Research and Getting to Know You

When we start to engage with you, whether that’s via email, phone call, networking, form fill, however that conversation has started, we like to do some initial research on you and your organization We look at your entire digital media footprint and learn as much as we can about your organization before we move forward with an official proposal.

Here’s what we look at:

Website

We can learn a lot about you just by perusing your existing website or make some pretty quick assumptions if you don’t have one. Some of the questions we ask ourselves are:

• Is it aesthetically pleasing?
• Does it clearly, and concisely explain what your business is?
• Do you have call to action buttons so visitors can learn more?
• Do you have any media (video, gallery) calling attention the visitors?
• Do you engage with your visitors (chat box, form fills, etc.)?
• Is the User Interface accessible?

Without diving in too deeply (this we would do in our Branding Audit), we can learn a lot just by asking these initial question and taking some notes about any big opportunities we see or ideas we have right off the bat.

Google Search

Here we’re looking to see what pops up when we Google your actual company’s name. Ideally, you dominate the keyword in your space by taking up the entire first page, but of course, this depends on your name. For example, if you type in “Bolt Goodly” on Google, as we are such a unique name (this was by design!), we take up the entire page.

This may look a little different for you if your company name includes a common word like “Bob’s Plumbing” for example. You would likely have a harder time taking up the first page with an industry common such as plumber in your name.

We’re looking for all of your social media profiles, Google Business listing, reviews, and the like. How your pages show up on Google can tell us a story as well. What do your snippets say? Is the messaging consistent from your website to your social profile listings? Is your Google business listing accurate (hours, location, etc.) What images show up? Do they tell a story of your brand?

As you can see, there’s a lot we can get from a simple Google search!

Social Media

We can dig deep into your social media and find out a lot of information, but again we’re just looking for surface intel right now. What does a first glance tell me? What kind of experience would a first-time visitor have on your page? Do the logo and colors match your website? Is your page active? Are you posting content regularly? Are people engaging with that content? Do you have any reviews?

A big one again is looking at your company information such as location, hours, contact information, calls to action. Is this consistent across all of your social media accounts? We also pay attention to which social media accounts you have and which ones you don’t. Almost everyone can benefit from a Facebook account, but Instagram and Linkedin for example, speak to more specific niches. If it seems that you’ve made a choice about which social media platforms to be present on, we’ll want to delve into that with you at a later time.

Campaigns

There are many different software platforms to use for analyzing SEO and website campaign information, for this we use SpyFu. When we enter your domain into SpyFu we are looking for your ranking with keywords in your industry, what is the competition doing, and what are other people in your industry spending on these keywords.

After we’ve agreed to work together, we will do a comprehensive campaign looking into your Google ads, and any social media ads, but for now we can get by with just the above information. We want to see what we’re getting in to. Have you even run ads before? If not, is your competition running ads? We can learn a lot by comparing and contrasting with competitors in your industry and even potentially see a path we might want to walk down.

Website Technical Audit

This website technical audit goes beyond the user interface example up above in number one. Here we’re looking for everything that’s going on in the back end of your website. A website might look fine from the user side, but when you take it to the back, it could potentially have all kinds of errors. This is where we look to see if your sitemap make sense if your pages are indexed, do you have any broken links, are there any redirects that need to be addressed, etc.

We use SerpStat for a surface level understanding of a website audit without doing an in-depth audit. Again, there are different platforms you can use for this, we happen to pay for a SerpStat account.

Now What?

After we’ve done this quick initial research, we’re probably ready to have coffee with you! We’ll have a better idea of what questions to ask you, suggestions to offer, and services you might need after looking at these research insights. While this research doesn’t actually take us very long and may seem like an obvious part of the process, surprisingly not all agencies take this step.

We have learned from experience and we find this step to be very important in our consulting part of our sales process. The more we do up front in our consulting, research, and even onboarding, that faster and better we are able to work on your project and move your needle forward! If you’re ready to chat with us, click below, or shoot us an email!