If the website needs to be revised or newly created, the question of the right agency usually arises. How do I choose? Is the price the most important criterion?
One agency charges 3,000 euros, the next 6,000 euros, apparently for the same service. But is that really the case?
The difficulty in evaluating the service offered lies in being able to correctly assess the quality of implementation. Because there are huge differences here.
Technical terms such as on-page seo, inbound marketing, interactions, conversions and bounces are supposed to convey competence, but they regularly create a great deal of uncertainty in the other person. You feel at the mercy of others and rather helpless when asked whether this is all necessary for the desired purpose.
The topic of digital marketing (done right) is technically very demanding and requires intensive work and continuous training to ensure that the expected results are actually achieved.
With the following short checks, you can quickly and easily check whether your agency is actually doing what it says it does?
There are three facts that should not be discussed when creating a homepage / website.
The website must:
- Be fast
- be error-free
- enable a good user experience (you could also call it user experience).
The site should also look good. This point is the most difficult to evaluate, as taste is a matter of debate.
But now to the concrete procedure. Use the following easy-to-use tools to evaluate the website of the agency with which you have just had a conversation. And, rate some of the sites listed as references.
This gives them a quick and uncomplicated assessment of whether the agency is just throwing around technical terms or whether it takes the necessary procedure seriously and implements it in customer projects.
1st speed
Today, slow pages have no chance of achieving a good search engine ranking. If you have to choose between function and speed, always choose speed.
Enter the web address of the agency or reference projects here and you will receive a very simple evaluation of the site in terms of speed. Twice green is good. Anything else is not acceptable. It's really quite simple. If you are a little more familiar with web development techniques, you can also use GTmetrix to go into more detail to find out the causes of a slow site.
Alternative tools for testing speed, which require a little more experience in interpretation, are
- https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- https://www.webpagetest.org/
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/feature/testmysite
- https://tools.pingdom.com/
2. freedom from errors
Technical errors on the page such as unreachable pages, duplicate content, a faulty headline structure, to name but a few, are mercilessly penalized by Google. To fully analyze a page, you need an SEO tool, but these are not available free of charge. Nevertheless, you can use the following links to get a quick overview of your agency's performance:
If you are interested in a detailed analysis of your own site, use our free analysis, which you can download from our Contact page can inquire.
3. user experience
Analyzing the user experience is not feasible without tool support. In our experience, only very few agencies use an analysis tool to analyze visitor behavior after the go-live of a website and to improve weak points.
Suitable tools for this are:
https://www.hotjar.com (our recommendation)
https://www.crazyegg.com/
4. the human factor
Despite all the technology, the chemistry has to be right. Does the person you are talking to listen attentively, ask you lots of questions about your customers and target groups, try to get to know you and your company well? Does the person you are talking to respond to your ideas and discuss a solution that meets your requirements? Or are they trying to sell something?
These are soft factors that complete the picture, ultimately you need to work with the person or people in the agency to achieve the best possible result.
Summary:
Take the time to at least check the speed and accuracy of your agency and some of your agency's reference sites.
If these results are correct and your agency has also shown that it understands your company and your target group well, then nothing stands in the way of a successful collaboration. Good luck.
