Failing Miserably - Should I Just Bin This Site
-
I am in the last weeks of my 3 months paid subscription with SEOMOZ and very sad to go.
The main reason is that my website design business site is delivering no business to me at the moment. Zero - zip - nada. It has been live for the past 4 years and cumulatively it has probably paid for few beers and pizza. Most of my business has been through word of mouth and not through direct traffic to the site. I had really hoped the site would be the sweet 25% extra. Now the overall website business is reasonably healthy but I cant understand what I am doing worng with the site.
I have tried and failed to optimise and am at my wits end what to do with it. If anything my ranking is dropping over the past months.
Could any of you guys give me some ideas and tips before I literally hang up the shingle on this site and start from scratch with a new design and revision.
I want to rank for website design and as we all know you need to be above the fold on page 1 to do this but I think my overall design and strategy for this site is flawed and I should start again. But if you have ideas then shout before I head over the high Irish sierras for better lands.
http://www.grangewebdesign.com is the site - feel free to check it out and give tips -
-
That's great Kieran!
Chew slowly and savor your progress at it happens
Just a couple of things I thought to mention in case you hadn't caught up with them yet...
-
On-page reports in the Pro App show you the on-page elements you can improve, including things like keyword usage, amount of text etc. The trick with these is that you have to load the keywords you want to optimize for in the campaign. Don't worry if it seems to want to apply keywords to the wrong pages, just use the manual selector at top of page to choose keyword and then type in the URL you want.
-
Not sure how the timing works for you, but there is a Weekly Welcome Webinar for Pro members every Friday morning (Seattle time). When you sign up for it on the Webinars Page there is an opportunity to tell Aaron if there are particular things you would like to learn more about.
Of course, if you already knew about these things, just ignore my ramblings
Have a great day,
Sha
-
-
Wow Sha
Thanks for the words above - you are right on the nail and I already made some changes. I am doing a root and branches change now to the language I use and the We v. I that is prevalent throughout the site which reads badly.
I am a terrible speller and your points on even these simple points make sense and I have corrected this glaring grammatical error and I increased the amount of words on main page, added my Google Places map and wrote a little bit more about me as well.
I am now working through ALL my 106 blog posts to make them crisper, with better keywords and of greater value as a lot of them were written in haste and need work and proper spelling (!!)
I am revisiting my decision to leave SEOMOZ and may stay a little longer as even this postalone is worth the fee for this month!! I hadn't actually realised I had a once a month private question either so I am lining that one up.
LAstly I am starting to munch on the elephant.
-
Hi Keiran,
After reading the comments here and taking a very quick look at your site I would say just a few things (since I am playing hookey from a project to recharge with a cuppa and really must get back to meet a deadline
-
Please DO NOT ignore the text errors on your site. While many view this as a minor issue, there are some other things to consider. You are in the web design business. Errors are NOT an SEO issue, but a conversion issue!
First, there is a typographical error on your home page which has completely changed the message you are trying to convey to potential customers "You do need any technical knowledge". While those of us in the business understand what you are trying to say and will read over the mistake, potential customers with little or no knowledge of web design may at the very least find themselves questioning whether it is a mistake. Some will even take it to mean that they need technical knowledge if you build their site!
The other very significant problem with errors in your text is that you are sending a message to potential clients. Remember you are selling a service which requires you to build pages full of text. If your own website is full of errors, the message you send is that the websites you build are likely to also be full of errors. That is without even considering the secondary message that there may be an issue with attention to detail in your company
Having read a blog post I am surmising that part of the error problem may be your reliance on an editor to catch the errors. While it may be alerting you to obvious spelling and typos, it is not letting you know when you have repeated words etc.
Yes, I'm a self confessed word nerd so I'm always going to be sensitive to the error thing, but in this case it is all about the sales message you are sending.
-
The home page feels a little unfinished with the 3rd column and service sections looking empty and to be honest I would be looking to get some more text into the page. I would also make sure that text adds some more local emphasis (not just the county name, but some more specific references to your location). Have you claimed your local business profiles in Google Places, Bing and the best known citation sites? The links in these profiles will provide some trust signals and increase your chance of moving that page 1 keyword above the fold.
-
You are missing out on some nice keyword inclusion opportunities with your Blog Titles which also appear on your home page via the feed. Consider perhaps - "If I Had A Hammer - Could I Create Your Website In A Day?". Two things here actually. First, including some relevant keywords and second, talking to your prospective client in the first person. The text and images on your site are your first face-to-face meeting with your client. Speak directly to them and you have a much better chance of engaging them - that is the first step to converting them
If I were you I would keep the Pro account a little longer, do all the reading Stephen suggested and use the Q&A forum to learn and ask for help. Don't forget your monthly private question where you get to ask SEOmoz staff and Associates for specific help too.
Also - when the problem seems insurmountable, remember two things ...
- The heart of this community is TAGFEE and that means help is close by.
- Best way to eat an elephant - one mouthful at a time!!
Oops ...back to my deadline!
Hope this helps,
Sha
-
-
An alternate view:
Specific comments like fixing spelling mistakes, get better anchor text or redirects, is doing more damage than good here
It leads to false hope that this will help rank for the term "web design" and that Kieran will rank for this if he "just tries hard enough"
If you have been here 3 months and think that trying to rank for "web design" is a good business move, then yes, let the SEOmoz contract lapse if the money is an important factor. Read the blog, read everything on this site in the last year
The problems you face are not analytics or SEO or anything OSE measures - its understanding how the web works, understanding how customers are going to react when they see your website.
Seeing your website, Id say your best bet is personal recommendations. Knock the site into shape to convert people you send their personally, and don't waste time or energy on SEO
S
-
No problem thank you for commenting.
-
Thanks Ryan. I have my graphics guy working on cleaning up the logo which Is not great. I will look at the spelling errors and of course I don't take offense in fact go as hard as you want.
I appreciate the comment on focusing the level of expertise at least in terms of on site. One of the items I need to do is work back through all my blog posts over the past year and tidy them up as I know the need a ton of work in the first place and this is an area I will work on,
-
Yes that was my comment's meaning. Sorry that I wasn't clear.
-
Thanks Nicholas - I have redirected that contact number page - careless to say the least. I am on page one for website design cork but below the fold
I will look more closely at my index page - any thoughts welcome of course but thanks for the feedback to date.
-
Thanks Sean. I agree that Website Design is competitive and is probably aiming high. I will try and aim for website design Cork.
Most of the forum comments were done without link building in mind and I suspect that if I didn't use real name in a lot of these cases my post would not be accepted.
However the guest post space is somewhere I will investigate and see what impact it will have.
-
I would suggest finding a niche market and going for that. As one example, you list wordpress, drupal, and joomla as your area's of expertise, and go on to say you can provide expertise in any other CMS. You may find more success in picking one, and becoming a recognized expert in that CMS specifically. Also focus locally. You still haven't reached page 1 for "web design cork", so that'd be a good first goal.
I also noticed some spelling errors and non-transparent colors in your logo, little things that would stop me from contracting business services from someone. I mean no offense, but those should be fixed asap.
-
By looking at your site I still feel like you could be doing a better job with your on-page seo and also with the content on your index page.
I would start researching local keywords and work from there. "Website Design" is too broad, IMO. Maybe start with Website Design firm in Cork, Ireland, or something like that.
Also, by Googling your phone number I was able to find your old site/design, this could be resulting in some duplicate content.
-
Sorry double post please delete
-
I think what he's saying is, ranking for 'website design' is going to be really, really tough - it's a highly competitive term. You'll need a DA of MUCH higher than 30 to be ranking for that term. Which means building links from more authoritative websites. I noticed that some of your best (i.e. highest domain authority) links were forum/blog comments which probably aren't passing much link juice. I would look to get guest blog posts on higher domain authority sites that can link back to you. And remember that all important anchor text - a lot of your links have the anchor text 'Kieran Daly' rather than 'website design'. Not forgetting the value of writing great linkable content, of course
-
Not sure what you mean?? Can you clarify???
-
You want to rank for "website design", bold suspect others want the same. Mozbar states your DA as 30. Surely thats ambitious. I am pretty new to this as well but it looks like you want to be playing for a different term.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Why is my site not getting crawled by google?
Hi Moz Community, I have an escort directory website that is built out of ajax. We basically followed all the recommendations like implementing the escaped fragment code so Google would be able to see the content. Problem is whenever I submit my sitemap on Google webmastertool it always 700 had been submitted and only 12 static pages had been indexed. I did the site query and only a number of pages where indexed. Does it have anything to do with my site being on HTTPS and not on HTTP? My site is under HTTPS and all my content is ajax based. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | en-gageinc0 -
SEO Blow-Up After Site Redesign
I contracted with a local web design firm - a highly recommended firm - to redo my law practice's Wordpress site. The redesign was done in early April. After the redesign I saw a large drop in rankings across all of my keywords, lost internal page rank, and had a big traffic drop. The site is www.toughtimeslawyer.com. There were a couple of issues that contributed to it; but I'm not sure how to rebuild. The internal URL structure changed completely. I wasn't aware of this until the site went live. I didn't have a sitemap for about a week, then the sitemap plugin they used was not very good and showing errors in Webmaster tools. Last week, I replaced it with Yoast's SEO plugin. The biggest problem is that they setup a subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com, without asking me or telling me. The subdomain had all of my content on it. It was not blocked with robots.txt; and it is being cached by Google. I just discovered it today, when I was doing something in my cpanel. I assume that this is creating a duplicate content problem with Google. I'm not sure what steps to take to recover. I am especially concerned about the subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com and the best want to handle it with the search engines. Thanks in advance, all advice is appreciated. I've been pulling my hair out for the last few weeks over my rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ToughTimesLawyer0 -
Two Sites Similar content?
I just started working at this company last month. We started to add new content to pages like http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. This is their main site. Then i realized it also put the new content on their sister site http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. the first site is the main site and I think will get credit for the unique new content. The second one I do not think will get credit and will more than likely be counted as duplicate content. We are changing this so it will no longer be the same. However, I am curious to see ways people think we could fix this issues? Also is it effecting both sits for just the second one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Do follow or no follow on wordpress site?
I have read many different opinions on what links to make do follow on a wordpress website versus which ones to leave as no follow. (internal and external) There does not seem to be any consensus among the inputs to date. Any perspectives on this would be appreciated. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030