iCrossing Digital Marketing Agency Review
The Google Lighthouse screenshot is for iCrossing’s homepage, see the live Lighthouse results at:
iCrossing Homepage Time to Interactive: 14.2 seconds, note the Speed Index was slower at 17.6 seconds.
When searching Google for the phrase Digital Marketing Agency whilst connecting to the Internet from Skegness, the 8th Google local organic search results for Skegness is iCrossing : https://www.icrossing.com/.
Search for Digital Marketing Agency from another location like London, Brighton, New York, Seoul, LA, Beijing, Peru etc… and Google will present other local results. iCrossing might not be in the top 10 for YOU, that’s how Google local results work, they are local to your location.
iCrossing is a US based digital marketing company that’s part of the Hearst group. iCrossing have around 20 offices/locations around the world, 2 in the UK: London and Brighton and offer Total Search, Digital strategy & Planning, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Technical Search Engine Optimisation, Content, Creative, Media Planning & Buying, Social Media, and Web Analytics & Data Strategy…
Since iCrossing aren’t a local Skegness business they don’t show up in the Skegness Local Google Map listings, those are reserved for actual local marketing agencies.
iCrossing mobile SEO performance score is poor, a website can’t score much worse than 17/100 for Performance! Their time to interactive is 14.2 seconds and the speed index (when content is visible) 17.6 seconds. The iCrossing site is PAINFULLY slow, I’m testing via a Desktop PC on a landline (Broadband connection) and browsing through the site feels like swimming through cold custard, I love custard, but not when it’s cold and up to my chin!
Also checked a Blog Post, which wasn’t easy to find, they have their Blog section labelled “Ideas”. When I eventually found a Blog post and it finally loaded, it’s Performance score was better at 37/100 and time to interactive was better 8.5 seconds, BUT the speed index was even worse at 24.2 seconds!
That’s a LONG time to wait for content to show visibly!
The iCrossing website is visually appealing (when it finally loads) at the front end (don’t visit the “View More Ideas” section at https://www.icrossing.com/ideas-all though, it’s an image free zone), but difficult to navigate and NOT an enjoyable experience.
I see NO signs of basic caching or minification, no sign of lazy loading of images which would help with performance/speed. To be brutal I see no signs of any onsite/onpage SEO, it’s like the content was created by people who haven’t heard of search engine optimization!
It’s shocking considering iCrossing offer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Technical Search Engine Optimisation. They write above SEO on the website, but they don’t appear to use any SEO techniques on the iCrossing website or it’s content.
It’s rare to find an SEO service which still uses the meta keywords tag in 2020.
Google has NEVER used the meta keywords tag content in it’s organic search engine results, I stopped using the meta keywords tag around 2002, about 2 years after first learning about SEO.
View Source of their homepage and you’ll find their meta keywords tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="digital marketing, digital agency, digital marketing agency, digital marketing agencies, digital marketing company, digital marketing firm" />
The above meta tag content has ZERO SEO value, it’s a complete waste of time adding it to the site.
From my limited research I’d describe iCrossing as a brand marketing agency, they build flashy sites which stand out, but they certainly aren’t fast or truly SEO’d.
What’s telling is iCrossing’s Twitter account doesn’t link back to the iCrossing website, it links to their Instagram account. Suggests they see their Instagram account (generally used for flashy images) is more important than their website.
Interestingly they don’t have a lot of Twitter followers, less than 8,000. To put that into perspective I have multiple Twitter accounts I’m not really using with more followers, some with over 15,000 followers. My personal twitter account has just shy of 40,000 followers.
Considering how visual iCrossing websites are it’s surprising they only have 1,000 odd Instagram followers. They seem to understand brand marketing really well (I watched a few interesting case studies on their site), it’s strange they haven’t built a huge following themselves.
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