the average time spent on the website, and they can also tell me the user behavior. This is interesting, because I can see how many people are coming to the homepage and then how many are going to different pages. I can see, for instance, that 34 people went to a particular blog post that we've written. I can see that 27 people have clicked through and listened to a specific podcast. So, if I've got some 1,363 visitors to my website and I know that 35 have gone to a specific page, then I know that there's some validity to what I've got on there, but I need to then take that person to the next page to the funnel. That's the work I need to do. There's another tool called the Yandex.Metrica. This is free along with Google Analytics. All you need to do is put the code into the website host pages, so that we can extract the data. We can see by geography. We can see by pages. We can see by device. We can even see then by the software they're using. There are lots of improvements that I need to make, and I'll share these with you, so you can see whether they're useful for your website. Each web page should have at least three internal links pointing to it, because we need to increase the interconnectivity of the web pages. If we have a high bounce rate, people come to the website but that's because we haven't taken them to another page within the website. So, I need to increase my links. It also makes it easier for Google to understand what the page is about, because they reference to other pages. We also need to have some anchor text; in other words, text that describes what the website or the page is offering. In the website hierarchy, I've been reducing the number of items I've got in my menu. Like going to a restaurant, if there are too many items on the menu, we could get overwhelmed by the chocies or we'll order what we know. There's a view that you should have three to seven categories, and one view is to use what they call a hamburger menu, which is to have three different items on the menu to keep it nice and simple. We need to make sure that the URLs, in other words, the name of the pages can be read by humans. Whenever I do a blog post, I try to make a sentence that could be read both by humans and the bots that are indexing them. If it's possible to have a search bar at the top of each page, that's great. I've been trying to find out where to do that on Zoho. On a WordPress site, that's much easier. In the past, I used to have a little Google search box which would search my web page. We can also include alt text in images. I always give images a name. If I embed a video on my website, I'm allowed to then give an alternative text to that video. For website speed, there is a 15-second rule. I'm well under that with four seconds, and research has shown that a site with a page load time of six seconds has a 106% higher bounce rate than a site that loads with just one second. Basically, the slower your page is, the more people will leave. If your page can load in one second, that would be amazing. The paradox seems to me that you're supposed to create more valuable content, but that content must be light in terms of size, it must be linked, and it must be easy to search. This becomes the challenge, to have more content in order to be easy to be found. But the more content we have, the harder it is to manage it. We need to create powerful headlines, because 80% of viewers only read the headlines. If people visit your website, 80% of what they read could be the headline. So, we need to provide accurate information and an index, and this is where I want to look at the media press centre. In the past, we used to create a virtual press office. In fact, back then, there was a company who had a website called Virtual Press Office started by a couple of young Englishmen who lived in New York. We've all moved on from those days. Today, there are a couple of options for you to think about. One is called Vuelio which has full press centres which allow you to publish your press releases, images, and collateral of all kind. You can send them as press releases and have them as an optimized, customized, and integrated press centre on your website, which means that then when the media wants to come and find it, they would give their details, and you'd be able to track who they are. This could be very useful if you're sending out a press release, because when you sometimes send images, they're blocked, filtered, or result in the press release going to spam. So, links to a press centre are a nice way around that. Vuelio has a number of online tools as well. Much like Cision, you can publish your press releases. You can send them to media lists. You can manage inquiries. You can build calendars and reports as well. Another one is called PressArea, and they have a sister site called PRshots. They've been providing online media centres and what we call digital asset management solutions to businesses for over 20 years. Their clients include companies like Marks and Spencer. There are a number of things to look for when you're looking at a press centre, like is it a fully branded press room? Is it standalone and is the domain name going to be the same as your company one? You wouldn't want the media to go to a third party press domain name. You also need to consider how much digital assets you'll need in terms of storage. With PressArea, you can have up to 500 GB on the Base package, or up to unlimited if you go for their Unlimited package. You can also look at integrations into social media and automatic distribution. PressArea has a 395 monthly plan, and their next plan is 750 a month. For their unlimited package, you need to contact them for pricing. When we look at a website and we look at making it good for public relations, we have the initial attraction for general attention to the company that might be potential staff, partners, or customers, but the media have their own special area. They have their own special needs that are more in depth and more in detail, and they're more likely to go through to, in effect, a funnel for relationship building with that media. Websites form a fundamental part of anybody's marketing communications. They have to be ready for the big screen, but they also have to be ready for mobile as well. Some things we need to consider are our website's speed, the depth of content, and accessibility. With that, think about what you've got and how you make your assets available to the media through your website. If you get that right, it saves you a lot of time and can get you extra coverage, because it makes the work for the journalists much easier as well.
