Louisville Kentucky SEO Consultant

After 13 years of web development and online marketing, I would say that I see the same mistake over and over again that clients make before I consult with them on their search engine marketing projects.

This mistake ends up costing them on the average 40% more in consulting fees, work, and lost time ( which is lost sales ) than any other mistake they could make.

The mistake? Hiring a search engine marketing consultant after, or near the end, site completion.

Internet marketing needs to happen before anything else you do. Before you buy a domain, before you hire a designer/programmer, and before you pay anyone to do any work on your site at all.

Everything you do with your site can, and will, effect the ranking it has in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK. I am not saying everything has to be 100% perfect SEO for your site to rank, but EVERY LITTLE thing you can do can help you rank better even if it is selecting the proper domain and hosting for your site.

Many of you may still be wondering what I am talking about, so here is an example.

I have a client that is an attorney that wanted a simple site built that could generate traffic for his business. Knowing that most attorneys can only practice within certain city and state limits, it would make since to focus all his traffic to his local community. Why try to build a site around the term ‘lawyer’ when he can not help people outside his practice area? It would make more since to target ‘Louisville Kentucky Attorney’ or ‘Kentucky DUI Lawyer’ then to focus on a broader term that would most likely generate traffic he could not convert.

One thing that could have helped him was buying a domain that focused on his core keywords and audience. Many people think that a domain does not help in rankings, but it does in so many ways that I would be willing to sit down one on one with someone and discuss it until I am blue in the face. Instead of buying a domain like ‘louisvillekyattorney.com’ ( which has his terms in the domain ), he bought a generic domain. I already hear people screaming ‘but who would remember such a name as louisvillekyattorney.com? That is not the point here!

Using a domain that has your target keywords in it helps build search engine rankings, plain and simple. Use that as your main domain for your site and if you are worried that people will not be able to remember it, but a shorter domain based around yourself like your name or something easy to remember and print that on your business cards and such. Have this shorter, more memorable domain, redirect to your main site with your keywords in it. Now people can type it in because they remember it, and still reach your main site while giving you all the extra push you can get for having keywords in your main domain.

This client also went with the cheapest hosting company he could find. Not only does his site never show up when visited ( because his host is always down ), but Google never gets a chance to fully index and rank his site, because it is never available to spider it. Not only that, but I found out his hosting company was hosting spammy porn sites along side this client of mine and had been labeled a ’spam host’ by Google. This caused a penalty to be put on the entire class C IP block, including my client.. hurting his chance to rank well in Google.

All in all, this client was very unhappy and felt that he wasted his money on Internet marketing for his site. The truth is, this client never properly planned out his site and wanted to do things his way instead of listening and consulting with a search engine marketing consulting first.

If you own a business, don’t you owe it to yourself to make sure you have everything working for you and not against you when it comes to making money online?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Louisville KY Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.