Online publishers need web strategy to grow - Nweke

The Group Executive Editor (GEE) of ITREALMS Media Group, Mr. Remmy Nweke, has tasked online publishers in Nigeria with having an operational web analytics 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 strategies, mediapreneurs under GOCOP will be propelling their websites for healthy growth.

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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, such a growth strategy must include making 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 a prerequisite to having a healthy website because health is wealth with a 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's healthiness; health is wealth,” he declared.

In developing a growth strategy for their businesses, Nweke, who is also 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 organise 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 Google PageSpeed Insight (PSI) to deepen web analytics and search engine optimisation (SEO), underscoring that any anticipated growth must have a ‘GROW’ model alignment.

The stages of a ‘GROW’ model, he said, revolve around the goal, reality, obstacles, options, and way forward.

“The goal is the end point, where the publisher wants to be, and it must be clearly stated so that when achieved, it is noticeable,” he said.

The reality, he said, is where the publishers and/or websites are now, taking cognizance of the issues, the challenges, and how far they are from their goal.

“The obstacles stopping the publishers and websites from 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 that will take the publisher to the anticipated goal built on commitment and willingness to advance further growth.

In advancing the growth goal, publishers, he advised, should do everything possible to make their websites more user-, reader-, 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 through the use of

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI), which is a popular but free tool that analyses the page speed of a website on mobile and desktop devices,

Further, Nweke canvassed for the deployment of the latest image compressor formats to improve website growth, like WebP, created by Google since 2010, and AVIF, developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a non-profit organisation 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, loading websites 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 that need to be incorporated into the strategy for web analytics by online mediapreneurs so as to grow their businesses.