Your PR agency can benefit greatly by working with a website partner. The benefit of a professionally designed and developed website helps your clients establish domain authority, leverage campaigns, and generate more website traffic. The work you do is no easy task-it requires connections, strategy, and time to build relationships – all the expertise you offer. However, as a PR professional, you can put in months of effort to create campaigns and build relationships only to find you get zero results. Why does this happen? Your client’s website is not optimized.
Contents
The problems that come up when you lack a website partner
For your strategy to work, you first have to ensure your client’s website is adequate. The best way to do this is to find a website partner who can perform a thorough website audit. An audit identifies all the shortcomings and key areas requiring optimization. When you do this, you help your clients build authority and improve results for their campaigns.
Background Information of a website
Regardless of how effective your campaigns or backlink-building strategy is, it can’t reach its full potential for success without a fully optimized site. Some common website issues that end a customer journey too early include:
- Slow page load speeds
- Important information is not easily accessed
- An outdated website
- Messaging doesn’t align with your campaign
- The site is hard to use on the back end
- Too many design issues for your team to “spruce things up”
- Navigation is not intuitive
- Content lacks internal links to help visitors easily delve deeper to find more information
Without a website partner, you can’t bring that top-tier level of expertise to the project. With the right partner, however, you can execute a website redesign, and produce measurable results for your clients.
The Solution- get yourself a website partner
Your PR agency has to address issues that interfere with visitor stickiness and the ability to build domain authority. For example, 91% of all web pages never generate organic traffic because they don’t have backlinks. You can build your business by simply offering effective domain authority strategies, but this is impossible without an optimized, well-designed site. Backlinks equal improved rankings and in turn, improved website traffic.
In fact, the top results on Google’s first SERP (search engine results page) have 3.8 times more backlinks than the sites below them.
Do you owe it to your clients to fix issues that interfere with their ranking and success? The top-ranking factors Google uses are time on site, pages per session, bounce rate, and site usability. A site that’s difficult to use or to navigate can hurt rankings indirectly by reducing time on site, pages viewed, and increasing bounce rate. Website audit and redesign can improve all of these.
Partnering Options With a Website Agency
There are two ways to partner with a website agency:
1. Add your web partners as a contractor on one piece of a larger project:
- Pros: You manage the project for better control and can mark up the cost of the work to benefit your agency.
- Cons: A specialized project manager might be needed to ensure you and the Web Design company produce high-quality work. This approach can also take longer because approvals are more involved. You also have to pay the website agency directly.
2. Your client signs a contract with the website agency and collaborates with the agency on the project:
- Pros: You act as a content curator while the website agency manages the website build using proven methods. Your feedback is valued, but you reduce risk.
- Cons: You can’t mark up the costs for a financial benefit to your team, and you will not be responsible for managing the relationship.
Work Performed By a Website Partner
The following tasks are the minimum required services you need to see the partnership succeed:
- Setting up or transferring the new site design to the client hosting account
- Managing the purchase and direction of domains
- Creating an initial design or style guide as a static design for approval before proceeding with development
- Ensuring all Quality Control checks will be done by the agency and clear timelines are set for content delivery
Bonus Services from an agency partner
Ideally, the website agency offers services to elevate results such as:
- Branding and custom graphic design
- Custom code to add improved functionalities to the site
- Stock photography or special fonts
- Ongoing website maintenance
- Separate strategy meetings with your team to ensure that the site will be a complement to your campaigns
Conclusion
Partnering with a website agency is an effective way to ensure PR success. Collaborative marketing efforts combine your expertise in branding, messaging, and developing suitable relationships for a backlink strategy with an optimized website capable of handling the new traffic volume. As a result, you maintain your reputation as a PR agency that gets measurable results and you create long-lasting relationships for a more sustainable business.
