SEO Belfast

Doon kindly requested if he could take me up on the free credit crunch offer and I was only to happy to take a look at his site and go through a list of recommendations. Thankfully he agreed to me listing my recommendations on the site.

Obviously it’s the building blocks rather than a very comprehensive report with all the trade secrets thrown in, but there are plenty of suggestions here for Doon to get to work on.

The site in question is www.kissweddingmovies.com

On-Site

The first set of suggestions are related to On-Site SEO, in simple layman’s terms that’s everything to do with the structure, coding and set up of the site.

Page Titles

The Page Title on the Homepage is very short (you can see the page title highlighted), it’s ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’.

I would target 2 keyword terms, I would look for a secondary term that compliments the main term. For instance ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos Northern Ireland’. Note the plural ‘videos’ and the inner term ‘Northern Ireland Wedding Videos’ minus the apostrophe.

Or perhaps another suggestion is ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos – Kiss Wedding Movies’. This includes the plural and also includes the company name. Sure it misses the additional Northern Ireland but it includes the name that has the keyword ‘Wedding’ in it, and is less than the standard 70 characters that Google tends to only display for the page title.

Looking at Doon’s competitors the term DVD/DVDs also appears to be popular terms to bear in mind.

Google displays the page title in it’s returned results and treats it as a very strong indicator of the page’s content so make it unique and align it with the page and the terms you’re targeting.

Overall the page titles need to be better. An easy way to check the current page titles is to do a site: operator search on Google, providing the pages have been indexed.

Most of the pages have at best 3 or 4 keyword titles without a regional qualifier. Most people search for wedding videographers based on an area/region, so the title could be improved upon by adding the region and possibly another synonymous keyword term.

Meta Descriptions

Below is an image of how the Meta descriptions are displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results (SERPS).

These need improving and should be unique for each page particularly for the important pages within your site. As you can see the current homepage Meta description is ‘Wedding Videos Northern Ireland Premier Creative Video Specialist’. It’s very short and uninspiring, and more than likely won’t have as good a click thru rate as it could. I’d make it longer and throw in some of the main popular terms you are targeting. On Google these keywords will then be bolded when a search on that particular keyword is carried out. It’ll then attract the eye of the searcher and improve the click thru rate.

I’d maybe go a couple of sentences that include the main keywords of the page, something like ‘Wedding Video Services by experienced Northern Ireland Videographer Doon Storey….Personalised Wedding Video packages available.

Page Header

Kiss Wedding Videos is the main title on every page and surrounded by the H1 heading tag (The H1 header tag isn’t visible, it’s just the code behind the scenes).

This gives Google an idea of the main theme of the page or at least should do. ‘Kiss Wedding Movies’ isn’t the term that you should be targeting and it shouldn’t be duplicated across every page on the site. My personal preference would be to replace it with an image. I’d then use the H1 tag to be more specific on each page so for the home page have the H1 tag surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland or Wedding Video with a buffer keyword, and get rid of the H2 tag which is currently surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland. I’d do this for all the pages and have unique titles specific to the page.

Internal Linkage

The internal linkage could be improved though it’s not bad. Link back to the home page and the main pages throughout your site with keyword rich anchor text. So for the homepage, why not link to it from one or two other important pages with the terms ‘wedding videographer’ or ‘wedding video’. The current funnel to the packages page where the customers will learn what you offer is on the right tracks.

Canonicalisation

There are links both to www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com from within the site itself. The URL is indexed in Google not the web page, so although entering www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com into the address bar brings up the same web page content, it’s actually 2 different URLs.

Sometimes you might see the same page indexed in Google both for the www and non www version. The best bet is to have this uniform so that the page strength isn’t undermined. Pick a version and stick with it. As the site is new and not well established I’d go for the familiar www, make sure that you list your site with other sites with the www version and that from within the site you link to the www version. Even though the site is indexed in Google without the www, I’d change that as it’s very early days in the site’s history, you can set this up in Google Webmaster Tools (that I touch on briefly below) in the preferred domain section.

Images

All the images on the site should use an alt tag to let Google know what the image is about. If an image is for decoration purposes then just leave the alt tag blank.

That’s enough on-site to be getting on with. Here’s some off-site stuff.

Google Account, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics

Set up a Google Account. You can then set up a Google Webmasters Tools account and Google Analytics account and manage all the accounts under the one console.

The Webmasters Account needs you to verify your site. Once the site has been verified the GWT console will give you a heads up on issues such as duplicate page titles and meta description that you can then address.

It will also inform you of crawl errors, http errors etc.

Looking through the pages listed in Google I came across this one http://kissweddingmovies.com/page2/page2.html. Like many of the listings it just looks like an old page, floating about doing nothing. You can delete this page from Google’s index from within GTW.

Another thing you can do is set the region that the site targets. As Doon’s hosting is American based and the site is a .com, I’d set the region to UK as that’s where your target market is.

You can also install Google Analytics. This will allow you to benchmark the progress you make with your campaign. All the usual are there such as page visits, visitors, keywords, and search engine traffic, referrals etc.

Setting up one or two goals might be for another day, for instance a contact goal might give you some idea over time what keywords etc bring leads. One of the mistakes that I made early on was not tracking all the sales that I made for a couple of years, it was only looking back on this that I realised the error. If I had of known what terms converted, where they came from etc this would have provided valuable information.

Google Local

You need to promote your business on Google local Search and get your site listed on the local business results.

You can read more promoting your business on Google Local Search.

Links

Google is still a links driven search engine. Your site currently has zero links pointing back to it. It’s pretty anonymous and friendless. Your direct competition certainly won’t give you any links, but you may have a small number of business partners that will. You also need to get some authority editorial links preferably from highly trusted sites.

I’d recommend a 4NI listing. The amount of listings you get depends on your budget. You’ll need to invest simple as that if you want to get a good return.

Looking at the bottom of the page 1 results for the term ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’ there’s sites listed there with just 30 or so links which isn’t an awful lot. In fact even the higher up listings don’t have that many links to them.

As a small business creating great content that will attract natural links isn’t going to be easy especially when you have a business to run. Provide a great customer service, hang out in a forum or two, like the one I have mentioned below and raise your head above the parapet and you’ll get a number of links over time and more importantly referrals.

PPC

I would run a tight PPC campaign, especially as you won’t be high up in the organic rankings for a while, and keep running it even when you are top of Google providing it’s profitable. Together with your Local Listing you’ll have a 3-pronged strategy that will give you plenty of traffic and boost your online profile.

Pay Per Click can also give you valuable information on your clients, what terms they search for what works etc and you can then use this information to improve your SEO campaign. For example you can find out terms that people are searching for that you have overlooked in your SEO campaign and then take advantage of this, particularly if your competitors have missed these.

Time management is an issue so I’ve left out some of the Social media avenues you could go down etc. that can be quite labour intensive, but joining a forum where your target market and hang out such as http://www.weddingtalkforums.co.uk/ and contributing and building up a network of colleagues as well certainly won’t do you any harm.

I haven’t mentioned anything about client testimonials etc and a whole host of other things but follow these steps above, give the site a bit of time to age, invest, and your site will certainly get traffic. That’s the first part of the battle. Improving the conversion rates is for another day!

Good luck.