4 Tweaks to Increase SEO on BTA Roofing Company Website

For a little over 2 years now, I’ve been working full-time at Douglas Marketing Group as an online marketer. Part of my job description as an online marketer is to develop search engine optimization strategies for new and existing clients to help increase their search engine rank position, traffic, lead generation and of course customers and clients.

One of the companies I worked with recently was a commercial roof consulting company head quartered in Michigan called BTA or Building Technology Associates. They work closely with facility managers and businesses across the United States on ensuring their roof is in tip-top shape.

When I first started working at DMG two years ago, the website had already been designed and in production so I didn’t have much say on the overall strategy of the website. About 6 months after the site was launched live, they noticed that they were showing up for a few of the keywords they targeted, but not as many as they liked. They asked me to take a look and offer up some recommendations on how to better target their website towards their audience. Below are 4 tweaks I recommended to help increase their position in the search engines.

1. Optimize the title and description META tags on each page of the website – BTA had done a good job optimizing most of the pages on their site, but they missed several of the “secondary” pages. Another somewhat crucial mistake was the mismanagement of the tags on the homepage. I recommended they change the META tags on the homepage with a better more specific selection of keywords which better targeted their key audience.
2. Add more text-based content to the homepage of the website – Again, while the website featured a small snippet of text-based content on the homepage, it wasn’t nearly enough. I recommended they add at least 2 or 3 full paragraphs of text content that people will want to read. Information about their commercial roofing services, links to tips and money saving information – basically anything that the user will find useful.
3. Targeting lead generation pages – This one doesn’t have as much to do with overall SEO as the others however it was still a big factor in improving rankings for specific pages. Creating pages geared towards their keywords i.e. “emergency-response.aspx” which offered information on the spot was a big part in optimizing their site for their secondary keywords.
4. Guest posting – Many people who work in SEO aredown on guest blogging but I feel if done properly it can still be an asset to any overall SEO strategy. Guest blogging takes quite a bit of work but the results can be very beneficial. I had BTA contact similar sites to theirs (competitors excluded of course) and ask them if they could write a guest post on their blog. Then write a blog post that relates to your business and helps their users/readers as well. Be sure not to stuff the backlinks to your website with keywords and also be sure to make your blog make sense. You wouldn’t believe how many guest blog posts I’ve seen that either make no sense, don’t relate to the website at all or are just overall garbage.

Summit Mobility Products Web Marketing Recommendations

It's been quite awhile since I updated my blogspot with a post, but I've just been so busy with work, family and other responsibilities lately, that I just haven't had the time. In fact, it's been so long since I posted here that I literally had to figure out how to use this new interface to post again!

Anyway, I wanted to come on and talk about one of the many projects I've been working on lately. The company is called Summit Mobility Products. They are a durable medical equipment supplier located in Michigan. They sell new & used mobility scooters, ceiling track lifts, bath aids and much more to the elderly, disabled or really anyone who is in need of durable medical supplies.

When they came to me asking for web marketing recommendations, I suggested several things to help increase their online sales; 1) Proper Use of Google Adwords, 2) An SEO Plan and 3) Improvements to the User Experience. Each recommendation came with a formal right up which I won't share with you here, however I will give you a brief overview of what I suggested.

1) Proper Use of Google AdWords
They had dabbled in Google AdWords themselves for months and weren't achieving the results they'd like. I suggested pulling back on the amount of money they were spending daily on ads and try to focus more on SEO. With the little money they were still spending on ads, I made suggestion on which keywords would be worth buying and which weren't. There were even some situations where they were ranking organically for results, and still buying those keywords.

2) An SEO Plan
I put in a basic SEO plan which helped improved their on-site content as well as their META information. We selected several keywords to focus on and a few longer tail keywords as well. I optimized as many of the header tags as I could and then created a plan to update the site regularly with fresh content. As you can see from the homepage, we've also added quite a bit more text to each page.

3) Improvements to the User Experience
One of the biggest flaws in their plan was in their "Cart" execution. This is still something they're improving upon. As you can see when you try to buy one of these new or used mobility scooters, the cart process is a bit tedious and long. Not to mention the fact that the "Add to Cart" section is located at the very bottom of the page.

So far, it's been about a month and we're already seeing a vast improvement on last month's sales. The Google AdWords click through rate is a lot better and people are starting to find the Summit Easy website through organic results.

I will be back with another update in a month or two with progress reports.

Thanks for reading!

My SEO Skills: Tony Rauti Luxury Homes

Just wanted to write a quick post today talking about the search engine optimization work I did for my client Tony Rauti Luxury Homes. One of the first things they wanted to talk about in our initial meeting was how they could get better results in Google. I explained to them the ways in which I would try to get them better rankings. The first thing I asked them was which search terms they'd like to rank for. Initially they said generic terms like "custom home builder" or "luxury homes". I explained to them that since they're a local home builder that most of the people searching for those type of terms would most likely attach a city to the end of them. We collectively decided to go for the terms "custom home builders windsor" and "luxury homes windsor". I did both on-site and off-site search engine optimization for them and after just 5 months here are the results when searching on Google.com.

"Luxury Homes Windsor" - Result #2

"Custom Home Builders Windsor" - Result #5

I'm the first to admit; the competition for these two keyterms isn't as great as some of the more generic terms however, considering the fact that the domain is only 6 months old and the site is only 5 months old. I'd say I did a pretty good job optimizing this website.

My Web Design: Montessori Early Years

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I'm a Windsor web designer who can pretty much do it all. Not only do I specialize in web design and development, I can also handle your site administration, web hosting, email hosting and search engine optimization. The full package is something I recently offered to the Montessori Early Years in LaSalle. Not only did they want me to re-design the old site I created for them, but they now wanted me to handle all the site administration as well. Here is what I came up with...

As you can probably tell from the preview image, one of the major features of this particular website is the "members only" section for the parents of the Montessori Early Years. In the members only section, parents can view recent pictures as well as grab newsletters and other important information that only they can see. All of the updates on the site are taken care of by me, including re-sizing and uploading the images.

The web design is very clean and informative. Parents are only one of two clicks away from all the information they may need about the day care facility. The main image in the header changes each time a page is refreshed which is all handled by a neat little Javascript code I created.

In the end, Montessori Early Years was very happy with the website design and I was too. It's been great working with them on the site. I look forward to handling any and all of their web needs in the years to come!

Google's Latest Algorithm Change

I'm beginning to really wonder what effect, if any, this latest Google algorithm change had on their search results. Since I'm a web designer who is into search engine optimization, I try to keep a close eye on what happens when major changes are made to the search algorithm.

I had read reports that cheap article sites like eHow.com had been hurt by the latest change, but then I did a search today for "hamburger patty recipes" and the first result was a lame article from eHow. The link was titled exactly what I had typed in. I was actually fairly surprised to see that it was still there, so I clicked the link to see if the information was useful. NOPE. Not at all. Just another article listing about nothing. You can clearly tell this site was optimized for the search engines and not end-users like myself.

I guess it may still be early to tell, but it seems to me that Google needs to continue to work on getting these content farms out of the top 10 of their results. As a website designer, it's always frustrating to see a clients site pushed down because of some crummy written search engine only optimized article.