Digital Marketing For Managed IT Service Providers
So you've built a website for your managed services provider business. How can you check its performance and make sure that it's built properly?
Fortunately, there's a powerful digital marketing tool that provides an impartial and detailed analysis of your site.
Website construction and structure matter for search engines, which base search rankings partially on the right usage and information in various parts of your online presence.
Who Provides the Digital Marketing Assessment Tool?
The website assessment tool is provided for free by the Business Development Bank of Canada. The tool can be accessed here.
How Does the Website Assessment Tool Work?
The process is exceedingly easy. Simply enter your website's URL and hit the blue Test button. The assessment process takes about 60-90 seconds to complete.
Once completed, the site displays a score in the upper right corner, which is a weighted ranking of the tests and is a measure of a site's digital presence.
How Does the Website Assessment Help With Digital Marketing?
The tool delivers a rather comprehensive assessment of your website components, including many of the key features that operate behind the scenes, such as how your metadata is set up and your image tags are formatted. It also looks at some of the core marketing strategies you're using such as paid search or paid keywords. It inspects your local directory listings for accuracy and consistency and looks at social media too.
The onscreen assessment covers six categories. Here's a more detailed breakdown of what is tracked and measured on the onscreen website assessment:
- Social Media. Facebook page likes, Twitter followers and online reviews
- Mobile. Whether the site is optimized for mobile devices. As noted in a recent article, your website has to be designed today with a mobile-first focus.
- Local Presence. Local listings found, listing accuracy and inconsistencies, and presences on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp
- Paid Search. Whether paid search is detected and paid keywords are found
- Organic Search. The number of monthly organic referrals, search terms used, amount of content (words), number of backlinks and the domain's age
- Website Build. Presence and number of analytics, if images are optimized, last update date, mobile speed and video platform used
What's Included in the Emailed Website Assessment?
If you ask for a more detailed assessment, you'll receive an emailed link to another online site with the option of downloading a tabbed pdf. Both contain nearly 30 categories, including the six above.
Additional categories include:
- Bounce rate
- E-commerce
- Page titles and descriptions
- Broken links
- Contact details
- Headings
- Images
- Sitemap
- SSL
For each category, you can take a deeper dive to get more specifics. For example, the Analytics tab details not only how many tools are found but also names them. The Twitter tab includes a link to the affiliated account, number of followers, time between tweets, interactions per tweet, the average percentage of followers who engage with posts, and whether the account is updated regularly.
Insights into your website help you make smart decisions about digital marketing. At Ulistic, we help MSPs with marketing strategy, content and website development. Grade your MSP website now at https://www.ulistic.com.
