Online Riches to Rags
This review highlights a company that had a continual stream of online enquiries and then decided to build a new website with the new company owners. It is a catalogue of mistakes.
The new site will reposition the company as being good at shredding documents and away from their core activity of storing documents. That isn’t exactly what the owners would want! The new site also has them as being based in London and not multi location.
The new site has been launched unfinished. There are internal server errors, a non functional site map link on every page, various spelling mistakes in the metatags sections, no on-page SEO and no effective calls to action. It is also written as an inward looking corporate brochure, not a customer centric website. Working on websites once they are live really annoys Google and other search engines. An unfinished online project gets reviewed as just that…an unfinished website. This will count against the website owner.
They have asked to us to do “one of those redirect things” with very little notice. It’s not a problem but they never asked about 301s. This will lose them all their existing Google “credibility”. The new site does not have any possibility to be found on Google for any of the search phrases that they used to have and which brought in frequent enquiries. Even with 301s the site would be a very poor performer. The next step will be using an SEO company. And they will waste all their money with them. The site is un-SEO -able! It’s broken and not even the best SEO company in UK could fix it.
Poor and outdated coding is revealed in the metatag section (and other areas also.) The keyword metatag is stuffed with more than 10 keywords. For everybody’s information, Google haven’t used the keyword metatag for over 5 years and more than 3 keywords per page was always a mistake. The html builder is obviously very out of date. The title and h1 tags are also poorly contructed and incongruent with the copy.
The site lacks any human feel. There are no pictures of staff on the site. This is a huge mistake by many companies as they miss out on presenting themselves as normal and approachable.
The company has totally failed to understand that they did have a superb lead generation machine within their old website. The rebranding exercise for the new company has totally washed away any need for financial accountability. Did the new management not know about the tens of thousands of pounds of new business that the website has brought them over the last 3 or 4 years? Did they not know that they were at 1,2, or 3 on Google for their key phrases?
Sadly the company will lose over 80% of its current traffic and disappear into online obscurity. The phone will never ring again. Emails will cease to arrive and new business will be acquired “old style”. Online enquiries will totally vanish when the old site comes down.
Ah, if only they had spoken first with the people that made them so much money.
Point, aim, click, fire. Kill that online presence.
