http://www.clemson4wheel.com/ We just went live with a new site and changed our CMS. We are looking to increase our traffic and sales but I really need some SEO/SEM tips and advice. I have a couple of ideas but have never talked to anyone thats successfully implemented a online marketing campaign. - I send out newsletter every once and a while about rebates. Usually only one or two manufacturers have rebates going on. Otherwise we run no specials. We just started shipping everything over $98 for free. - Social Media Give-a-ways? Example, 2,000th person to like our page (or a post/image) and we give something away. - In-store Credit for Product Reviews or a upfront $5 - $10 credit to a customers account? - Free shirt after $X of money spent? - Getting our employees involved in related 4x4 forums giving advice and posting backlinks - We are a brick and mortar shop with a show room filled with products we sell. We also have a 4x4 Shop that`s constantly busy. Other than posting pictures to Facebook how can I utilize this? We have paid for Adwords, Banners and PPC services but none of them have shown a increase in sales. Any advice, Ideas or personal experience doing this sort of thing would be extremely helpful. Also open to suggestions on our website.
Hiring an experienced SEO Expert to use creative and effective methods of driving targeted traffic to your new website, with a unique SEO strategy, could be an idea to consider. Experienced being the "keyword" to keep-in mind in the above sentence... It seems that most so called "SEO Experts," seem to rely on guess work and ineffective methods, and overlook some of the most import factors of search engine optimization, that should always be taken into consideration. There is no substitute for time, when it comes to learning and an having an in-depth knowledge of the most important factors of SEO
"Hiring an experienced SEO Expert to use creative and effective methods of driving targeted traffic to your new website, with a unique SEO strategy, could be an idea to consider." I believe we are currently and have been doing that with a local company. We are spending upwards of $500 a month for a couple of Facebook Ads and PPC Ads. Results arent THAT bad but we have seen absolutely no increase in sales. Facebook likes are great but if they dont convert to sales its pointless. Im looking at our big "competitors" and see what they are doing as far as marketing. Im bringing my list to my employers soon. Is there anything anyone can think of that I could Add? - Web - Encourage product reviews before and after a purchase. Send out a email X # of days after a purchase asking for a review or included a "please review our service and products @clemson4wheel.com" in the actual shipped product box - Web - Have a support forum with a few FAQS, Common Jeep technical questions and just a place for customers to ask questions. - Web- Set up some kind of reward system for buyers. Whether it be send out a $10 credit/giftcard after a certain amount spent or just as simple as sending a free tshirt or coozie with the purchase of a certain item. - Set up a live chat on the website during business hours - Social Media - Give-a-ways? Example, 2,000th person to like our page (or a post/image) and we give a shirt, cap or lower cost item. - Social Media - Give away a big item - Join our newsletter/like our facebook page/Share an Image and on Black Friday (example) a Facebook fan will be chosen for a Free VR8000 Winch etc. *If you are spending $500(etc) a month on Facebook Ads then this will prob produce better results and be cheaper. - Social Media - Free shirt for first right answer to something. (Example: Post a picture of a Jeep part and say "First person to name this part gets XX Shirt for Free" - Then have a link to the part on our website after its answer etc. ) - Social Media - Post daily on the whats happening and being worked on in the Shop. Post #tags and #links back to clemson4wheel.com to the products you are installing - Web - Get employees involved in related 4x4 forums giving advice and posting back-links to our website. Most big forums are crawled by Google. Most of forums have a "vendor" fee to represent a business.
I honestly do not see anything that I would consider to be "effective," listed above, in regards to what should really be done to help your website, utilizing important and a very effective methods of "REAL SEO."
So. Are you trying to sell me "REAL SEO" or you assume Im some idiot that doesnt know what hes doing? So far you have no constructive advice just vague input on the "REAL SEO" that you apparently offer. Do you have something too add or some advice on what we can do to increase our traffic and conversions? Im not coming up with these ideas of out of the blue. Im looking at what other ecommerce outfits and our competitors are doing and Im asking here what other retailers and ecommerce owners are doing. So please, I would love to request your "Free SEO Evaluation Service: I will personally manually perform a series of tests and checks using many different SEO tools. If and when I detect any hints of problems or potential issues, I dig deeper into the problem until I’m able to clearly identify the problem or until I’m able to rule out the suspected issues." I know for a fact our actual site is not bad on the SEO side of things. Titles and Headers are set, Meta tags are set. Img-alts are set. Keywords are set and w3 validates well on almost all of our pages. Our site functions on all browsers IE7 > up and is responsive on most mobile screens. Where I stand I think we are suffering in SEM and marketing in general. Im looking for ideas to increase our rank, our newsletter subscribes, Social presence and overall customer base.
I did a few different types of check and tests on your site, below is the results of my SEO Evaluation as you requested The Overall Optimization Score: 93% (FOR THE HOMEPAGE) Although the over score of your homepage is very high, and much higher that most sites that I evaluate, I do see plenty of room for improvement with just the meta description and meta keywords used on the homepage of the website, aside from everything else that I have noticed and noted. Keyword Relevancy: 33% Descriptiont Relevancy: 58% (homepage description content has a spelling error that I noticed as well) Title Relevancy: 100% (this is what is "helping" the over SEO score for the homepage) The Title Relevancy score, as well as other scores listed, is only based on the keywords that you have defined, and textual content within the homepage, as well as a few other important factors. Selecting better keywords to use within the title of the site, for not only the title of the homepage, but other important pages of the site would help a lot, and then spending the time to very carefully write relevant meta description tags, could really help to improve the internal relevancy of site as a whole. Making sure a website is properly optimized internally first, before spending a lot of time doing external SEO, will definitely pay off in dividends in the end! <<<<< BELOW IS ONE VERY SIMPLE EXAMPLE >>>>> ---- CLICK BELOW ---- << BROKEN LINKS ARE BAD FOR SEO >> If you are paying someone for Search Engine Optimization Service, and they over-look a simple task like: CHECKING FOR BROKEN LINKS I would start by first: Recommending that you get a refund for whatever you are paying for that they are calling: "SEO Service" This is nothing new to me, I deal with these types of issues on a daily basis, but some people still "just do not get it." People like to sell you what they think you are willing to spend money on... Does not mean it's "SEO Service"
The "Broken" link is a URL redirect to #. There is a "shop by category" page as indicated but the drop nav menu is redirected to #. We cant disable the root category so we have to redirect it, in this case, to nowhere. Not a big deal as there is no work-around for us at the moment. The W3 errors are from the embedded Facebook, Youtube and Javascript. I can drop most if not all of them with a hour or two of work. Easily fixed by external references and valid xhtml markup, but again. Isnt really going to affect our ranking. In the long run these are minor bugs and easy fixes. The meta descriptions however do need to be done on a product by product basis (Sigh, Thousands of Products =-). At the moment we are pulling the meta descriptions from the Product Descriptions and it bugs the meta description if there are any quotes or symbols in the product title which there are on each product because of the style and format of the descriptions. The main content is there, However, there is some trash data mixed in. Our competitions pages bring up hundreds of validation errors and they rank extremely high for our targeted brands and keywords. On validation and the actual platform/CMS/Design coding side of things I think we are ahead of the competition, aside from content. Your SEO suggestions are spot on but by no means will the minor w3 errors being fixed cause a noticeable jump in ranking. This may be the wrong forum. Im leaning more towards Advertising (SEM, SM,) and Customer Engagement as a means to increase our customer base, traffic and sales. We need customer engagement not only at a local level but at a National level as well. Do you have any advice on these? Thanks for your time!