A new client recently asked us how we can help them promote their business by attracting business via the web. They are in a faily competitive business, and specialize in local services here in Central Ohio. On top of that, they have a limited budget and will need the most bang for the buck that we can squeeze.
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“.