Site Check: www.eriskay-associates.co.uk

[MarkTaylor1968]

Hi Folks,

I think I need to get some work done on my site, both on the format and content and the SEO/SEM activity.

Can anyone give me some ideas on the best way forward.

Many thanks,

Mark.

 

[stuarty]

Hi Mark,

Lucky I was passing by! What are your goals? Target market?

I've literally done dozens of "consulting firm" type websites both SEO and Marketing based.Mostly ex Deloitte, PWC, EY people and they've done really well. From experience you need to be link baiting, link building. Your site is fine but there are a lack of "calls to action".

You are on an apache server so I would convert your website to a Blog - wordpress is defacto standard more or less. Posting regular articles will increase inbounds. Circulating to your network, building feeds, email base etc are all excellent methods. Twitter is working well for the consultants I deal with - and I mean REALLY well.

Your site really doesn't need much - I did a quick scan on on what I would presume to be key phrases and the target market is not overly competitive.

I would seriously recommend converting to a blog, using it as a cms and posting regular articles. I can put you in touch with one of our copywriters - prices are reasonable.

Does that help?

 

[Gordon N]

Hi Mark,

As far as SEO goes, you could do far worse than to listen to Stuart - and I will not attempt to improve on his post above...

On a design and development front I would agree that a move on to a bloggable (just invented a word!) CMS would benefit yours and hundreds of businesses like yours - although there are alternatives to WP out there that are worth considering.

If you do move on to a new delivery platform then you might as well take the opportunity to freshen things up a bit - have think about what you would like your first impression to be i.e. modern, traditional, eco, friendly, formal etc. and take it from there. What I usually ask my potential clients to do is have a good dig around your competitors sites and pick five that have the look and feel that you are looking for as a comparison/baseline. This gives a designer a good starting point...

If there is anything I can help with you know where I am...

 

[Hobo]

Quick Wins? Go to your titles. By far the most imporant change you can make easily.

Example - Your Detailed Strategic Audit.... can this be expanded on upon? Get that in the title. Focus more on the intent of a search engine visitor - focus more on satisfying a particlular search that makes you money. Narrow down your target market because you are never going to rank for very popular terms without domain authority.

Optimise your titles (you can get up to 70 characters TO DISPLAY in your titles in Google) but put your important keywords at the front of your pointless branding in page titles on internal pages.

Once you have these keywords targetted and in the titles, focus your pages on these terms as the more relevant the title is to the content the better chance you have of ranking.

You probably need to work on your content too, it's a bit thin. Im a seo and I have nearly 600 pages on my site.... I hope that tells you the importance I place on content to drive traffic. Rule of thumb? Each page answers a question about something to do with my industry - or at least I hope

You have canonical issues with your home page - it should not link to the index.html

dont link like that if it is the domain root, link to Eriskay Associates - Your logo should also be a link I think.

As mentioned above get a blog. You probably already know you need better links than you have at the moment - get editorial links in content from real websites. Dont bother with exchanging links and dont buy crappy directory links.

You are totally under utilising your home page title too.

You have a survey form quite prominent on the home page that takes the visitor to a different site? Get that on to your site, and make a linkbait type of thing.

Example
What is this page supposed to rank for? - Eriskay Associates : SMEs -

Ideally what would a searcher type into Google and find that page?
Put it in the title and form your text content on the page around that title.

I would definately move that into a wordpress blog environment - would sort out some structural issues.

That free business MOT is a good idea many would be into at the moment... I'd consdier making that a centre piece of the site (on the site) and take it to the social networks if you can make it unique enough.

Remembe though if you wanted to rank for Free business MOT it should be:

• In the content of your page
• In the page title
• In Internal Links to the page
• In external links to your site

Hope this helps in some way