The Importance of being Earnest

Something we get alot at Revive is new clients coming to us and saying things like, "We have a brand new website, but it's not showing in Google", or "We've had our website for several years, but we don't really know if it gets any visitors."

This makes me sad.

An example I recall was a catering website; it looked contemporary - clean, modern, with nice photography - however, it didn't appear anywhere in Google, even for its own name. The owner asked us to look into it, and as we're such kind and helpful people (and obviously hoping there might be something for us to help with) ,we did.

What we found was the whole site had been built with a 'Flash' site builder; which for the un-inititated means that the website wasn't constructed in the same way as most sites, and the code (and of course keywords) was not visible to search engines; so when Google's little helpers visited the site, all they could see was a 'blob' of nothing - and as such, nothing was ranked.

We re-created the site identically - it looked the same, worked the same, but underneath, it was completely different. Google could now read the pages, work out what keywords were relevant, and decide where in the search engine listings the various pages should be listed. Job done.

It often amazes me how so many website design companies focus almost solely on how a website looks - and ignore how it works. There's no point having a great looking website if no-one looks at it, and as so many people use Google to search for things, it's important that a website is found in Google.

We use a number of tools to measure how a website is performing. Things we measure include the number of visitors to a website, how they found it, which keywords they searched for, how long they spent on the website, how many pages they looked at, and what was the last page they looked at before leaving. We also track number of enquiries on forms, ranking in Google for keywords, and ranking in Google of websites belonging to our clients' competitors.

All this information allows us to make changes and tweaks to ensure that our clients have the highest chance of getting new business through their websites; after all, that's why we have a website. One of the great things about a website is that so much can be measured; so you really can tell if it's working, and if it's worth the money that you paid for it. That's why, when a new client comes to us knowing nothing about their visitors or even if their website is working for them, I feel highly frustrated.

If you have a website, and you don't know how many visitors you get each day, or how many pages they look at, or how many have picked up the phone to you - please, please give us a call.