Inherited a site by well known company - Input and opinions please!
-
Hi all,
Just handed the keys to this site "newly" designed and put together by a large well known company during a small business experiment they were running. They took a dated old non-responsive site with questionable architecture and even more questionable SEO practices and made it responsive and well... what you see now. I skimmed it and started to review and audit but decided I was a little too close to be neutral so thought some third party opinions would be helpful as a start.
I guess I'm just hoping for some fresh eyes to take a look and give me your overall impression re: structure, coding, SEO etc and then some idea of how you might tackle all of what I was handed if it were a perfect world scenario where there was actually a good, strong budget and a lot of time to spend. WWYD in other words!
Thanks so much for any comments in advance!
-
Hey Pixel,
I wanted to mention that, for some reason, every time I've tried to access your site in Firefox, I get a Server Not Found error, though I can access it fine in Chrome. Something you might want to look into.
The site is lacking some very basic Local SEO best practices, including but not limited to:
-
No complete NAP in footer
-
No complete NAP on contact page
-
Title tags are not optimized with reference to San Jose
-
Homepage text also makes no reference to San Jose or any geography at all
So, while whomever built the site has made some good efforts at visual appeal, this business is hardly coming across as local at all, due to a lack of basic best practices.
In addition to working on the optimization of the site, I would suggest running the business through our free Check Listing tool (moz.com/local/search) to start assessing the state of citations.
Looks like there is good room for growth in this area:
And earning reviews will be super important. I'm seeing zero on Google or Yelp.
Here's a good post from Casey Meraz on auditing local businesses: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit
There is great opportunity for this business to improve - lots to do! Good luck to you!
-
-
Thanks very much Patrick...Those are all things right on the money for what I was thinking in terms of how to go about the process of getting a handle on this. The design/typography is pretty bland so I now it needs some reworking on that front, too.
I haven't run it through any technical audits yet because I'm a bit afraid of what's going to turn up but yes, that's on my to do list this week. With that said, let's say this comes back with issues beyond the SEO, what should take priority here...Optimization and a ton of local SEO or code/compliance/structure fixes?
Right now this client needs calls and the way the site was put together, he's basically starting from ground zero in terms of results. I'm guessing there were no redirects or any attempt at saving a bit of the small results he had before and so it's like a whole new entry. Sigh.
Anyway, thank you again for the quick skim and advice. It really helps to have fresh eyes on it. If anyone has anything else, please throw it out there and don't be shy. I didn't design this site so I have no skin in the game other than I have to deal with it now. Also, if you anyone has any favorite tools, Id love to hear the suggestions.
Best to you all!
-
Hi there
I went through and did a quick skim. Here's what I found:
- Titles need to be optimized
- Meta descriptions needs to be optimized
- Remove meta keywords
- Images don't have alt tags
- No schema on the website (lots of opportunities here)
- URLs could be updated
- No canonical tags
- www. and non www. URLs both work
- https returns warnings
I would also run through a technical audit to make sure your bases are covered, as well as this site migration guide to make sure proper steps were taken.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
One company, two audiences. Ok to make two sites?
I have researched and researched on this question, and I'm still not satisfied. Most of the answers on the Moz forum and otherwise are all from 2013, as well. So, I thought I'd bring it up again. I have two distinct audiences for a real estate business I'm working with (very different needs and interests): Farm Buyers Residential Buyers My client is wanting to expand their presence in the farm market. Their main competitor is ranking for, more or less, an exact domain name match. They want to spin up a site focused only on farm buyers. Here are the pros/cons in my mind of creating a separate site: Pros: Reaching/targeting a specific audience (better user experience), having domain name with keywords (I won't keyword stuff...promise), a site completely devoted to content regarding farms, a blog completely devoted to farms (we have a content strategy in place) Cons: NAP issues (same address), splitting up domain authority, a bit of brand confusion (though the same logo/brand will be on both sites) In my mind, the pros outweigh the cons. Any ideas on how to address the cons? I could just not include address and phone, but that seems ridiculous...catering to the bots and not the user. Thanks, everyone!
Local SEO | | Gabe_BlueGuru
Gabe2 -
We are adding an ecommerce feature to our site. noindex the order. subdomain?
our site currently consists of directory listings for different stores but we will now be adding an ecommerce feature to our site. people from the main site will be able to click a button that will direct you to the orders. subdomain. we are thinking about noindexing the subdomain as i can't find any use cases in organic searches for this new orders. subdomain. What is the current best practice for this type of situation and will noindexing the orders. subdomain harm us in anyway?
Local SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Will I get Penelized for having a .co.uk site AND a .com site?
Hi Mozers, I have a very important pitch coming up which needs to tackle a questions about international SEO. My client currently has a .com website, but we are debating internally about creating a .co.uk website too so that we can localise content for the UK versus American English on our .com site. Currently, our clients proposition is global, so we made the decision to create a .com website but using American English spelling as a large chunk of English speakers in the world use American English over British English. However, we want to grow the business within the UK, and therefore want to use British English language. Hence creating a .co.uk website. Now, my question is this.... the new .co.uk website will be identical content as the .com website, except for a few spelling changes and the way we phrase certain sentences. How would we be able to run both a .co.uk site and .com site without being penelized from Google for plagarism? Would it involve href lang tags? Server hosting location? Any ideas from you guys out there?
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Separating facebook pages for 2 separate but similar companies
I am currently working with a payroll company that has two separate businesses. Payroll services and Time and Attendance services. Currently the client has 1 facebook page with about 50 likes that caters for both companies. My question is.... Should I separate the payroll and time and attendance companies and create 2 separate facebook pages, or since the businesses are so close together, we could use the one page to promote both businesses. We also have a similar issue with LinkedIn company pages. What do you guys think? Separate pages or combine pages? Currently there are 2 separate websites for each companies services.
Local SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Does the physical location of a server effect the local rankings of a site?
I've just been running a report on a site and noticed that while they have a .co.uk domain it is hosted on a server in the United States and just wondered if anyone was aware, if the physical location of a server mattered to search engines for ranking purposes especially with local search?
Local SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
Linkbuilding for Medical-Industry Sites
Hey Mozzers, I currently have a client in the medical industry who I'm trying to build some keyword rankings for, but I'm having a hard-time finding low-/no- cost link partners. The client specializes in 'breast augmentation procedures' (ex. breast reduction, breast enhancement, reconstruction, etc.), however, a lot of the sites I've been finding throughout my link prospecting efforts are either low-quality or haven't published content in at least several years. My question to you all is: Have you found any SEO strategies to be particularly successful for medical industry-based sites or plastic surgeon sites? Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this! I'm looking forward to reading your responses!
Local SEO | | maxcarnage0 -
Local Pages for National (Service) Companies
Hi there, I was wanting to know the value of local pages for a service company that operates nationally. They do not have a phone number or address, but they do maintain employees in each of the locations and are thus, keen to emphasize this fact with location pages. The location pages merely explain that they have staff in each of the locations and experience working there, alongside a variety of information that is relevant to the industry/market in that location. None of the location pages are currently ranking well at all - in fact, all of the ones I've looked at so far have had a page authority of 1. Most of the major towns, cities and counties for the entire UK have been covered which means the location pages constitute a significant proportion of all of the pages for the entire site. My questions are: Is a national service company likely to benefit from having location pages? And could it even be something they could be penalised for at some point down the line? Thanks very much, in advance, for your time. Kind Regards, Tom
Local SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
How can you perform productive local SEO when the company is moving?
I'm working with a brick and mortar store that is planning to move to a new location in a few months. All the citation information is going to have to be updated. Is there anything productive you can do in the interim to help their rankings when you know you'll be facing an update of all their citations?
Local SEO | | cakelady0