A small business owner recently called me wondering why their website wasn’t moving up in the search engines. I said I would take a look at it and set up a website strategy session to go over the results with them. When I first landed on their website, I thought “Wow, this is a really beautiful website. I’m not going to be able to find anything wrong here.” Here is what I landed on:
Website Strategy Session – this is what the website looked like before the website redesign. It was very beautiful. Showing lots of images of their work and had a great layout. At first glance, the only thing I found terrible wrong was that there was no call to action.
As you can see, it’s a really nice looking website that is set up to engage visitors. It did have a few problems though.
So, I get to looking around and first thing I notice is there is no call to action. That’s something I come across all the time. No big deal and easily correctable. Then I take a look at the images and sure enough, none of the alternative text tags were filled in. Because this website relies very heavily on images, this is a big no-no. What you have to remember is that the search engines can actually SEE the picture you put on your site. So it has to READ the alternative (alt) tag. The unfortunate thing is that this site was built using GoDaddy’s Website Builder and they don’t have a way to add those alt tags. One last thing about the images on this site. They weren’t optimized for the web causing the site to render (show up) slower than it could.
Okay, that’s enough of the bad because there was a lot of good stuff on this site too. Things like: they used their own pictures instead of stock photos; the images were clear, giving the visitors something original to look at; the layout and design were really good, great in fact; the navigation was easy to follow; and the contrasting colors and accent font used were great.
If you have a website that looks great but just isn’t getting any traffic, set up a website strategy session and I tell you what’s causing the problem.