Last week an ad came across my Facebook feed that interested me. It came from a pretty big name in the internet marketing space and his credibility video is a “who’s who” of digital marketing rock stars endorsing him. I have to say, it was impressive. That alone turned me into a warm buyer.
I clicked on the webinar link. It was an automated webinar that was starting in 5 minutes. I started to watch and about 10 minutes in, the video had a hiccup and stopped working. I refreshed, and the same thing happened again. I did it a few more times with no luck. I replied to the confirmation email I received because I really wanted to watch this webinar. I got an instant reply that this was not a valid email.
All I could say was, “WOW!!!” This company paid to run Facebook ads to drive traffic to the webinar. They are paying the automated webinar service to run the program and who knows how many other marketing dollars went into this campaign. How much money is this company leaving on the table from people who never got to their offer because they couldn’t get through the video? And there is no way to reach out to them to tell them it’s not working because the email they are sending from cannot be replied to.
Besides the fact that people can’t see what you have to offer if there is a broken link on your site, it also leads to a 404 error. It turns out Google doesn’t like it either. I just went to an amazing presentation on SEO held by Laszlo Horvath, President of Active Media. He is an SEO guru! What I learned from him is that broken links equate to Google giving you an SEO “ding” for your website, which in today’s competitive online space, none of us can afford to have happen.
One thing I always recommend to people I work with is to regularly check their website and email funnels links to make sure everything is fine. It’s really important if you are running a campaign to make sure everything works – the videos, the sales page, the follow-up emails. TEST, TEST, TEST before you start.
You spend a lot of time, effort, and money to have a good website and offer amazing content and products, take a little extra time and make sure everything is working and connecting where you want people to go. Google really is like the Almighty Oz, so keep them happy by not having any broken links on your site.
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