Over Stuffed. SEO & Your Web Design.

Ok, Turkey day is near, it’s near lunch time and I have home cooked stuffing on the brain.

We met a prospect that sells a rather seasonal product. Her product was a great niche product, but was only needed or sought after a few times a year.  The traffic kept climbing to her web site, but her sales kept trending downward.   She asked us to dive in and take a look at what was happening: Here’s what we found: OVER SEO’d, stuffed to the Giblets with SEO keywords and over salted with random copy.  There must have been 20 paragraphs written just for search engines on the home page alone. So prospects were finding the web site, but guess what? The web site wasn’t about them.  The web site was all about trying to get Google traffic. No customer comments about their products, no best sellers on the homepage, no gift giving suggestions, just all about SEO and pulling in traffic. No cranberry sauce, no gravy, not stuffed celery (yum.), just boring copy.

The second we take our eye off of the prize and stop focusing on what the consumers want on our web sites is the exact same second that sales start going south.  Your web site needs to be geared for prospects, not just all about the search engines.  There is a blend and a balance that needs to be achieved, SEO and Web Design can live in harmony, but again, the primary focus needs to be on the consumer.

Here’s the moral of the over stuffed story: We tend to be greedy when it comes to traffic.  Granted, traffic is critical, but think of it this way: if you hit Black Friday and waited in line to get into a store that was sub-par, that didn’t clean up the floors, didn’t make it easy for you to find what you were looking for, didn’t feel the need to turn on the AC even though there were 1500 people in the store, you would leave just as quickly as you came in. The same applies to your web site.  Make it comfortable, make it inviting, make it easy to use and aesthetically appealing, bottom line, make it about THEM.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all and a sincere thank you to all of our clients who trust us to their online marketing / web design needs. I am truly thankful for all of you.