PR Agencies, Practice What You Preach! Please!
I've been researching Dallas PR agencies for potential partners and I'm surprised at how many HUGE agencies boast about their processes and services, but don't practice what they preach! I won't drop names, but I've spent most of the day researching the top agencies in Dallas and their so called "Interactive" departments. Here's what I found:
PR Agency Trends that need to disappear
- Most say they provide search engine optimization and online marketing services, but their own sites have horrible page rank, no backlinks, brutal title descriptions and little to no spiderable site content! How can you honestly say you are experts at Internet marketing when you can't even properly design and optimize your own website - much less your customers'? Practice what you preach!
- Most say they are usability experts yet many of their sites load slowly, are riddled with navigation issues and break most web best practices including small fonts, too many characters per line, non W3C compliant code, etc. Now, I'm not saying we are perfect, but we have a site with over 6000 pages and most conform to usability rules and are W3C compliant. Practice what you preach!
- 3. Almost all are Flash-based and don't offer an HTML version that actually works. As a result, instead of actually finding the information I'm looking for (which is what the web was created for), I can wait on pages to load slowly, try to figure out how the hell to navigate your "creative" menus, or better yet, get frustrated and just leave your site. I'm glad you mentioned increased conversion rates on the homepage though! Practice what you preach!
Sorry for the rant, or if I offended your site. Obviously you have good creative. Please don't say you are experts at web design and Internet advertising though. Stick to your banner ads, print and tv commercials. You're giving true experts a bad name.
