SEOmoz’s Website Review: Pro Webinar
The team at SEOmoz is taking four websites and reviewing them for us. I’ll get what I can, but some of the more valuable pieces of information will be the tools the team uses for a site audit.
Valley Wide Plumbing
- www.valleywideplumbing.com
- Local, small business plumbing company.
- Challenges: Want to rank higher in local search and improve conversions
Ranking Better on Local Listings
- Address on every page
- Google Local registration
- Registration with every local directory of competitors
- Reviews on local websites from customers
- Local links
- Consistency of phone/address/business name
For more help with local listings, Rand suggests David Mihm’s article.
Problems with this site
- No text-based phone number. (Customer can find number, but not Google – the phone number is an image.)
- Very few links
Conversion Rate Optimization
- What are visitors’ objections?
- Why do people choose a plumber?
- Short bullet points > Long paragraph text
- Simple, compelling call-to-action
- Web design quality (sometimes people consider better design more trustworthy than Better Business Bureau logos or security seals)
- Testimonials
Try the 5 second test: a kind soul looks at the site for 5 seconds and reports back on what they get out of it.
Quick Wins
- Submit to local directories
- See where your competition is listed – submit there
Content & Link Opportunities
- What do people what to know about plumbing?
- Comparison of liquid uncloggers
- Simple ways to maintain good pipes
- DIY plumbing advice & help - What’s interesting to the press?
- Famous incidents in plumbing disasters
- Plumbing stats (homeowner costs, geography, etc.)
Wizard Headquarters
- http://www.wizardhq.com/
- Magic trick products.
- Challenges: Decrease cart abandonment
Problems with this site
- Not working in Chrome
- Needs a redesign to create a visual structure
- Simple fixes need to be made (for example, something needs to happen when a customer clicks “add to shopping cart”)
- Many (most) titles are the same
- Text isn’t displaying properly (search engines see it, but visitors don’t! Yikes!)
- Massive amounts of duplicate content
Links & Content
- Links from suppliers
- Links from happy customers
- Promotional material to bloggers/sites
- Magic content – so much!
- Top Magic Acts Around the World
- Magic Acts Revealed
- Magic & the CIA – how they share tactics
- Magic for practical jokes around the home/office
Rand suggests that you shouldn’t create great content, but share content that people want to share.
Quick Wins
- Cart Abandonment fixes
- Clean design – where are the products?
- Design seems out of date/spammy
- After adding product to cart, hard to find where to check out - On-Page SEO
- Why redirect to /servlet/StoreFront?
- Add branding to the end of title tags – want keywords first
Tiki Master
- www.tikimaster.com
- Retail and wholesale of island lifestyle products
- Challenges: increase traffic, lower cart abandonment, increase search engine ranking
What they’re doing well
- Text-based navigation (check your cache to see how Google sees your website)
- Cross linking between categories and using great anchor text to do it
What they’re not
- Some links/text hard to see and use
- Keyword stuffed headlines
Quick Wins
- Links to pages which are robots.txt’d & 404′ing
- Use meta noindex,follow instead of robots in many instances
- Let Bot select crawl rate
- Every page 301 redirects right now; may want to update
- Blog hosted at Blogspot!
Winshuttle
Site issues
- Elevator pitch? (Complicated product, make it simple)
- Picture with button and finger pushing it, but isn’t clickable (Make it clickable)
- A lot of 302s that should be 301s
- Keyword targeting in titles
Have a page that’s already ranking for a keyword that you didn’t intend? Leverage it.
- Optimize it even more
- 301 redirect it to the page you want to rank for the term
Quick Wins
- Get list of top 20-50 keywrods and run keyword site:winshuttle.com. Make sure the right pages are ranking and the keyword targeting rocks
- Call to action & conversion focus could use help, particularly on the “demo” portion
- Blog hasn’t been updated since July 2009!
Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Jen Lopez, Peter Meyers - SEOmoz