ProSelfDefenseProducts.com - Your Online Store for Self-Defense Products

Look and Feel:

First impressions are important, and the first impression that I got from ProSelfDefenseProducts.com is that they’re a small brick-and-mortar shop trying to sell a handful of their products on the web. The site is probably built and maintained by the owner or a family member. While none of these things are bad in and of themselves, it’s really not the impression you want your buyers to get when they first visit your site. You want them to think that you’re a large, reputable business that’s been around for 50 years. That sort of feeling gives buying confidence, and without confidence, you simply won’t have any online buyers… at all.

I would strongly recommend redesigning the site on an ecommerce platform. All marketing activities should really be placed on hold until you can make the change over. As they undergo the redesign, I would recommend paying close attention to the quality of your photos. Online shoppers need high quality images to look at when they’re considering making a purchase. Especially if they’re spending hundreds of dollars with you.

I would also recommend ProSelfDefenseProducts.com focus on building up their brand. This means investing in a professional logo.

Search Engine Friendliness:

The site has about 150 pages, which are all found and indexed by Google. The URL’s are fine, excect I would recommend using a - instead of a _ when you redesign. Title tags are a bit short on most of the sub-pages, and are focusing on keywords that are too broad. All titles should contain the brand name at the end as well. The images on the site seem to have appropriate alt text, but the keywords used are too broad. I would recommend putting the full product name, as well as part number in each image alt text.

On a side note, the site’s navigation needs to be retooled. Having two left hand navigation bars on the side of the page doesn’t work. One left hand navigation with drop down functionality is the way to go. Followed by a standard bottom navigation would be ideal.

Keyword Selection:

The only broad keyword that ProSelfDefenseProducts.com seems to rank on the first page for is, [Self Defense Products] - which is a good thing. Having that keyword phase in the domain should be automatic win. If the site secures a few more inbound links they should be #1 for the phrase in no time.

In terms of overall SEO strategy, I would recommend focusing on ranking for the individual products they sell. Additionally I would recommend adding more keywords in the title tags of all pages across the board - especially the category level pages.

Linking:

Although ProSelfDefenseProducts.com doesn’t have a lot of inbound links, the great domain name makes the few inbound links they do have fully optimized. So my recommendation would be to go out and secure as many one-way links as possible. Make sure you’re listed in the big-directories (dmoz, business.com, yahoo, etc).

Also a word to the wise… Make sure all your internal links that point to your homepage point to the top level domain only, and not the “/home” version - you’re just splintering your valuable internal links like that.

Analytics:

I did see some sort of pixel based analytics tag on the homepage, but it doesn’t look like Google Analytics is installed. Regardless of what stats program  you are using, I would always recommend having Google Analytics installed on the site. Even if you never use it, and it just sits and collects data, you never know when you’ll need the data. If you’re serious about commerce online, you need to have a solid analytics tool helping you make business decisions.

Other:

Here is a laundry list of SEO to-do’s:

• ProSelfDefense.com should make sure their logo has optimized alt text
• Title tags need to be longer and optimized
• Meta descriptions should be added on each page
• Drop down navigation (css based) should replace left nav
• Image backgrounds should match the site background and should be high resolution (ok, not SEO, but important)
• Links Page 1 and Links Page 2 should be removed (top priority)
• All homepage links should point to the top level domain, not /home

Summary:

I know I sound like a broken record here, but this site badly needs a redesign. All that organic traffic in the world isn’t going to drive sales if you can’t convert a visitor.

Step:

1. Resign site
2. Implement SEO recommendations
3. Profit!

New Era Pest Control: A natural pest control service based out of Miami, Florida.

Look & Feel:

While search engines can’t see what your web site, “looks like”, they do take into consideration the actions users take on your site. Therefore a high bounce rate could have an adverse affect on your search engine rankings. http://www.newerapestcontrol.com’s look gives a sense that they’re legitimately a medium sized business, but it doesn’t scream professionalism. The logo is a little too large, and should be moved to the top left of the page so it doesn’t interfere with the main hero shot.

The hero shot is a too large, taking up half the available screen estate above the fold (depending on your monitor resolution). The phone number at the top is a nice call to action. The satisfaction guarantee is there, but it’s not clickable, so there’s no way to get more information on what that guarantee actually is.

The navigation seems to be an extension of the hero shot. The image based links  have alt text that is a little over-optimized in my opinion. The images below the navigation seem to serve no real purpose, so I would recommend getting rid of those images so that the text content moves up on the page.

The testimonials are great, I wouldn’t change a thing there. The, “Rodent season” call out is a good idea, but the graphical execution should be addressed. The 5 gold buttons below should really be a side navigation near the top of the page, not at the bottom. The look and feel of those buttons should be consistent with the top navigation. The text and links below look spammy to me. I would recommend moving those links to a sitemap, and removing the last paragraph all together.

The footer looks to have both a text version and an image version of your address. I’m sure the text version is for search engines and the image version for humans. Go ahead and get rid of the image version. Move the text version into your footer area, and use CSS to make it look pretty.

If NewEraPestControl.com really wants to make SEO worthwhile, they might consider a redesign to help improve conversion rates.

Search Engine Friendliness:

NewEraPestControl.com looks like most of it’s content is being indexed with exception to the forum. Forums can be a great way to generate content on your site, but this site probably doesn’t need one. An FAQ page with a contact form would do the trick, and would save visitors time in finding questions to their answers. Since the forum content doesn’t actually exist on your site, it’s not giving them any SEO value, so they might as well scratch it for the time being.

NewEraPestControl.com’s URL structure looks very good, but I don’t see an HTML sitemap. I’d recommend creating one so that they can move some of those location driving direction links off the homepage. They are using an XML sitemap which is great. Overall their search engine friendliness is very good.

Keyword Selection:

The only keywords I would recommend NewEraPestControl.com should focus on right now are [Miami Pest Control] and [Pest Control Miami]. Their title tag should be updated to reflect those two keyword variations. I would also recommend adding the  brand at the end of the title tag. NewEraPestControl.com’s meta keywords are to broad. Narrow them down to about 10 words, focusing on different variations of the 2 I gave above.

Linking:

NewEraPestControl.com shouldn’t need many more inbound links to get to the top of the results for my two keywords above. I would get in touch with the people already linking to NewEraPestControl.com, and I would ask them to update your link’s anchor text to reflect your two main keyword variations above. If they can update some current ones, and secure some new ones with optimized anchor text that should do it. After they’re #1 for those two terms, they can expand to state wide terms,

Analytics:

It looks as if NewEraPestControl.com has Google Analytics installed. I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, and would highly recommend it. I cannot see if any goals are setup, but it looks as if the primary goal should be the “Request a Quote” form, however that form is located on the contact us page. So NewEraPestControl.com really can’t tell if a user is going to the page to request a quote, or for a general inquiry. I would suggest creating a separate “Request a Quote” page. This way they can focus on optimizing the path visitors take to achieve the goal of requesting a quote.

Other:

There are a few random things that can be improved.

1. When they link to their homepage on the site, they should always link to the www.NewEraPestControl.com not www.NewEraPestControl.com/index.html - they’re splitting up their internal link between the two pages
2. Remove the, “http://newerapestcontrol.com/miami_our_great_city.html” page. It’s really of no value to visitors or search engines and is just confusing as to why the page is on the site
3. There are little sentences throughout the site that just have location names in them… remove them
4. The left side of the page on the testimonials page looks like advertisements… remove them

Summary:

The NewEraPestControl.com web site doesn’t have any serious SEO problems. The only caution I would give them is to tone down the keyword density, and try not to over-optimize the site. Focus more on securing some quality, optimize links, and don’t build unnecessary pages for search engines. If possible, give the site a fresh new look.

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