This past weekend I attended a dinner at the home of some friends. I hadn’t yet met one of the other attendees and her son, so it was a fun evening of meeting new people. Over the course of the conversation after dinner, this particular lady described to us the problems her parents were having with their web site. They weren’t getting the desired sales off the site and were very frustrated it wasn’t performing better. She said something to the effect of, “If you don’t know our web address, you can’t find us.”
I borrowed our host’s notebook computer and pulled up her parents’ site. The home page looked very nice, but a few issues were immediately apparent:
- Important keywords were buried at the bottom of the page.
- The logo was large and situated in the center of the page, which pushed a lot of key information below the fold.
- Navigation solely consisted of buttons, no text links were included anywhere on the pages.
Digging into the source code for a few of the pages also revealed there were no descriptions nor keywords nor any “alt” tags for the images. I also noted clicking on the logo for the site designer company’s link at the bottom of the page lead nowhere – the site is gone. That’s not a good sign.
She also told me that when her parents complained about the lack of traffic to the site to their ISP (who, as I understand it, now does the updates to their site), they recommended a PPC campaign to drive traffic to the site without addressing the underlying SEO problems first. I don’t remember how much she said her parents were quoted to start this PPC campaign, but it seemed to me rather high for a small mom and pop business.
I took about 15 minutes and described what needed to be corrected on the site before anything else should be considered. As I went over some very basic SEO considerations, she said something like, “I wish someone had showed us this a long time ago.”
I do, too.
Now, this lady is no technical slouch. She’s a skilled network administrator. But, she is not a web designer and admittedly knows next to nothing about HTML let alone SEO techniques.
I won’t call out their web host, because I don’t know their side of the story.
Still, I have to wonder if they are ignorant, incompetent or just providing bad service. Whichever the reason, there is certainly little value being added to this family’s web efforts.
How many of you have heard stories like this? How many have had to clean up someone else’s mess? I’m curious to hear your stories. Please feel free to leave them in the comments.
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