Discussion
Why is your contact address in Berkshire? (I appreciate that's probably the RO)
I could not find you on Google Business?
I find this a bit odd:
"Leather Better are a Nottinghamshire-based company who specialise in the care & restoration of leather products used in furniture and cars."
the Nottingham bit should be taken care of elsewhere (see above!) and the furniture and cars is a bit extraneous there should be more about repairs, tears, scratches, colour change etc IMHO
I could not find you on Google Business?
I find this a bit odd:
"Leather Better are a Nottinghamshire-based company who specialise in the care & restoration of leather products used in furniture and cars."
the Nottingham bit should be taken care of elsewhere (see above!) and the furniture and cars is a bit extraneous there should be more about repairs, tears, scratches, colour change etc IMHO
I'm not a pro SEO person, but made a lot of difference to my business' site with some effort. A quick look at yours shows some things I'd probably address anyway:
1. Get a free report from gtmetrix (does pagespeed and Yslow together). Site is slow, images not optimized or scaled, no browser caching. Google will mark you down on this.
2. No Expires headers. Again, down go the rankings.
3. Banner graphic takes over 2s to load! Easy to make lots better.
4. Site doesn't default to https. I'm not 100% sure, but I think Google doesn't like http sites so much.
5. As said above, burger menu in an odd place for mobile.
6. Phone numbers should be callto: links, not just numbers. Easier to call from mobile particularly.
7. Your social media links waste space at the top of the page, esp on mobile. Images sell - yours don't appear above the fold on mobile.
8. IMHO you need before/after pics on the home page, and the "look how clever we are" techy stuff on its own page. You have that massive chair pic which says nothing.
9. Who buys from you? Men? Women? Pics are all beige or black. Suggest some colour pics too, just make sure they're tasteful!
10. I can't see any changing content (Google again). I really suggest a blog with pics of work, descriptions, add testimonials. Much more interesting to follow (social media interaction) and you can use something like buffer.io to post on FB, LinkedIn, Twitter at the same time to link back to your blog.
11. Meta keywords look like you're keyword spamming. Google used to mark this down, don't know if they do any more.
12. You're misusing the H1 header. It's really intended as a reference to the content - so "We repair your leather furniture in your home" would be better.
Hope that helps a bit.
1. Get a free report from gtmetrix (does pagespeed and Yslow together). Site is slow, images not optimized or scaled, no browser caching. Google will mark you down on this.
2. No Expires headers. Again, down go the rankings.
3. Banner graphic takes over 2s to load! Easy to make lots better.
4. Site doesn't default to https. I'm not 100% sure, but I think Google doesn't like http sites so much.
5. As said above, burger menu in an odd place for mobile.
6. Phone numbers should be callto: links, not just numbers. Easier to call from mobile particularly.
7. Your social media links waste space at the top of the page, esp on mobile. Images sell - yours don't appear above the fold on mobile.
8. IMHO you need before/after pics on the home page, and the "look how clever we are" techy stuff on its own page. You have that massive chair pic which says nothing.
9. Who buys from you? Men? Women? Pics are all beige or black. Suggest some colour pics too, just make sure they're tasteful!
10. I can't see any changing content (Google again). I really suggest a blog with pics of work, descriptions, add testimonials. Much more interesting to follow (social media interaction) and you can use something like buffer.io to post on FB, LinkedIn, Twitter at the same time to link back to your blog.
11. Meta keywords look like you're keyword spamming. Google used to mark this down, don't know if they do any more.
12. You're misusing the H1 header. It's really intended as a reference to the content - so "We repair your leather furniture in your home" would be better.
Hope that helps a bit.
The best SEO people are to be found on a forum known as "BHW".
Real SEO people that is not an agency who will charge a lot and do a little.
In my experience SEO is pretty worthless now, because anything you google the first few pages get dominated by people spending £200k a month on Adsense.
Real SEO people that is not an agency who will charge a lot and do a little.
In my experience SEO is pretty worthless now, because anything you google the first few pages get dominated by people spending £200k a month on Adsense.
twoblacklines said:
The best SEO people are to be found on a forum known as "BHW".
Real SEO people that is not an agency who will charge a lot and do a little.
In my experience SEO is pretty worthless now, because anything you google the first few pages get dominated by people spending £200k a month on Adsense.
Most people on BHW don't know sReal SEO people that is not an agency who will charge a lot and do a little.
In my experience SEO is pretty worthless now, because anything you google the first few pages get dominated by people spending £200k a month on Adsense.
t except churn and burn tactics. Don't read reddit either, unless you want to cringe.Unfortunately the only people you should trust are reputable freelancers or leading agencies (even then you might have an incompetent people working on your site.)
twoblacklines said:
How do you gauge "reputable" when everyone and his dog is selling SEO services though?
I think you are best trying to get some recommendations from people, I work as a freelance SEO and I very rarely tout for work, most of it comes in from recommendations. I think for your business, you are probably too small for an agency to do anything meaningful. I think you need a freelancer, look for one who has a good 10 years under their belt and one who knows several other facets of search marketing such as Adwords. Check out their CV / Linkedin and look at their recommendations and who they have worked with in the past. I would strongly avoid blackhatworld too, I lurk there to see what the spammers are up to and ok yes there are some people there who know what they are doing for sure, if your SEO experience is limited you are going to find it hard to determine who knows their onions and who does not. Looking at your website, I can see a lot of improvements that can be made not just from an SEO point of view but as others have suggested with the actual user interface which could be costing you conversions on the traffic you have.
If I was starting out with this website as a new client campaign, I would be running an exploratory Adwords campaign to harvest converting keywords and then once I had a good eye on the potential traffic and keywords I would start with on-page optimisations.
Link building, at some point in the future would be needed, but it would need to be a slow and organic process. I would be encouraging you to think about every day communications with other people/businesses/organisations and think of ways in which you could get a link from their website if it is relevant or authoritative.
Hope that helps a bit.
twoblacklines said:
How do you gauge "reputable" when everyone and his dog is selling SEO services though?
Personally I would ask for a site performance report from several different companies and after collating them you can make your own assumption to the issues.Ive said it many times before that when my living depended on my website and everyone who came to see me with a miracle method of site promotion I just switched off. I got to thinking that everyone adapted their service to exactly what my site needed to get a payday.
mr_spock said:
I'm not a pro SEO person, but made a lot of difference to my business' site with some effort. A quick look at yours shows some things I'd probably address anyway:
1. Get a free report from gtmetrix (does pagespeed and Yslow together). Site is slow, images not optimized or scaled, no browser caching. Google will mark you down on this.
2. No Expires headers. Again, down go the rankings.
3. Banner graphic takes over 2s to load! Easy to make lots better.
4. Site doesn't default to https. I'm not 100% sure, but I think Google doesn't like http sites so much.
5. As said above, burger menu in an odd place for mobile.
6. Phone numbers should be callto: links, not just numbers. Easier to call from mobile particularly.
7. Your social media links waste space at the top of the page, esp on mobile. Images sell - yours don't appear above the fold on mobile.
8. IMHO you need before/after pics on the home page, and the "look how clever we are" techy stuff on its own page. You have that massive chair pic which says nothing.
9. Who buys from you? Men? Women? Pics are all beige or black. Suggest some colour pics too, just make sure they're tasteful!
10. I can't see any changing content (Google again). I really suggest a blog with pics of work, descriptions, add testimonials. Much more interesting to follow (social media interaction) and you can use something like buffer.io to post on FB, LinkedIn, Twitter at the same time to link back to your blog.
11. Meta keywords look like you're keyword spamming. Google used to mark this down, don't know if they do any more.
12. You're misusing the H1 header. It's really intended as a reference to the content - so "We repair your leather furniture in your home" would be better.
Hope that helps a bit.
Without reading through everything or looking into it in any depth, there isn't really any content which would appeal to search engines.1. Get a free report from gtmetrix (does pagespeed and Yslow together). Site is slow, images not optimized or scaled, no browser caching. Google will mark you down on this.
2. No Expires headers. Again, down go the rankings.
3. Banner graphic takes over 2s to load! Easy to make lots better.
4. Site doesn't default to https. I'm not 100% sure, but I think Google doesn't like http sites so much.
5. As said above, burger menu in an odd place for mobile.
6. Phone numbers should be callto: links, not just numbers. Easier to call from mobile particularly.
7. Your social media links waste space at the top of the page, esp on mobile. Images sell - yours don't appear above the fold on mobile.
8. IMHO you need before/after pics on the home page, and the "look how clever we are" techy stuff on its own page. You have that massive chair pic which says nothing.
9. Who buys from you? Men? Women? Pics are all beige or black. Suggest some colour pics too, just make sure they're tasteful!
10. I can't see any changing content (Google again). I really suggest a blog with pics of work, descriptions, add testimonials. Much more interesting to follow (social media interaction) and you can use something like buffer.io to post on FB, LinkedIn, Twitter at the same time to link back to your blog.
11. Meta keywords look like you're keyword spamming. Google used to mark this down, don't know if they do any more.
12. You're misusing the H1 header. It's really intended as a reference to the content - so "We repair your leather furniture in your home" would be better.
Hope that helps a bit.
I'll echo what MR Spock says. What keywords do people use to find you? Where is the in depth content containing those keywords which will be indexed?
Your H1 is 'Leather furniture looking worse for wear?' but people won't search for this. How many monthly searches does 'Leather furniture repair' receive? The same applies with your H2s.
Your links may have been lost due to them being gained using unethical or now frowned upon methods. You may have a penalty as a result, or as your relationship turned sour, your previous agency may have disavowed them.
The SEO you contacted gave an honest answer. To create content and optimise the site would take long enough in itself. Building quality links even more so and could prove quite expensive.
battered said:
A friend of mine is a very good marketing bod, she's self employed with a number of SMEs that she works with. SEO is part of it, I can pass on her details if you wish. It looks to me like SEO is only part of what you can optimise.
Yes, please get her to contact me. If you need any contact details please let me know. Many thanks for all your replies. TBH I thought the thread had died off, and only noticed it again this morning!
The consensus seems to be that as well as SEO the site generally needs a spring clean at best, and a shake up at worst. The thing is, knowing nothing about such stuff, is (as others add) who do you trust? Most if not all shall promise the world, AND take your money before it becomes apparent that they're doing a rubbish job. This is unlike most trades; if I had a plumber or a spark in, and they cocked up the job they wouldn't get paid, as I wouldn't if I didn't do a good job. This is a pretty damn big reason to get it right!
Has anyone any further words of wisdom around what I need to look for (credentials, experience etc) in such a provider?
Feeling a bit lost in the whole process......
The consensus seems to be that as well as SEO the site generally needs a spring clean at best, and a shake up at worst. The thing is, knowing nothing about such stuff, is (as others add) who do you trust? Most if not all shall promise the world, AND take your money before it becomes apparent that they're doing a rubbish job. This is unlike most trades; if I had a plumber or a spark in, and they cocked up the job they wouldn't get paid, as I wouldn't if I didn't do a good job. This is a pretty damn big reason to get it right!
Has anyone any further words of wisdom around what I need to look for (credentials, experience etc) in such a provider?
Feeling a bit lost in the whole process......
Dont ask the plumber to rebuild a wall and while he's there wire in a plug then. It's not what he's good at - you need a range of skills to fix this problem and probably put some of your own time into it as well (especially with backlinks, you need good authorities for these, and I guess you've probably bought a load of st ones)
t ones)andy-xr said:
Dont ask the plumber to rebuild a wall and while he's there wire in a plug then. It's not what he's good at - you need a range of skills to fix this problem and probably put some of your own time into it as well (especially with backlinks, you need good authorities for these, and I guess you've probably bought a load of st ones)
I agree.t ones)Get a good designer to sort out the site first. Get a good copywriter to sort out the content. Then get a marketing person - test the waters with Adwords, Bing, Facebook, email newsletters, see what works and what doesn't. Focus on off-site SEO last.
As with any services, the way to find a good one is to ask for references and then check those references, go and talk to ex-customers and find out for yourself what their experience was like; did their situation improve, were they a good person/company to work with, etc.
Some people can do it all, I do, its my job. BUT, man its a lot of work even on a site such as yours which is relatively small. On top of this, no guarantee about anything actually working. Rankings can take months to start to look attractive. A lot of this will depend on how sharp your competition is. If your main competitor has a great agency and they are on it you will be seriously up against it because someone else is trying to achieve exactly the same as you and they wont be backing down.
So if company A are using an SEO expert and rival company B are using another SEO expert, they're both trying to out-do each other and both company A and B are spending money month after month just to achieve the first place. Wouldn't it be cheaper for company A to pay company B (or vice versa) so company B don't do SEO? 
Hoofy said:
So if company A are using an SEO expert and rival company B are using another SEO expert, they're both trying to out-do each other and both company A and B are spending money month after month just to achieve the first place. Wouldn't it be cheaper for company A to pay company B (or vice versa) so company B don't do SEO?
Yea it's kind of surreal now. If anyone remembers yell.com, that used to rotate all the listings, which was fair, (I know fair doesn't matter one bit in business), and the sponsored links would sit at the top. One off payment, not pay per. You could now have a war, no good for anyone except Google, re sponsored links. It might actually soon go back to a bit of collusion, like used to happen 25 years ago, whereby all the yellow pages local builders would spread jobs between them, but drive the price up etc. How ironic. markcoznottz said:
Hoofy said:
So if company A are using an SEO expert and rival company B are using another SEO expert, they're both trying to out-do each other and both company A and B are spending money month after month just to achieve the first place. Wouldn't it be cheaper for company A to pay company B (or vice versa) so company B don't do SEO?
Yea it's kind of surreal now. If anyone remembers yell.com, that used to rotate all the listings, which was fair, (I know fair doesn't matter one bit in business), and the sponsored links would sit at the top. One off payment, not pay per. You could now have a war, no good for anyone except Google, re sponsored links. It might actually soon go back to a bit of collusion, like used to happen 25 years ago, whereby all the yellow pages local builders would spread jobs between them, but drive the price up etc. How ironic. I'm kinda thinking "divorce lawyers".markcoznottz said:
Yea it's kind of surreal now. If anyone remembers yell.com, that used to rotate all the listings, which was fair, (I know fair doesn't matter one bit in business), and the sponsored links would sit at the top. One off payment, not pay per. You could now have a war, no good for anyone except Google, re sponsored links. It might actually soon go back to a bit of collusion, like used to happen 25 years ago, whereby all the yellow pages local builders would spread jobs between them, but drive the price up etc. How ironic.
That is if your SEO company is doing the stupid thing of going after one or handful of search terms!Oceanic said:
I think you are best trying to get some recommendations from people, I work as a freelance SEO and I very rarely tout for work, most of it comes in from recommendations. I think for your business, you are probably too small for an agency to do anything meaningful. I think you need a freelancer, look for one who has a good 10 years under their belt and one who knows several other facets of search marketing such as Adwords. Check out their CV / Linkedin and look at their recommendations and who they have worked with in the past. I would strongly avoid blackhatworld too, I lurk there to see what the spammers are up to and ok yes there are some people there who know what they are doing for sure, if your SEO experience is limited you are going to find it hard to determine who knows their onions and who does not.
Looking at your website, I can see a lot of improvements that can be made not just from an SEO point of view but as others have suggested with the actual user interface which could be costing you conversions on the traffic you have.
If I was starting out with this website as a new client campaign, I would be running an exploratory Adwords campaign to harvest converting keywords and then once I had a good eye on the potential traffic and keywords I would start with on-page optimisations.
Link building, at some point in the future would be needed, but it would need to be a slow and organic process. I would be encouraging you to think about every day communications with other people/businesses/organisations and think of ways in which you could get a link from their website if it is relevant or authoritative.
Hope that helps a bit.
You know it isn't my website right? But thanks for the info. Paid traffic and organic for me!Looking at your website, I can see a lot of improvements that can be made not just from an SEO point of view but as others have suggested with the actual user interface which could be costing you conversions on the traffic you have.
If I was starting out with this website as a new client campaign, I would be running an exploratory Adwords campaign to harvest converting keywords and then once I had a good eye on the potential traffic and keywords I would start with on-page optimisations.
Link building, at some point in the future would be needed, but it would need to be a slow and organic process. I would be encouraging you to think about every day communications with other people/businesses/organisations and think of ways in which you could get a link from their website if it is relevant or authoritative.
Hope that helps a bit.
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