SEO Company wants to rebuild site

[arzawacki]

Hello Community,

I am a designer and web developer and I mostly work with squarespace. Squarespace has SEO best practices built into the platform, as well as developer modes for inserting custom code when necessary. I recently built a beautiful website for a Hail Repair Company and referred them to several companies to help them with SEO and paid search. Several of these companies have told this client that in order to do any kind of SEO, they'll need to completely rebuild the site. I've seen some of the sites these companies have built, and they are tacky, over crowded and hard to use. My client is now thinking they need to have their site rebuilt. Is there any merit to this idea? Or are these companies just using the knowledge gap to swindle people into buying more services?

The current site is : https://www.denverautohailspecialists.com/

Any advice would be appreciated.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Arzawacki!

Kudos to you for opening this up to the community for feedback. I second EGOL's wise advice that educating yourself about SEO is going to improve your game as a designer by leaps and bounds. Rather than reiterate what EGOL is saying, I want to take a few minutes to give you some specific feedback from a brief look at the website you've linked to:

1. I like things about this site. I like the creativity of the language that has been used. "Ah hail no". Funny. I can see you've worked hard not to take a "vanilla" approach to what might otherwise be considered a "boring" subject.

2. The green is not working for me. It's too loud for my comfort, making it hard for me to attend to the content on the screen. The effect is dramatic (again, kudos for creativity) and if this were a movie I were watching, those green skies would be truly ominous. But, this is a website with the purpose of selling a service which I, the consumer, need to be sold on, and the very vivid color juxtaposed with the black background and grey text is making it really hard for me to read the content, which is how we sell the service. If you keep the site, I would tone down that green and brighten the text. This article has some good, visual examples of what I'm referring to: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/text-over-images/

3. The site is not well-optimized for local consumers. If this business is serving a local clientele, the site is not providing sufficient signals for consumers to fully understand this. It lacks the title tags, locally-optimized text, images, contact page contents and other factors that say "We serve here, come on in.".

4. The text content of the website is, in itself, extremely brief. The homepage is all but empty, when it should typically be one of the strongest pages of the website. You mention in your critique of the SEO company's other sites that you have seen that they seem "crowded" to you. This is the perennial debate between Design/UX/SEO folks: how do we keep things tidy while also getting maximum oomph from the website's content? Right now, the site is erring on the minimalist side, in my opinion, because there just isn't enough there to convince me that this service is THE ONE for me. You know how you've created the FAQ page? That's a good place to start to get into the mindset that this entire website exists to answer customers' questions, on every page. Right now, it's not doing that. Again, look at the home page. If I hit this page, am I going to pick up the phone and dial because this page has convinced me I've found the company for me? If not, the homepage isn't working for the company.

Summing up:

If you decide to keep the site, it needs some pretty substantial overhauling.

If you decide to hire an SEO company, I highly recommend hiring a company that specializes in Local SEO but also has organic SEO in their back pocket. Right now, adequate local hooks just aren't there in this site and they need to be incorporated.

If you decide to learn SEO, you'll begin to see these types of issues in your daily work, and to be able to spot within a few minutes whether websites are capable of truly serving consumers while also sending the necessary signals of authority/relevance to search engines. I'm really glad you're here in the Moz community, as it's a great place to advance your education to the next level!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

The answer is that it really depends, SquareSpace for a 'bigger' business is not something that I would recommend itself as it doesn't provide you with a ton of flexibility to do custom things that a 'normal' Web site will. But in this case I'm doubting that. It is mostly going to depend on the goals that they have and the competition that they're having in their domain. If this is an industry where there is a lot of competition you'll have to do a ton of work to get a SquareSpace site ranked better as you can't focus on any technical SEO issues and must rely on having good enough content on the pages. That is possible with a SquareSpace site and shouldn't need a redo of their site.

However if the space is filled and they'll have to do a ton of work in order to make this business rank in their industry/niche then it would sometimes be wise just to rebuild it as it could make things easier. Easier to update, easier to add new content and easier to handle certain implementations. If that's not the case I wouldn't put my money on it. In the end you can probably make a relatively easy business case. What's the expected impact and what additional costs would a new site bring.

Martijn.

[EGOL]

There is a long history of SEOs not liking the work of designers and designers not meeting the expectations of SEOs.

I come from a content and SEO background, not a designer background.  I spent lots of money on design work and didn't like it.  And, I would not like the work of SEOs or content writers because they do not meet my standards.

The best advice that I have ever received was... do your own design.  Keep it simple, simple simple, but do your own design.  I didn't like that advice but I did some design, threw it away,  redid it and threw it away, redid it yet again and threw it away.  Then, finally I came up with a simple, simple, simple design.  Live has been good ever since.  My design will not win awards, but that design does not compete with my content, it works great with my SEO and it looks simply good.

Two things that you do not mention in your question - which are of jugular importance.

1. the website must also meet the needs of the visitor

2. the website must also meet the needs of the business

These two are the intersection of content and design and SEO.  They are neglected in most websites.  And that is why most websites only make money for the designer and the SEO and the hosting company.  The needs of the visitor and the owner are not planned or not understood.

The most important benefit of accepting this person's advice is... I no longer have to pull teeth from designers to try to get them to do things my way.  I know what I want and I make it... and sometimes I need a special graphic and I pay for that element.  But now, I start with A) business goals and objectives, B) needs of the visitor, C) a content plan that will meet the needs of SEO (along with the needs of my visitors and the goals and objectives of my business).

Your website needs SEO in my opinion.  And, if I was going to work on the SEO of this website, I would start from the beginning.  I would start by planning the needs of the visitor and the needs of the business.  Then I would plan where in the search engines the website must be visible and how that can be accomplished (which includes link-worthy content).   Then I would plan the content to meet all of those needs.  Finally, would come the design.

So, my suggestion to you is ... Learn SEO.  If you learn SEO, I am betting that you will change the way you design and you will change the way that you do content.  You will serve your customers better and you will produce greater demand for your services.

A person who understands SEO, content, business objectives, user needs and design will have the most success.  Because they will not need to build a highly competitive automobile with parts made by many different people who do not have the specifications or care about them.  They just wanted to be paid for their part of the job.