Desperate Web Help Needed- Site Struggling

We have had a website up and running since the begining of the year and still finding it very hard to get good volumes of traffic and buyers onto our site.

Can anyone give us any hints, tips or help as it is in serious need of some help to prevent our business from calapasing.

The website in topic is www.express-enterprise.co.uk

Regards

Carl

 

Congrats - you just made your first post. It took more than 40 second for your site to load. Very slow indeed.

 

Thanks for the welcome. Can you give us any advice hints or tips at all to get more traffic and our site found on search engines etc, as currently we are not even sure where we are ranked.

 

been glancingavarious topics on the forums and have been establishing web links with other car related business and sites, car clubs and forums as have seen this will help.

Anything el;se we can do or things people can see wrong with our site in order to get it being hit alot more. We are averaging in the region of 40 hits a day, whcih we feel is poor considering teh potential market of teh world wide web.

 

what you need is some good SEO work in order to make your website rank for its keywords.

your keywords would be:

car refurbishment
wheel refurbishment
car modification
valeting

 

Your problem is that you have an all-Flash Web site, which the search engines cannot handle very well. Please read my thread "All You Need to Know About SEO" and the Search Engine Optimization FAQ over at SitePoint.com (where I am a Mentor on the Design Team) for more information.

 

and how do i sort that then buddy. We are working to a tight budget.

 

Simply put, I'd start looking at saving up some money and hiring a competent Web designer/developer who's also proficient in on-site SEO (in other words, creates accessible easy to use Web sites, doesn't use tables for layout, validates their HTML, writes semantic markup that separates the structure, appearance and behavior from one another as much as possible). Either that, or find a designer/developer who's willing to work out a payment plan.

 

i think it's time to hire a good new seo..

 

Ok so what sort of cost would i blooking at to have it revamped and sorted out properly.

 

No, he needs a new Web designer and/or developer (like I said above).

A lot of people here will try to say "I can do it for $XX.xx" thinking that yours will be an easy site to turn around quickly but find themselves stuck in the mud instead. I'm not going to BS you here - your site will probably take some time (a couple of weeks). Depending on how much the designer and/or developer charges (some designers also code Web sites, while some developers stay as far away from the actual "design process" as much as they can - I'm in the latter group, but I can justify that by focusing on things like accessibility, ease of use, cross-browser compatibility and durability of the site from browser to browser and version to version, and SEO, which when one thinks about it, all go hand in hand and when done properly will actually cost less to implement).

But since each freelancer/studio/agency bills differently, giving you a ballpark range is going to be difficult at best. What I can do though is sit down and "audit" your site to see how long it would take me to convert the existing design (I'd probably take a screenshot of the home page and convert the design that way, rather than creating a new one) and then give you an estimate of how much it would cost to hire me to do it, but that wouldn't be fair to the others if I were to do so here in the thread, and I'm not keen on discussing pricing on matters like this anyway due to pricing laws (though I have no qualms about telling others what to charge so they can keep a roof over their heads and grow their businesses).

 

Thanks for your reply Dan.

Anyone else on this???

 

Carl, you have two options:

1) Get rid of the flash: The search engine can't read or see your flash, so no wonder you rank nowhere. Why would they rank an empty page. For what keywords?

2) You can keep your flash but then you need tons of quality backlinks with your targeted keywords in the anchor text. That can rank even an empty page #1 and then you get visitors.

Gunter

 

Can you explain point 2 infurther detail as this maybe a better option than having thesite fully rebuilt as not sure e could afford that as w on a tight budget as we are bordering collapse, unless something dramtically changes.

 

What he's saying is that your site would have to be immensely popular and have each of those sites (I'm talking on a scale of tens of thousands of quality relevant links here) point back to yours with the keywords you're trying to target. In other words, you have to get them to play by your rules, which most sites won't do.

 

ok, i see what you are saying.

Basically i need this website to work for my business and earn me money to stop me hving to shut up shop. All comes down to money now and what its gonna cost to have it all sorted out properly.

 

You have a very impressive site! Whoever designed it is quite talented. Unfortunately, as a couple people already said, flash doesn't mix well with SEO.

Does your store only sell local, or nationwide? If it's only local, then I don't think you need to spend money to get your layout changed. You would probably want to look into Google Adwords, targetting towards your geographic audience. You could also use TNX to increase your ranking for select search terms such as YourLocation Car Repair.

 

geoffr, that won't have much of an impact on his site.

 

I thought using TNX was like shouting in Larry and Sergey's face "BAN ME PLEASE"?

 

I've never heard of TNX. Must be one of those stupid jargon "words" that some "SEOs" use to make themselves look more important than they really are.