Website SEO Review/input

[Josh]

What would you do for $2k, Josh? He's open to change and obviously willing to spend the money.

For $2k there is a list of things I would do. The first thing would be some keyword research to get an idea of what's vulnerable and then start doing "stuff". The funny thing about SEO is that it's really built around doing a bunch of things. I have one site that went from a PR 0 to a PR 3 with the most recent update and I really don't know which of the things I've been doing made that happen. We can get on the phone if you'd like. For $300 I took a guys site to page 1/2 on google for most of his money terms and page 1 on bing for all of them. Another guy paid me $400 and got an app from his site two weeks later. I'm not claiming to be a pro at this, but it seems like my amateur abilities are getting better results than many "professionals". For $2k, there's a lot I can do. Brook taught me a bunch of stuff and I've developed some of my own tricks. If you want to see some really crazy results your guy could give us each $200/month and there is no telling what could happen.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

This is the biggest mistake I see: All SEO experts agree to write content for your readers - not Google. Then people go right ahead and write content for Google, not their readers.

If you want to see SEO in action, write something your audience actually want to read, then watch it get passed around and watch Google fall in love with you.

 

[Alston]

IMHO, there are two things that the home page of every site that supports a local agency should do without the user needing to scroll:

1. Display the phone number prominently
2. Display a link to the quote form prominently

The above are usability and conversion issues having nothing to do with SEO. My take on the SEO follows.

The first thing I look at when analyzing a site from an SEO perspective is the title tag. The title tag is the most important real estate on the page. You only get about 70 characters to tell Google the keyword or keywords you think are most relevant to the page.
"Atlanta insurance" is probably an unrealistic target for the short term. I assume that there is a lot of competition for that phrase.
Ditto for "Atlanta Investments."
The name of the agency doesn't belong in the title tag IMO. You will have very little competition for the name. You can optimize for that phrase without wasting so many characters of your most valuable real estate.
The site probably ranks for a 3-word keyword that includes "Atlanta" and "insurance." I'd put that phrase in the title tag. This way, if your long term strategy is to rank for Atlanta insurance, you are still targeting it even if the words are no longer consecutive or in the same order. But while you are waiting for your site to rank for that keyword, you should get traffic from a less competitive keyword.
There is a lot more to SEO than optimizing the title tag, but I always start there. It is about as important as knowing what basket to shoot at when playing a full court game.
If an SEO firm fails SEO 101, they are probably not worth hiring at any price.

 

[ksigmtsu]

Alston, for Atlanta insurance, the shorttail, its so wide open that you could probably put a site to number 1 in less than 6 months with very little backlinking.

4 sites in top 12 are PR 0 including the number, most sites have less than 100 backlinks.

I just checked cause I was curious, but anyone that does SEO that can't hit that term should quit.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

brook is correct, the top site for "atlanta insurance" is Gwinnett Insurance Agents | Gwinnett Auto Insurance | GA, ahrefs shows 25 backlinks, no anchor text for "atlanta insurance", the closest is "atlanta insurance agency".
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but i really should get together with a web designer i could make a good 5k extra a month prob with little effort over charging for seo and web design. anyone want to JV?

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

We should team up Mark. I'm gonna start charging $12,500 for website design. I mean, why not.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

sure CJ. i wouldnt really even have to "do anything". the seo part, well, I'll just outsource it and resell others seo packages, for what do you think? 2-4x cost?

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Well we have pigeons out there who apparently don't care about paying $500 per month for SEO with no results or paying $18,000 for a $300 website. We'll get rich.

 

[seosteve]

I analyzed page-sitemap.xml to better understand the content strategy (typical WordPress optimization). Taxonomy makes sense, but the actual content is awful.

Where I'm not yet impressed is with their link building strategy. Thus far OpenSiteExplorer has captured 32 linking domains, most of which are the result of article syndication/article spinning tactics.

Oddly, their top links is from linkagogo, on a page that appears to be a link farm (stupid search engines).

Because it's a local SEO campaign, I tried to find a KML or other micro-format data on the site and contact page, but found none. It's obvious they paid for UBL or another data blasting service, as I found a plethora (62 actually) of citations claimed, found using WhiteSpark's local citation finder tool.

They are week in social media, creating a group instead of a page in Facebook (duh), but they are paying folks like Thrive America to get links and mentions through mild video SEO (find the handle blankstage24 in YouTube).

A solid location-based SEO campaign can trump the small headway they've earned over the last month or so. Think:

1. Data Validation
2. On-Page Local SEO
3. Relevant Links & Citations
4. Mobile & Suggestion Engines

Good luck!

Dear moderators, I worked reasonably hard on this post, delete it and I may actually take offense.

Cheers all.

 

[shepnerd]

How do you see their pr ranking and backlinks and such?