As a part of our reseller roundtable about COVID-19 (Digital Marketing Impact of Coronavirus), we discussed the importance of engaging with customers during this unprecedented time. One of the ways the group identified to do that is to find ways to provide more value and to practice good housekeeping on client websites.
We took that recommendation to heart and have developed features that can help spot SEO issues to correct during this unfortunate but necessary downtime for many businesses.
The first feature we have released to our reseller community is website Response Time for client sites.
The Response Time feature builds upon our automated 404 checking that makes sure sites and pages we are working on are up consistently. For several years now, our Account Management team gets alerted when a site is down, or a page we have optimized and are linking to, is down, and team members follow up with our partners to make sure solutions are implemented as quickly as possible.
For each client website, our system checks the website Response Time (in seconds) of the homepage and each deeplink (page we are targeting in our SEO efforts). The average Response Time is then calculated and presented as shown above. The number in parentheses is how many readings we took.
Google has acknowledged that it uses site speed as a ranking factor, and slow load time is not good for user experience either. We are now able to alert our partners in real-time if there are on-page or server-side issues that are causing a website to be slow -- and possibly hurting rankings and causing more visitors to bounce from the site.
As you can see below, even an average website Response time of over two seconds is well above the average of the hundreds of sites, and thousands of pages, we monitor.
We are committed to fulfilling our purpose of growing together with our partners. To that end, we will be releasing more features to help ensure we are doing our due diligence and providing additional value for our customers, and your customers, particularly in these difficult marketing conditions.
We are planning to contact each of our partners soon to go over these new features and what they mean for retaining their clients and, ultimately, growing their business. In addition, check here for more information and to provide feedback. As always, feel free to reach out to us for more information, or if you are interested in our reseller program, or contact your Account Manager if you are already working with us.