You Are Losing Leads Everyday
There's no easy way to say this. Salesforce Partners websites are, in most cases, a disaster and I guarantee its costing you leads.
This article has three sections;
- Experiences to support my statement
- How to check your site in a few minutes
- Real world solutions
The Data
From a partners assessment report
I've seen the above data points from every single partner I've worked with. It's Google Analytics #'s showing the #1 referrer of traffic is Salesforce AppExchange (along with a number of other key web metrics).
Majority of individuals who look through your listing will click on the website link, look up the company on here or Google.
Making the transition from AppExchange to a companies website is almost always a shocking experience. A ridiculous number of pages, calls to action, duplicate content throughout and a visually frustrating mix of fonts & sections.
How Is That Costing Me Leads?
Annoying AppExchange visitors coming to your website is minor compared to the biggest impact; Organic Search on Google. Any question asked or keywords typed into Google, it uses company websites as an important piece of it deciding what to present.
Having a challenging website impacts how Google ranks you. Ever wondered why your company website isn't in the top 5 search results for what you do? Is it buried on page 2 or lower? This is likely your biggest marketing challenge and its easy to fix.
Checking Your Site
In my listing assessments, I always start with two steps; # of pages in the sitemap & a Google Lighthouse test.
From a partners assessment report
A sitemap is a list of URLs (pages) which are likely being indexed by Google on an active basis. For most partners, hundreds of links is far too many. Do you have 311 offerings or hundreds of blog posts? In reality, you shouldn't need more than a dozen (products/services/resources/support/about etc..).
This is duplicate content and Google doesn't like it. Having many pages with similar content/keywords is detrimental to how it ranks you. Also worth noting if the competition has less, they may rank higher.
Sitemaps are generally found by going to www.<YourCompanySite>.com/sitemap.xml in a browser. Let the counting fun begin.
Lighthouse is a great tool to see how Google scores the sites Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices & SEO.
Google expands on the above in How Search Works. Two prime examples:
Quality
"After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify signals that can help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness."
Usability
"For example, our systems would look at page experience aspects, such as if content is mobile-friendly, so that those on mobile devices can easily view it. Similarly, they look to see if content loads quickly, also important to mobile users."
Solutions
My 1st ISV had over 400 pages along with a poor Lighthouse score. I made the mistake of 'trimming' the existing website. Months of effort, countless meetings & emails only to remove a hundred pages and the impact was minimal.
After that experience, I learned my lesson; throw it out. Build a new website from scratch.
My team has built new sites for 3 different partners since then.
Cost: Ranges from 8 - 25K
Time: Ranges from 4 - 8 weeks
Results:
Can you guess which month the new site launched?
Notice anything? Creating a lean, mean, SEO website machine drastically improved AppExchange organic performance. Google is typically the first place we look for solutions, regardless of where you currently get the bulk of leads. A lead is a lead.
Last but certainly not least, we always take the opportunity to refresh the brand and usability. See below:
The #salesforcepartner ecosystem is very competitive and transforming quickly. Marketing to it has nuances unlike any other market. A website is not a project or one-off and has a lifespan (3 years max before a refresh).
If you made it this far, I'd like to ask a question.
What do you think of your website agency/contractor now?
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