So what does this have to do with SEO?  Well, the gentleman that installed this system was a terrific guy, and we had some discussions about his business as well as my own.  He is an independent plumber after several years of working for a large home builder here in Central Ohio.  His name is Scott Rose, and he owns S.J. Rose Plumbing.  Always knowing the caliber of websites in the home improvement industry in Central Ohio, I’ve always wanted to take on the challenge of taking a brand new website and dominating the numerous, but poor quality, sites in the local world of the plumbing industry.  Scott did not have a website, so this provided the ideal opportunity to start with something from scratch and see what we can do.  I purchased a highly optimized domain name based on a commonly searched phrase in this area, PlumberInColumbus.com.  I’ve found that a lot of people search for that exact phrase when searching for a plumber in Columbus.  After setting up the site, installing Wordpress as a free content management system, and applying a few tweaks, the site immediately took over the top spot in Google for “plumber in Columbus”.  That isn’t good enough though.  I want to get this site to be #1 for other phrases, especially the ultra-competitive “Columbus plumber” phrase.   That is the targeted keyword phrase, as well as the more generalized “Central Ohio plumber” phrase. 

I’ve just started developing the site to look better and have a more custom feel, and will be adding more and more pages to better target the local market.  We’ll be targeting more specific phrases as well, such as “hot water tank replacement Columbus” for less competitive phrases but things that are very important to come up number one. There are more specific things that fall under the plumbing category, such as “Columbus faucet repair” or “Columbus toilet replacement“.

I’ll be sure to share more details on this site as a case study in local SEO as time goes by, but this is a great example of what we can do on a very short timeline and also make a quick impact.   And for anyone that needs a great Columbus plumber, I highly recommend giving Scott a call at (614) 496-9776, and tell him you were referred by Joe Rozsa.   He’s very professional, fast, and has very reasonable rates.  There is no reason to go to one of the national chains and pay for the overhead costs when you can get great service from someone here in Central Ohio like Scott at S.J. Rose Plumbing.

We did have a clean slate to work with, creating a completely new website from scratch as the old one really contained very little information and was nothing to worry about keeping.  We did keep the little content that was on the old site, after optimizing it a bit for SEO improvement.  I recommended purchasing a new domain name, as the old one did nothing to help SEO, wasn’t really established in bringing in traffic already, and at $7.25 – there aren’t many better investments than an optimized domain name. 

Teaching Point – Domain names do not have to have anything to do with the name of your business.  Actually, if you have a small business or a name that isn’t a household name as far as branding goes, it would probably hurt you to use your company name as your domain name.  Now don’t get me wrong, you should own the domain name for your company name - but it should not be your primary site’s domain.  You should instead forward the other domain to the one you want to use (the optimized one).

So, since we were very limited with time and money, I recommended using a Wordpress theme for the site. This would save a ton of time for setting up the site initially, and time spent could be used tweaking the theme to match properly and adding content to help in terms of SEO.  We really had no room in the initial budget for added functionality, so the goal right now is to make the site visible and generate call in leads from the site (more of an online brochure, which is fine for this type of business).  More importantly, the framework or Wordpress is extendable so that if and when we go to add new functionality, we can do so very easily. 

After setting up the hosting and installing Wordpress, modifying a theme to look nice and adding the content, the site is ready for the world.  I created the proper XML sitemaps and let Google know about it by using Webmaster Central.  The site was indexed nearly immediately.  You can find the site by searching for the company name now, which is a good start – better than just using the domain name.  The key will be getting it to display when someone searches for “Columbus moving company” or a more localized phrase such as “Westerville movers“, “Dublin movers“, “Hilliard movers” or even “Central Ohio movers“. 

I’ll be curious to see how successful we can be with only 10 hours or so involved of time in the entire process, from site development to basic SEO efforts.  Either way, the client will have a strong fundamentally sound site in terms of SEO and code.  The site looks nice, and I do expect that in time, a decent amount of traffic will be visiting the site using the localized search keywords that we worked to build into the site as an initial priority.  Hopefully I will have the opportunity to work with them more in the future to take on the more competitive aspects of the industry.  But for now, I am satisfied with what we accomplished on a short timeline and small budget.  These are basic tasks used to really get the local search listings in your favor, whether searching for Columbus movers in the search engine or any “Central Ohio moving company“.

Much like our incoming President, I would love to see a college football playoff system in place.  But coming from a Mid American Conference school, Miami University, I wouldn’t stop at the 8 teams that Barack Obama and many propose.  I think if you are going to do it, do it right.  Invite every conference winner and 5 at large teams, 16 teams total.  Have the 1st two rounds at the home stadium of the higher seed, and the semi-finals and championship rounds at the current BCS bowl games.  I have defined a system that really has no faults that I or anyone that has reviewed it have found.  Existing bowls remain intact, the regular season is still incredibly valuable and there is even more weight on winning your conference.  Most importantly, the Ball State, Boise State and Utah’s of the world get to see just how good their team really is.  After all, there is no way to know without seeing them play. 

Anyway, we’ve just updated this site with the current playoff brackets (as of today) if this system were really in place.  There would be some unbelievable matchups playing out on the field, games that football fans everywhere are missing out on because there is no playoff system in place.  If you are a football fan, I encourage you to check out the site, and see the proposed college football playoff system in full detail on our site. And let us know your thoughts, good and bad.  

One funny thing about this site is that it has gotten very little to no love on Google since last year’s football season. And to be honest, we hadn’t updated it once since last season (until last week).  Yet just last week the site ranked in the top 5 on Yahoo for the phrase “College Football Playoffs”.  I liked that keyword phrase, so I thought it was time to get working on updating the site.  We’ve since added blog functionality, and we hope to do more and more to get the content there throughout the bowl and playoff season.  I’d like to see this site get to ranking well on Google for that same phrase, and start bringing in significant, albeit seasonal, web traffic.  Becuase the more people that see what *could* be in place in college football, the more likely we may get enough of an uproar to affect the prestigious *ahem* corrupt *ahem* powers that make these decisions.

In part of my effort to get the site converted quickly, we discovered a few new conflicts that arise with multiple javascript errors.  Combining Google Analytics, which I also use somewhat religiously for this site, with other WP plugins has a tendency to make some interesting and difficult to debug errors when combined together in this new Wordpress release.  I *think* I have everything working in harmony right now, as I discovered a few lines of code out there that needed a little tweaking.  If any of you come across something less than perfect on this site in the near future, please drop me a note and let me know so that we can get it fixed ASAP.  I typically don’t let any of our subcontractors touch the site except in case of emergency – and if the site is broken like it was today, it is fair game for anyone of us to jump in and get it fixed.  Hats off to my main man, Manny, for finding the javascript conflict code fix today.  However, because of this code fixing issue, Google wasn’t able to access our posting about the case study we are doing, and therefore could not index the site.  Let’s just pretend that the post was submitted tonight, since none of you (nor Google themselves) were able to see it until tonight anyway.      

For example, earlier today I posted about the exciting fact that we will be offering SEO training classes right here in Columbus, Ohio.  Our site was not ranked anywhere for these related keywords before today’s post as this is a new service that we will be offering beginning this summer.  I created a highly optimized post describing the services we will be providing, as well as a poll that asks visitors what kind of training they would like to see. 

Three minutes later (yes three, as you can see from the screenshot below) we were listed in Google in a very good spot

Take a look at the last updated time in the URL for my site directly above - 3 minutes ago.  So three minutes after the page was created, it is the second listing on the page for a highly targeted keyword phrase.  Not too shabby, eh? But we can do better.  I search for the primary intended keyword target for this phrase.  It takes me a couple of minutes to get situated, and during this time I also created the poll that you see on the left side of this blog.  Because of this,  this search doesn’t complete until a full 5 minutes after publishing the content.

Here you see that when searching for my intended keyword phrase in Google, the #1 result is now my blog post from earlier today announcing our new training classes.  Equally as powerful and not to be overlooked, the second listing on the page is… the poll that I created AFTER writing the post on the training classes in support of those classes.  So yes, within 5 minutes I had created a site so well optimized that it had passed over all of the other 400,000+ pages indexed for this specific keyword phrase.  

So, does anyone think that SEO is not a valuable skill?  Proper search engine optimization can be worth a substantial amount of money to your organization if you generate revenue online.  This is traffic that costs nothing to generate in terms of recurring advertising expense, as it is 100% organic (free) traffic.  One funny thing about the screenshots above are that there are, in fact, paid search candidates displayed prominently on the page.  Those sites are paying Google for every time a visitor clicks on their site.  And because organic traffic is clicked thru over 900% more frequently than paid search, I can apply a tangible value to the rankings that my site has attained in this example equal to approximately the cost for purchasing this keyword phrase times 9. 

I would like to remind you that these results should not be expected in every instance, especially with a new site.  It could take a little while to establish enough respect and credibility to get this type of respect from search engines such as Google.  It is also true that some search marketing ”professionals” actually could use tactics that could get your site banned altogether from search engine such as Google if they use a tactic that is intended to “game the system” in any way.  True expert SEO’s can be expensive, but like anything else, you get what you pay for.  I’ll have a post soon about what to look for in a quality SEO provider.  While we get several requests each month, SEO Columbus does not accept every client. We are fortunate to be able to be selective of who we work with and when (no porn, no gambling, no adult “enhancement” products - never), and when we do take on clients, the fees typically fall in the $250/hour range for our most senior level professionals. We hope to be able to be more active with providing lower cost, quality referrals once we start offering the training classes, however, as we will find talented and properly trained individuals in which we can refer these smaller budget projects.

As a part of our spotlight on corporate SEO over the next couple of weeks, I will focus on some Central Ohio based corporations and dissect the web marketing efforts that they have in place.  I hope that this recent Forbes recognition places a renewed focus and responsibility on the area’s businesses so that they do work to become innovators and leaders in the technology industry. One of my biggest gripes about many of the larger corporations in Central Ohio is that it is full of crotchety old companies that are stuck in an old school mindset – businesses like Nationwide that still use *gasp* Lotus Notes for their internal email application and operate almost all of their business on outdated 35 year old Cobol mainframe systems. Unfortunately, since a business is only as innovative as the people leading it, there are very specific reasons for the lack of advancement in the area’s tech industry over the last 10 to 15 years.   Hopefully, this shift led by cutting edge large firms such as Bettelle, as well as smaller industry expert driven firms such as our own SEO Columbus will keep Columbus at the top of this list for a few years – until it is no longer “up and coming” but rather “arrived”.

Well, we actually have something worth responding to today.  As you likely have noticed, we launched our new site yesterday to a somewhat limited audience, and completely to the entire world today.  I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about the new functionality that we have under the hood of this thing.  Powered by Wordpress (so we’re late to the party, but what the hey), we have a far more functional SEO Columbus site today than we ever had before.  It’s taken a while to tweak it to my personal liking, and optimizing everything the way that a top notch SEO firm would be expected to, but today we are live after much blood, sweat, and tears.  No, all of the content that was found before is completely here at this time.  But it will be added, and then some, very soon. 

In addition, we will begin offering Podcasts (radio, and eventually video) providing SEO training and tips on a regular basis.  We also have a more organized and nimble blogging opportunity, courtesy of the Wordpress framework.  I’ve even converted a few of the old posts to test them out, but for the most part this is going to be a clean slate with new content provided far more frequently than before.  Previous comments will not be making the transition, but I encourage you to register and share comments on the new site while promising not to change anything again for a lonnnnnng time.  I’d love to hear any feedback that you may have on the new look or anything SEO related for that matter.

 Thank you, and we look forward to serving you with an absolutely premium web site tomorrow.

Regards,

Joe Rozsa
President / Founder – SEO Columbus LLC