SEO chat done

I think my SEO chat with a local company was successful and that I was able to give them a few pointers to move in the right direction. I used my skills as a tech support person to keep it not too technical and gave as many examples as I could.

I think it is one of those situations where the company are usually so busy, the things like maintaining their website falls by the wayside. However, it is important to keep things like that updated as you never know when your “word of mouth” work will stop and you will have to rely on people finding you online.

The website belongs to a video production company and at the moment it just has images and videos and hardly any text on the site at all. The pages are all named wrongly with no SEO meta data at all so there should be quite a few quick wins if they can concentrate on the written content side of things.

Most video company websites I looked at are very flashy. Full screen videos play when you land on their site and everything they have worked on appears in lightbox popups. They are a bit in your face for my liking. Sure, if you are a big established company with a big ad budget, all well and good. But for the small guys, you need Google to eat the words of your site. Google can’t really interpret the meanings of images or video just yet.

My idea is to break the site out from it’s current “flat architecture” into categories and then sub-pages underneath those.

So you get a /work category page and a /work/amazing-video-work sub-page.

The category page also has content, talking about how they approach their work, the equipment used, ethos, process and vision. Then you can view the sub-pages which contain the individual video they worked on and some good content around the ideas, process, brief, how the video was made etc. It would also be the same for the company staff too; a chance to get across their own personal skills and vision, plus some personality.

The idea behind this architecture is to allow them room to add content to each page. This content will then be read by Google and will hopefully bring visitors to their site and turn them into paying customers.

I also asked them to think about the journey of someone arriving at their site. After landing on their homepage, what is the “call to action” when they scroll to the bottom after reading the company blurb? The site should guide the visitor through and lead them to a contact page or to read more information.

I also mentioned that they need to be thinking about mobile usage first. Google is using it’s “mobile first indexing” approach at the moment, simulating a 3G mobile when first crawling a site or new page. The large video on the current site plays when you load it up on a desktop browser, but on a smaller device you just get an empty black box. Either they purposely stopped it from loading, or there is something else going on.

Personally, I would love to read case studies of how a video was created from the client brief, with a few behind the scenes shots and information about the process. It would give me confidence in the ability and approach of the company, rather than being spun the usual sales blurb. Plus it is great content for Google to consume.

But that is just my view. I sent them off to check other companies websites to see what they are doing. Not that they need to copy or pivot, just for an awareness of what sort of pages they could create.

On a personal note, I felt very energised when I came out and walked back home. It’s a nice feeling when you can give help like that, even when it is unpaid. 2 members of my family work there, so I will throw them a freebie this time.

I wonder how I could get that feeling every day?