Questions
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SEO Company wants to rebuild site
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: 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. 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/ 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.". 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!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis2