Getting the structure of your website is vitally important. Get it right and the website will provide a great return on investment. Get it wrong and the website will do nothing. Let me illustrate this with a real life case study.
Case Study
I’ve recently been working with the owners of Mariner III. This is a motor yacht which is available for charters out of New York harbour in the summer. The last version of the website had been created by a marketing consultant with technical work done overseas. Although the website was based on WordPress, the design was poorly executed, confusing to work with and slow to load on the screen. Consequently it did not appear in search engine rankings at all. Even a search on “mariner 3 new york” ( a pretty basic test of a websites performance ) produced nothing at all.
The owners asked me to completely overhaul the website.
I stayed with WordPress, it’s a very good product. We agreed on the use of a freely available WordPress theme that was well regarded for ease of use and all round performance. The structure was carefully planned so that all pages were easy to access and had meaningful addresses. At launch , the website had 22 pages and contained around 16000 words of text. Pages were optimised for search using the Yoast SEO functionality and a large number of pictures were added for visual impact.
The results have been dramatic. Within two weeks of the new version of the website going live, the search engine ratings had shot up. That search on “mariner 3 new york” now returns the Mariner III website as the first result on Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Generic searches have also improved dramatically. A search on “new york yacht charter” now returns the Mariner III site on around page six of the major search engines. It’s these generic searches that will bring in new business and we will continue to work with the Mariner III owners to drive these results even higher.
You will find the new Mariner III website at www.mariner3.com
If you are concerned that your website is not working for you, give me call 0333 123 0004
Chris Jerrey