This is a free SEO white paper about a wedding lighting company from NYC New York that had hired an NYC SEO Company to do the search engine optimization for her wedding lighting website. Our client had a frames base website. The website was very old, registered with Network Solution (NetSol) in 1995. The negative was that the site had web design that wasn't really all that acceptable even back then, but having frames in your site is certainly not acceptable now. However, the previous SEO company had in essence added meta tags to the website, added about 800 words of copy to the homepage, submitted the site to a few hundred directories online (all links pointed back with the URL itself), and was billing our client a monthly fee, that they bumped higher every quarter. As many people know, Google places a significant amount of weight in their algorithm on the age of a website. In essence, the site earns more trust as it gets older. This site was several years older than Google, so it definitely met that criteria. Moreover, the rankings weren't bad, several first page rankings, and some second page rankings. However, like so many small business the client had less business coming in 2008. So she started looking for ways to cut expenses.

The first thing she looked at was her advertising expense. The SEO Company in NYC was eating up $550 per month. She had started with them at $100 per month. The prices were going north on her every quarter. The client didn't mind paying when calls were coming in, but when the calls dropped nearly 70% in volume, our client called the SEO Company in NY to ask them if they can go back to their original pricing. That is when our client was told the price increases are built into their pricing model. They start you off on a very low monthly plan, but they increase those rates every quarter. So our client asked them, what if she canceled the account, and restarted the account later, would she get the base price of $100 again. The SEO Company in NYC didn't like that question, so they told her if she cancels, they would not take her site back. Thus, our client went searching for a reputable SEO company to take over her SEO campaign.

When the client first called our office, the first question she asked us was if our yearly fee would go up each year. We said no, we have clients that have been with us for years at that rate. We do not increase prices, we grandfather them in. She then told us about his ordeal with the other SEO firm in NYC, noted above. So we brought over her account to our side, and we recommended she dump her frames site for a more updated WordPress theme site. We do have the resources to do that in-house, as long as the site doesn't require much work on the backend, we can quickly put up WordPress sites. So the client agreed. We built the site in a couple of days, and gave her a call. The site had no SEO on it at all, just basic pages, footer, top menu, contact form etc. The client loved it! We had used all her own content, and he own images. So we proceeded with the SEO work.

The client's rankings shot to the first page of Google for every one of our targeted key phrases in less than 2 weeks! Again, this type of a quick turnaround time is not typical of most sites, but if you have a site from 1995, and it has been up and running since then, and the domain has never dropped, then you have a very good shot of getting great search engine rankings very quickly, particularly if your key phrases are geographically targeted. The client said she was paying nearly $7,000 a year for her SEO, and now she is paying less than $1,200 a year (and a one-time fee for the WordPress site we built), and she has much better rankings than she ever did! The important part is the calls started to roll back in and her wedding lighting business started to pick up again.

Here is what we learned:

SEO should not just be SEOing and exicisting website, no matter what condition it is in. Search engines will do a much better job of indexing all of your pages, if you have the proper filenames, and site architecture that makes it easy for the robots. Google and Bing try to provide webmasters help in this regard. You can submit your site to them and they will give you messages if for example they can't crawl your site, or if you have too many 404 errors etc, but you as a website owner must do your part in making sure you have a decent site to present to those crawlers when they get to your site. Moreover, why lose clients who may look at your site and feel there is no one still around maintaining that website. In essence, having a framed website tells visitors just that!

SEO Lesson:

SEO's primary objective is to get targeted traffic to a website. Key phrase selection is a part of that process, but equally important is the presentation that site makes to visitors when they end up on the site. If you have a terrible looking website, visitors will leave your website. This will increase your bounce rate, which of course tells the search engines that people for the most part are quickly leaving this website. The search engines will in-turn slowly begin to rank other sites above your site, as they take a high bounce rate pretty seriously. A search engine's job is to produce the prefect search results for any given search. If the majority of people are leaving your site almost as soon as they land on your site, search engines will take note. Ultimately, your rankings will increase. People often ask us how Google would know of a high bounce rate, especially since they have not installed Google Analytics on their sites. Well, you are searching Google. So when someone presses back, and clicks on another search results presented in the Google SERPS, Google would know the exact time someone clicked on your search results, and the exact time someone clicked on the next search result. Thus Google would know if people are leaving your site too quickly. That is just one of the ways Google would know. Assuming, the searcher didn't use Chrome, Google's browser, or the searcher was logged into their Google account when they ran the search query.