Here is our first quarterly SEO Website Review. While this is a scaled down version of our SEO Site Audit, I believe that the site owner and our readers will find this feedback educational. Like many of our clients, this business requires better rankings in Google (and the other major search engines) – on the organic side of search.
Company: Gotham Glassworks
This website was submitted by Greg Locke, artist and owner of Gotham Glassworks. The studio is located in Toronto, Canada (just outside the city).
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The Challenge:This website has recently been relaunched, URLs have all changed, and of course it has no SEO history and poor rankings in search engines – even in a local search.
Search Engines: Google Canada, Yahoo! Canada and Bing Canada
Language: English
Local Search: Toronto
Basic Findability in Organic Searches (for targeted keywords)
1. fused glass toronto
Search results: 5,430
2. stained glass toronto
Search results: 48,900
3. art glass toronto
Search results: 104,000
Search Engine Visibility Score: 0
As you can see from our Search Engine Ranking Report below, Gotham Glassworks does not appear in the top 100 in any of the major Canadian search engines.
In addition, the majority of the keywords that sent traffic to the site via search engines are one of the following:
• Company name
• Artist name
• Title of artwork
Data source: Google Analytics
This tends to be common with new websites – and those sites that have not had search engine optimization done.
Here are three items that I recommend addressing to improve Gotham Glassworks’ search engine visibility:
1. Lack of content
Google and the other major search engines provide search results based on relevancy. In reviewing this site, you will note that a number of pages (including the home page) are content scarce. In order to get these pages to show up in a search engine results page (SERP), relevant content is required. This is a common issue in a portfolio type site.
2. Lack of keywords
Ideally Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis is done in the web design phase (at the start of the project). However in post-launch phase, the best strategy is to review title tags, content, URLs and links. Determine if the targeted keywords exist in the site – and where visibility improvement can be implemented. You should, of course, factor in how competitive this space is for each search term.
Note: The more competitive the query terms, the larger the investment is to rank high.
3. Lack of indexing restrictions
Improving one’s visibility in search also includes addressing what should not appear. Since this website has already been crawled and indexed by Google and the other major engines (always the first thing to check), the next item to review is the robots.txt file. While this file exists, there are no indexing restrictions currently in place. This will need to be reviewed and updated (which can be found in the site’s Google Webmaster Tools account).
Again, this is just a quick “What can you do?” to start the website search engine optimization (SEO) process.
Overall Solution:
Start small – and build your search engine optimization strategy over time. SEO is an ongoing process – not something you do once and forget.
Optimize for Google (Google.ca) and for local search (Toronto) and begin the SEO process for relevant web pages.