By Bisi Bamishe
The Group Executive Editor (GEE) of ITREALMS Media group, Mr. Remmy Nweke has tasked online publishers in Nigeria, to have operational web analytical strategy to grow their businesses.
Speaking at the pre-conference business session of the 2023 annual conference of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) held at the Abuja Continental Hotel on Wednesday, Nweke said that by developing web analytical strategy, mediapreneurs under GOCOP will be propelling their websites for healthy growth.
According to Nweke, who dwelt on ‘How to GROW your website: The Fundamentals’ at the per-conference session of the 7th annual conference of GOCOP, noted that such a growth strategy must include making out time to check the personal health of the strategists themselves, especially the chief executive officers.
This, he said, is imperative due to the level of stress and obvious distractions associated with managing a burgeoning media concern in this digital era.
Stressing that this is prerequisite to having a healthy website because health is wealth with profitable return on investment as the bottom-line.
“Above all, make out time to check your personal health, which is prerequisite to checking your website healthiness; health is wealth,” he declared.
In developing growth scheme for their businesses, Nweke who also is the lead consulting strategist at ITREALMS, advised the online mediapreneurs to come up with two approach tools, which comprise strategic and technical components.
The strategic component, he said, would afford them to organize their websites to reflect business goals by ensuring they are aligned.
“That way, you could know what to measure going forward,” he said.
On the technical component, Nweke pointed out that it would enable them to examine everything from site architecture and page loading speeds to the quality of the user experience; all the moving parts contributing to your goals while supporting your specific customer digital footprint on a given website.
Nweke cited an instance of using the Google PageSpeed Insight (PSI) to deepen web analytics and search engine optimisation (SEO), underscoring that any anticipated growth must have a ‘GROW’ model alignment.
Stages of a ‘GROW’ model, he said revolves around the goal, realty, obstacles cum options and way forward.
“The goal is the end point, where the Publisher wants to be and must be clearly stated, so that when achieved its noticeable,” he said.
On the reality, he said, is where the Publishers and or the websites are now, taking cognizance of what are the issues, the challenges, how far are they away from their goal?
“The obstacles stopping the Publishers/websites getting from where they are now to where they want to be, need to be properly identified as well as available options to find ways of dealing with them if they are to make progress and grow.
On the way forward, Nweke said it involves converting the options into actionable steps which will take the Publisher to anticipated goal built on commitment and willingness to advance further the growth.
In advancing the growth goal, publishers, he advised should do everything possible to make their websites more users, readers and search engine friendly.
He suggested in addition to establishing content authority, perfecting website technical SEO via multivariate testing in order to create a seamless mobile experience, by use of
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) which is a popular, but free tool that analyzes the page speed of a website on mobile and desktop devices.
Further, Nweke canvassed for deployment of latest image compressor formats to improve website growth like the use of WebP created by Google since 2010 and AVIF developed by Alliance for Open Media, a non-profit organization since 2019 which translates to faster downloads and less data consumption.
WebP for instance, he said, makes online images less bulky by significantly reducing photo and graphic sizes, websites loading faster and giving users a better experience.
“WebP is estimated to reduce JPEG/PNG formats by 25-35% compression,” he asserted, reiterating that these are some of the things needed to be incorporated into the strategy for web analytics by online mediapreneurs, so as to grow their businesses.
