Deverill Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Hi gang! I wanted to open this for comments because you guys always give me great answers when I ask for them. The site at www.grandslamkw.com is one of my commercial sites. I would like to hear any comments about SEO or promoting the site that you care to offer. I have asked for a website review in that forum so let's keep this thread to purely promotion. The situation is that this guy is a client, but also a close personal friend of mine. He has a great boat and does everything humanly possible to offer a great trip to his customers. He has a great business but sometimes not great results so he turned to me for help in the form of internet advertising. He has a clean boat and is very presentable so that's not the problem - it's just that he is on Charterboat Row which is about 20+ charter boats all like his... walkup traffic just has too many options so we want to catch them before they get here. I've been doing his site for over a year and he is getting customers, but not as many as I'd like to see. He's getting 15-20 visits per day but about half are robots and spiders which is not entirely bad, but they don't pay the bills. We have gotten over 60 page references from Google and another 60 or so from various others. I have flags on all my sites that tell me when Google visits and although this site is listed, the Googlebot hasn't visited it since I added the email notifier - even though he has visited my daycare and church page multiple times per day and every once in awhile he ends up at my web design pages. Another interesting fact is that 63% of the people that come to the site via search engines are there because of the page for his 1969 GTO - not many of them are interested in fishing charters. I've submitted the site to the TCH Family forum and am going right now to request a site review but would love to hear any ideas from my TCH Family on how to get this guy tapped into some of the revenue that is out there on the 'net... SEO or any other advertising ideas welcome! Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
surefire Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Well, one reason why you haven't gotten your emails when Google visits is because the script probably isn't being read by the server. View the source code of the home page and you see <body bgcolor="#336699" text="Yellow"><!-- <?php if(eregi("googlebot",$HTTP_USER_AGENT)) { if ($QUERY_STRING != "") {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF.'?'.$QUERY_STRING;} else {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF;} $today = date("F j, Y, g:i a"); mail("jcsewell@runbox.com", "Googlebot detected on http://$SERVER_NAME", "$today - Google crawled $url"); } ?> --> <table border=3 width="49%" align="center"> And if I can see the PHP code in the source, then it's not working... period. So I'd check the file logs to see if Google has visited. Also, and I'm not the pro here at TCH, that's DSDemmin, I would focus on tighter keyword phrases. I see in your page that you have listed "Key West, charter, fishing, boat.." and stuff like that. I would narrow it down and try to use more precise keyphrases. You need to do a lot of research here. I would think "Key West charter" or "Key West fishing" would be your best bet. Leave out the rest once you decide on 2 or 3. The links to the page are critical. What do they say? If they say 'Grand Slam' then that's worthless (almost) if that isn't a keyphrase. Your link back to him should say "Key West Charter: Grandslam" or something like that. Also, the title for the page should be shorter and focus more on keyphrases at the front of the title. "Key West fishing charters: Grand Slam" would be good. Anyhow, gotta run. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deverill Posted September 20, 2003 Author Share Posted September 20, 2003 (edited) Thanks for the link/keyword help, Jack... and "ouch" on that script. I'll bet it's a missing line in .htaccess that's causing it to not parse php. I hate making stupid mistakes! I'll be looking at the rest in the next day or two. Thanks again! Edited September 20, 2003 by Deverill Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilexa Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Jim... I think you need to get rid of the HTML comment tags around the php code. ...Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilexa Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Jim... Using the free overture keyword selection tool, ***http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ The following search counts were recorded for June -- fishing key west 1733 fishing key west charter 716 key west charter 315 key west charter boat 143 It looks to me like there isn't a very big "pie" of internet searches for "Key West fishing". As a comparison there were 114680 searches for all "key west" and 5210 searches for "key west boat" You might try other keywords in overture to try and find a logical set that applies to your client and has tons of searches. Good luck. ...Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
surefire Posted September 21, 2003 Share Posted September 21, 2003 My approach would be different than Wilexa's (not better, just different). You fishing charter client probably only needs one or two clients to come from the web for it to be worth the time, effort, and money. Obviously we all want more... but let's aim for something realistic. I would look at the fact that the tighter keyphrase 'fishing key west' and 'fishing key west charter' are going to Have less competition than 'Key West' Be a tighter match with client to business And between the two, you have 1700 potential hits PER MONTH. If your client is like most charter operations, there is only one boat and therefore only a fixed number of people they can handle per week. So after a certain point, getting too many leads is pointless. If you brought them 1700 leads per month, that would be too many. So why try to cast a bigger net (no pun intended). My suggestion would be to get a fix on who this charter group wants for clients, and what they are typing in to find charter services in Key West. Do not compete in the broader 'Key West' category. Go for a tighter match so that anyone who lands on the site from a search will think 'That's exactly what I'm looking for.' But that's only half the battle. Once the person gets to the site, what are you going to offer them in order to compel them to raise their hand and say 'I might be a potential client'...? Too many sites just say "Here's what we do, here's our phone number". You've got to watch the numbers and work on converting as many visitors to clients as possible. Getting 'eyeballs' don't pay the rent. Getting leads into the funnel and having a mechanism in place to convert those leads to sales is the trick. I'm currently working with a client on this very thing. They have plenty of 'eyeballs' but their sales stink because they didn't give me what I told them to give me... compelling content and an irresistable offer. They told me to put their existing brochures online. Boring... boring... boring. They're starting to come around now that I've shown them the numbers. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilexa Posted September 21, 2003 Share Posted September 21, 2003 Great comments, Jack! We all want to do business with a company that perfectly suits our needs. TCH isn't the top name in google for web hosting, but it certainly is the best company! Rock Sign Since Jim's client is a specific operation (you must be a fisherman and you need to physically be in Key West to use his services), your approach is a good one. I certainly defer to your experience in attracting actual business from web visits. Regardless of the keywords picked, a site must be VERY focused on those keywords. And as DSDemmin always says: be consistent. [i personally have problems picking the right set of keywords for my site. It is hard to let some go and focus on the "right" ones for SEO. We all want to tell the public how many different needs our site can meet for them, but the shotgun approach does not help your site in the search engines.] Right now, I can't even find grandslamkw.com when I do a search for "key west fishing" or "key west charter" on the first 10 pages or so of google. Note: One of the competitors, seaclusion, relegates the name of his boat to a lower spot and titles the main page "Key West Fishing" and ranks up near the top. ...dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deverill Posted September 21, 2003 Author Share Posted September 21, 2003 This is great stuff guys! I hope that this whole thread can help others too, but it surely is helping me! I appreciate the thought put into your replies and think that by implementing most/all of them the site will do better. It is an excellent point about how many customers the guy can serve - US Coast Guard laws only permit 6 people (plus crew?) on his boat at a time so even half-days gives us no more than about 360 customers per month at full speed ahead so your point is a good one. Now to find out how to click into that niche! I have noticed that one of the keywords gets some hits I wouldn't have expected and that's "shark". Being such an uninterested angler as I am hurts in this case because I'd never have thought that would be a big draw but apparently it is a nice niche and one I want to take advantage of. In fact, I just tried "key west shark fishing" on Google and came up #5 so that's encouraging assuming the clientele is out there for such a thing. That's another thing, how many folks interested in shark fishing would put "Key West" in their search term - AFAIK, Key West is not well know as a shark hotbed. I believe it would be best to dedicate a page or two in the site to specifically shark fishing and tune all keywords and links to that, but also having a lead back to the main stuff. Another thing to decide is how much link sharing and advertising to recommend to my client. For instance, I have a link to a local hotel that I traded for one on their site. I figure what's the harm because they aren't competing with my boat guy. Afterall, if you sleep here you can fish and if you fish you need somewhere to sleep. I just wonder how many of these would be at the point of diminishing returns. I know if it ends up being a "link farm" it's a Bad Thing. Do I only advertise Key West stuff or do I go for fish-related sites outside Key West to get the relevancy up (hotels and boats aren't really related)? Or something entirely different? Of course I don't want to link to competitors to give the potential customer a chance to click away. Also, paid advertising is kinda new to me too for web promotion. I have been blessed with some good (very narrow) sites to promote before. I started with my church's website and there are only 2 other churches in town with websites that I know of so that's an easy thing. In fact, I've been able to keep the #1 (and several in the top 10) positions at Google for almost as long as the page has existed. The competition for "Key West fishing" is new to me and I am hesitant to spend my client's money on something that may not pan out well for him. I suppose we could pick a few to try, let them run a month or two, and see what results come from it and then switch out the bad ones... isn't that the normal thing to do in any business endeavor? Anyways, enough going on about it. Thanks for your help and I'm all ears for any other comments on this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
surefire Posted September 21, 2003 Share Posted September 21, 2003 Note: One of the competitors, seaclusion, relegates the name of his boat to a lower spot and titles the main page "Key West Fishing" and ranks up near the top. Wilexa echoes the point I tried to make earlier, Deverill. You need to carefully craft your page titles and the text in the links back to the site so that the keyphrases are first and concentrated. In other words, put the name of the company last, if at all in the title of the page, put the keyphrases first, and don't dilute their effect with long page titles. You are going to have to focues on some keyphrases at the expense of others. Sometimes you'll find a 'gimme' in your log files such as the 'shark fishing' that you mentioned. This occurs when you find a term that you accidentally rank well for and where there is little competition. Put up a page dedicated to this topic and you'll probably rank even better... until someone wants to dedicate their entire site to the subject. Currently, the inbound links, page titles, and H1 tags are not set up to give your client's site the best bang for the buck. There are easy things you can do to improve this. If you decide to go with any paid advertising. Go with pay per click... and don't direct the traffic to the home page... direct it to a page where you have code that will count the hits in a database. This way you know what you're getting. Don't rely on their count stats... use your own. While we're talking about pay per click... a short term solution for your client is to invest in a pay per click program at Overture or Google Ad Words. While your long term goal should be hits for 'free'... this is a quick way to generate targeted traffic. If you know your numbers and your client is willing to 'buy' clients (and any smart business person should) then this can be a great marketing strategy. The frustrating thing about search engine marketing is that you can make a modification to your site today.. and not see the results for weeks or months sometimes. Pay per click can generate traffic immediately. Just be smart about your bids. And like I said... your client can only take X many people per week. So you're not looking for as many leads as possible... you're looking to convert what visitors you do get to sales. Big difference. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.