www.elymt.co.uk

Website - Return On Investment

Website & Business Marketing; Ethical SEO; & Site Maintenance.

Web Sites I Work With

Search engine optimisation and marketing, and website maintenance are my key roles.

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Information Pages

If you are not sure how well your website is performing please ask for an SEO review.

Well designed and constructed websites need to be optimised too!!.

Getting A Return On That Website Investment

One of the major points highlighted in the web user statistics page is that only a very small proportion of websites are 'search-engine-ready'. What this basically means is that, even though there is a perfectly good website in existence to promote the goods and services of an organisation, too often that site is not being found. And if it is not being found, the chances are that the senior management of the organisation are exceptionally frustrated and disappointed with their investment.

Rather than identify someone to blame for this, what I would like to do is provide two examples which will illustrate how easy it is for this kind of situation to arise - and I would want to emphasise that it is very common. However, before we look at these situations, I would like to highlight two points connected with website designers.

For the first one we need to establish that generally, however good a website designer is, they are rarely adept or skilful with website optimisation. In fairness there are some who are, but it really is a very small number.

The second industry fact we need to acknowledge is that, perfectly reasonably, website designers have, in recent times, been forced to take on some knowledge of website, or search engine optimisation, (SEO), to be able to add it to their client offering. In some design businesses they employ dedicated, knowledgeable SEO people supporting the output of the organisation. However, on the basis that most website design agencies are small, or one-man-bands, having an SEO guy or girl on hand is not the norm.

So where does this take us?

For my first example, I would use a large UK business operating in a highly profitable niche food market. My understanding is that they spent around £50,000 on the development of their website about four years ago. I do not know whether there was a specific SEO requirement with the contract, however, I do know that the board, and the sales and marketing departments were very excited about the business development prospects the site would bring.

Sadly - not the case.

Here we are four years on, (having kept the site content fresh and up-to-date), following a great deal of head-scratching, asking someone independent - me - to take a look at key pages to see if there are any obvious reasons why the site has not delivered the goods.

In my initial appraisal of any website I take a look at the overall feel and structure. I rarely look to suggest design changes if what is in place is sound, and in this case it was. I would take this further and say that this site was exceptionally well designed and constructed. However, it is also an excellent example of a good-looking, functional website which has numerous on-page SEO features which are poor, or not there at all.

Whilst this site stays like this, search engines will not rate it, and searchers will not find it in the first two or three results pages, and the guys and girls on the board, and in sales and marketing will continue to be frustrated. It might seem an over-simplification, but all it needs is some straight-forward, ethical SEO!!!

My second example is at the other end of the spectrum. A seemingly well designed modern site for a very new business venture in Cambridge. My involvement was only as a SEO reviewer for a concerned third party.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not look to suggest changes for the sake of it, however, on this site the home page included a power-hungry, (and in my view, pointless), Flash image sequence which I would have dumped. That said the pages I was asked to review were well designed and constructed from an SEO perspective. So what was the problem?!?

Well!! Here we have another designer / SEO "clash". The designer has done an excellent job - almost certainly within their remit, and yet the site owners are getting visitor numbers ranging from very few to nil - and once I had taken a look around, again, the reasons were numerous, and obvious! One being the omission of the name of the business and the two main keywords from anywhere in the text or navigation on the Home page!!

I refuse to knock website designers - I wish I could come up with some of the brilliant sites they create. What I do find so frustrating is that too many of them suggest to their clients that they can "do" the necessary optimisation as they build the pages, or that they are also SEO experts - and so many of them clearly are not!

So - if you are the frustrated owner or manager of a well designed, or maybe, not-so-well designed site and you are not getting the visitor numbers or response that you expected. Please seriously consider giving me a call and we can take a look at how to make some marked improvements.

Email me to arrange a chat.