My private internet marketing business handles roughly a dozen websites that are primarily lead-generating in nature. For the most part, these are small businesses with either a local reach or a reasonably defined line of business.
Anyhow, about three weeks ago I launched a redesign of a site for one of my new clients. Essentially I took the exact same content they had, updated it slightly per their feedback, applied a fresh new layout, applied a style sheet, utilized some basic include pages and hooked up a few lead forms. I tried to make the site both user-friendly and spider-friendly with some simple text navigation (although there is a JS image rollover menu too, but all the links are doubled up as HTML a href links as well). I also made sure to use descriptive internal linking with the main keywords, as well as using them in the headings and page titles – just basic on-page optimization here.
Next step was registering the site with some high-quality, applicable directories. Voila! Great rankings. Grant it these are not the world’s most competitive terms, but the reasonable volume of optimized content pages and a couple of dozen good inbound links really surprised me in the speed and degree in which this site acheived top rankings – for moderately competitive terms.
The end result? The site had generated less than a half-dozen leads in close to two years, and now just 9 days into March (not quite even 1 month after putting everything into place) the site has produced more than a dozen leads directly from the web forms, and several more phone inquiries. Not bad so early. Keep in mind this was an existing domain, but again shows the effect of some quality content, basic on page optimization, some good quality links and just a bit of patience.
As an editorial, today’s post I consider a bit on the weak side. I wanted to touch base again and I’ll have some good stuff in the next week or two or so. There are some big changes going on with my business and professional life in general, and I”ll discuss this a bit moreso in the coming weeks.