32 replies to this topic

[tobychance]

We have recently launched our site, which sells the Cobb cooking system - a bbq grill that was voted by the industry as the Best New BBQ in America in March 2003. Our goal is to make the site a major sales channel for the product, which also sells through specialist grill and patio stores.

We'd like to get some feedback as to the design, usability, SEO, product merchandising and copy on the site.

The original URL was http://www.cobb.earthfireusa.com and we signed up with [an seo company] to do the search engine submissions. They created the title, description and keywords found on the home page. Our hits have doubled from around 250 in August to 500 so far this month, so they must be doing something right. However, sales have been disappointing with only a handful so far.

Initial feedback suggested the URL name wasn't great (we had to use it for political reasons) so we have now launched a duplicate site at http://www.thecobb.com. The content is identical, and we are testing hits compared to the other site to see how the SE submissions on the other site are affecting traffic.

I am now concentrating on putting together PPCs, e-mail marketing and considering various affiliate alternatives.

When we launched in July the main graphic in the center was a Flash animation but since then we removed that and converted it to a static html page.

One concern I have is that the dynamic content (aspx) of all but the landing page might be a problem for the SE's and directories to read.

We also recently added the free cookbook as an incentive - to tempt people to risk a small amount of money.

Any comments/suggestions would be very welcome.

As an incentive I'll offer a free Cobb to the most helpful reply I receive in the next two weeks (Mod - hope this is allowed!!)

Thanks a ton.

Edited by Jill, 30 September 2003 - 03:12 PM.

[Jill]

Initial feedback suggested the URL name wasn't great (we had to use it for political reasons) so we have now launched a duplicate site at http://www.thecobb.com. The content is identical, and we are testing hits compared to the other site to see how the SE submissions on the other site are affecting traffic.

You won't be able to test this, at least with Google, because they won't list 2 domains with duplicate content. You'll find that only one or the other site shows up in the listings.

Jill

[tobychance]

Please ignore this request and go to the one above titled Website review request www.thecobb.com - sorry to be a pain, but I realised the title of this post was meaningless only after I did it!

[tobychance]

Wow, Gill, that was fast! Thanks for the tip - I've learned something useful today!

If you have time I'd appreciate any other feedback you care to give.

Toby

[tobychance]

Sorry, Jill - this time I've spelled your name right!

[Peter]

Toby,

Based on your request I first need to explain something about "hits" and "visitors". I think the software thay you use to get more "hits" has confused you. "hits" don't mean much as one "visitor" can generate more than one "hit". One visitor can generate 50 "hits" while the next visitor generates only 10 "hits". Think about visitors and forget about hits.

I took a look at your web site and these are my opinions:

1) Keyword research. Did you do any keyword research? The software you use probably looks at the copy in the pages and generates a title out of that. Problem here is that it used your product name to create the title. It is better to make a title that contains words or phrases that people actually use to find a product that you offer. What about : Free Cook book - Barbeque recepies

Or something like that. Investigate which keyword (phrases) will work best.

2) There is no text on your start page. All there is to be found is this:

TuesdaySeptember 30, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Earthfire USA All Rights Reserved

A search engine will never figure that this page is about cooking or cooking products.

3) Your meta description tag is practically a copy of your meta keywords tag. Make the description tag contain real sentences, let it describe the page and make sure your main keyword phrase is in there a couple of times.

Well,.. that is enough work for now I think,. If you have any questions, feel free to post them.

Regards,

Peter

[tobychance]

Hi Peter

Thanks for the reply - very helpful. Yes, you are right about hits - I used the word loosely, I know it's visitors I'm after.

Just one question - are your comments directed at the www.thecobb.com website or the other one? The description and title are different for each of these.

I am also concerned about the start page having no text. I think what we might do is add some of the text from the Product page beneath the main graphic so the search engines have something to work on.

The meta description was written by [our SEO company] - the company charged us a bundle to do this and submit the site to search engines. It would be easy to change, but I'm reading contradictory opinions on whether sentences or just words are better.

How did you like other aspects of the site? Do you think it does justice to the product and would it make people (you) buy the Cobb?

Any other opinions out there to compare with Peter's?

Toby

[Jill]

The meta description was written by [edited] - the company charged us a bundle to do this and submit the site to search engines.

Are you saying they charged you a bundle and that's what you got for it? New tags and submission? I hope not. How much was the bundle?

Did the SEO company actually not have you add copy to your home page and the other pages?

Who's idea was it to have the additional domain with the same info? Yours or the SEO company? Did they agree to this?

If you're happy with this company, why are you not asking them about all this stuff?

Sorry for all the strange questions not pertaining to your site review, but the stuff you're saying here is sending up some big fat red flags for me, which has me concerned.

I'm going to edit out your SEO company's name from these posts.

Jill

[tobychance]

Jill

Thanks for your reply. We were charged $980 for the initial work and we got very little advice, if any, on how to improve our copy. They give a money-back guarantee that we would be in the top 10 of major search engines within two months. They said they would create 10 Directory Information Pages (DIP's), each with a unique URL and domain targeting our keywords, and make bi-weekly submissions to 8500 SEs, directories and classified ads listings, as well as putting us in their two sister shopping sites.

This was about a month ago. Since then I've been doing a lot more research and come to the conclusion that we might have been sold a dummy.

The reason we've launched the new site is for name recognition. We are going to run some radio ads and thecobb.com is much easier to remember than cobb.earthfireusa.com. I have not submitted thecobb.com to any search engines as yet and will not do so until I have resolved this issue.

I'm tempted to dump the old URL and write the $980 off, re-launch the site with the new URL and get a better job done with the SEO and copy. If we do that can I redirect traffic from our old URL to the new one? I have signed up with a few PPCs, so I'll have to change the URL to the new one with these too.

Alternatively we can make some substantive changes to thecobb.com both to make it distinguishable from the old site for the benefit of Google et al, and to improve its overall effectiveness.

What do you suggest?

Toby

[Peter]

Toby,

My comments were toward your new domain thecobb.com. I haven't looked at the other domain.

In a web page it is best to target just 1 keyword phrase. If you have to you can target 2, but no more than 3.

keywords are words that you choose to rank high on, they are not just the words in the meta keywords tag. This keyword tag is ignored by most search engines so it doesn't really matter what is in it.

The description tag is another thing. The more keywords you put in there, the less good it will do for your web site. I know not everybody has the same opinion about the meta description tag, but making it a copy of the meta keywords tag is not a good plan.

In my (personal) opinion the web site is a bit heavy on graphics. And everything is big and too much there. I believe a lighter design, with a lot more text will be much more appealing to your visitors. This is not a product that sells it self, you need to sell it.

The text should be very well structured with small (5 line) paragraphs and a couple of headers. At least 250 words. Also give your visitors something else to do besides looking at the product. Some free information like recepies that makes people hungry for what the product can make, will make them also more hungry for buying it.

Regards,

Peter

[OldWelshGuy]

Hi Toby,

You say that your BBQ was voted by your industry as the BEST, why is that not on your front page?

More of a niggle really, but your page is jumpy to load for the first time, this could be solved by pre setting the height & width of the images, it would be a lot easier on the eyes as the images are loading.

You need text on that page or you are really up against it.

I am saying nothing here really that has not been said before, However, you say that you are running some radio adverts, something i have done (although more with printed ads) is to have a designated entry page for each advert, this may not work on radio due to memory, but it REALLy does work with the printed medium.

Ford said 50% of my advertising is wasted, I just wish i could find out which 50%! well by utilising designated advert addresses your web stats will tell you EXACTLY what sort of response each ad generates. I do this all the time, and it is a real winner, in fact i do it as a consultancy trick, I often save my clients a small fortune by stopping them throwing good money after bad on adverts that do not work.

All it takes is a quick look at your page stats and you can instantly tell how many people have come from each advert. This also works for paid listings, all you do is create a page for that paid listing only and you will know instantly how many visitors it generates.

PLEASE NOTE this is for tracking only, nothing to do with SEO, they are not gateway pages, and should be blocked from the bots with robot.txt to prevent misunderstandings ;-)

[tobychance]

Hi Old Welsh Guy

Good to hear from you - my parents live in Criccieth, N Wales (though we are not Welsh). It's nearly midnight where you are - you must be a night owl!

Thanks for the tips. I accept most of what you say about our home page and graphics. We will be making some modifications shortly to improve matters.

The pics of the awards at the top of the home page are supposed to get the message across about being the best bbq in America, but perhaps it doesn't do the trick and we need to be more explicit.

I'll talk to our web developer about the jumpy loading - good point!

The idea of tracking ad campaigns with different pages and blocking them from the search engines makes a lot of sense. When you do this, what do you call the page to distinguish it from the standard home page? Do you give it a different URL? The key for radio is to make it easy to remember, that's why we want to make the URL as simple as possible. We'll be able to track sales (though not visitors) by identifying the zip codes from the areas where we're running the ads. Is there any other way of identifying responses to the ad apart from having a unique landing page URL?

We are working on things on a number of fronts to get sales moving. I should have submitted this site for comments/reviews earlier, but I've only recently stumbled across this forum.

Regards

Toby

[OldWelshGuy]

toby, the easiest way to remember the URL is to use the name of the station you advertise on eg www.thecob.com/waveradio

thats what we did and it worked well you could always buy another domain ie cobonthewave.com etc really by using it in your yellow pages and all other adverts you will cut your advertising waste to the minimum, more importantly you will MAx your ad spend ROI.

The other way is to have a prize entry but visitors are all too wary of giving out e mail addys etc. I have found that using landing pages is the best way from an advertising tracking point of view

Wales is lovely BTW you should visit

[Jill]

I'm tempted to dump the old URL and write the $980 off,

Toby, you said they offer you a money-back guarantee, right? So why not just get your money back? Did you get the rankings they promised? Or is it too soon to tell?

If it's too soon, then give it time. If it's not too soon, go collect your money and move on. Don't write it off.

Jill

[tobychance]

It's too soon to tell - they only started a month ago. We have to wait another month before the guarantee kicks in. In the meantime I'll spend some time optimising the site by following some of the tips I get on this forum!

Toby