Sea Winds of Sea Isle is a website that focuses on a very particular business in a very particular geo-locality. It's not your ordinary website, and therefore requires a very unique approach with branding, online marketing and visitor conversion.
A good friend of mine, Ryan Caldwell, has recently been put in charge of their online marketing efforts. His main concern is that despite higher traffic then their competitors, the site seems to be lagging in conversions. He was looking for someone to bounce some thoughts and ideas off of, and contacted me to give him an in-depth overview of where the site stands, and what changes or ideas I would make.
After some great back and forth, here is what I have come up with.
History
The site, being only six months old,has the disadvantage of not being well-aged. The search engines place a lot of value in the age of a site. In fact, most websites start off with a major search handicap for the first 9-12 months of their existence. The young age is definitely an obstacle that requires extensive work in order to compete against other, older websites in the same real estate and online rental market. Don't be fooled by the fact that this is a relatively small niche. Sometimes small niches in valuable local markets are the toughest nuts to crack and worth the most long term value.
As the web ages and the barrier for entry decreases, the number of people competing in any given market is going to grow with time. This is especially true in the real estate industry since most everyone now realizes that the web is the perfect tool for real estate agents to market their business.
Local Search and Citations
One of the reasons that small, regional niches can be tough online industries to compete in is that search engines like Google use different methodologies for determining geo-relevance. Rather than simply looking at the raw strength of a website, they look for what are called "citations" - references around the web which contain some or all of the following information
A - Business Name
B - Business Address
C - Business Phone
D - Business Website
By tracking "citations" search engines can then group websites together which belong to the same general geo-location. The most important sites for any location are going to be the ones with the most citations in the most relevant places.
So what are the most relevant places? Read on.
Directory Submissions
Ryan has done many great things relating to citations in promoting the site, and is already seeing very positive search rankings. He has submitted the site to a few high quality, editorially reviewed, paid directories like Yahoo, GoGuides, Skaffe, Business.com and JoeAnt. These directories, because they involve reviews, are known to be more authoritative and contain less spam. Because of this, they are more effective for search engine optimization and promotion and count as powerful regional citations.
Of course, there are still many other directories, many free options that could also have a positive effect, and while this project might not be accepted to the Open Directory Project, it never hurts to spend the time submitting.
You can find a number of hard working people willing to take the time to craft free directory submissions on a number of forums around the web for a fairly low cost. I would start with a smaller number of them focused on the niche, somewhere in the fifty to one hundred submission range, in order to both get the best result, and not cause any negative factors with regards to how search engines see your site. You'll want to come up with as many custom descriptions, variations on titles if possible, and potential tags so that each submission is somewhat unique.
Content
Ryan has also helped make sure a number of content pages have been created related to the site, again increasing the number of geographical citations of the local business on the web. From a blog running WordPress with thirteen posts, to the various focused pages on the site that people expect like local information, contact information and related property information, the site isn't really hurting for content. I have seen many single page sites do well in the search engines, and while that isn't the rule, a massive amount of content isn't always needed to rank well, especially for local search.
I would suggest more content on the site as there doesn't seem to be enough marketing and sales page type material outside of the blog.
Images
The images are so small on the front page of the site, and there aren't any larger images elsewhere. With a beach location, images can sell more than words. While this isn't usually considered directly related to search results and rankings, larger images, given proper alt and title attributes can draw people in from Google Image search that might be looking to find a beach location to rent during the summer. Good images can increase traffic, and they have the secondary effect of helping sell a product such as real estate or rentals.
Keywords
Right now, Ryan says that they are most interested in generating leads via the "sea isle city rentals" search. Which, after a quick check, only gets 5,400 searches per month on average in Google. It also has a mid-level amount of advertising competition. If they were to focus on what might be considered a slightly less focused search of "sea isle rentals" they'd open themselves up to 8,100 average searches per month and have slightly less advertiser competition.
I can't say yet which search would convert better, and if at all possible, the site should take time and work towards optimizing for both phrases. I also think that in the blog, and on the pages of the site, the key phrases could be peppered around here and there, increasing the likelihood of ranking for those phrases. It is currently rare to see "sea isle city rentals" on any of the main content pages of the site, and even on many of the blog posts.
Basic SEO Concerns
Ask anyone what they need to focus on when they talk about search engine optimization, and they will say the basics include header title, meta keywords, meta description, content headers, and lastly bolded text. On this site, the headers are done nicely, but the meta keywords and description are only on the home page. Also, while the content headers (the H1's, H2's, H3's) are optimized nicely on some pages, they aren't focused properly on all pages. The "Our Agents" page could be better served by being "Sea Winds of Sea Isle Real Estate Agents" as it would be much better for SEO and more descriptive. Never use "our", "that", "these" if you can avoid it, as they don't properly describe anything to search engines.
Statistics
Currently, Sea Winds of Sea Isle is ranking amazingly for having been around only for six months. For their chosen phrase of "sea isle city rentals", the site is ranked first in Microsoft's Live.com, 43rd in Google, and 26th in Yahoo!.
For the "sea isle rentals" search, they currently rank 13th in Google, 8th in Yahoo!, and 2nd in Live.com. It looks as though with a little work, they could easily take a top three spot on all three major search engines for this phrase.
The site's main page currently has a Google PageRank of 4, which is actually quite good for such a region-specific topic, especially when taking the site age into account. While this has no direct relation to search engine results, it is an indicator of a healthy site. The site's Alexa ranking is surprisingly better than nearly all of its competitors.
Compete also has information on Sea Winds of Sea Isle, and shows that while traffic dropped substantially in December 2008, it is back on the rise in January as people prepare for their summer vacations. November was its highest tracked month on Compete with an estimated unique visitor count of 1,100, or one fifth the total average potential "sea isle city rentals" search visitors from Google.
Design
Ryan told me that the main issue with the site is conversion rate. And when it comes to conversion rate, nothing is more important than the layout and design of the site. This is where I think the site stands to improve the most and increase it's overall conversions.
Colours - While the header image looks pretty decent, and the colours fit the message of the site, they have little variety, and don't flow well together. Also it appears that links, other than the main navigation are missing any styling at all. This makes the site look at little unprofessional to me.
Typography - I am not a fan of using one font for an entire site. With the headers, navigation, and body text all the same font, it looks really basic, and not thought out. Headers could use a serif font, while body text reads better when it is sans-serif.
Overall Professionalism - Here is probably the biggest issue with the entire site, the overall design professionalism is lacking. Not only does the design change, depending on what page you are looking at, but it looks basic, reminding me of designs from years ago. Without a very professional facing design, I find it highly unlikely that potential customers will take the site as seriously as they should, and the design is, in my mind, limiting the number of potential sales.
Some issues include the navigation that moves from the sidebar on the home page to under the main header graphic on all other pages, the missing blog link on all pages other than the home page, the stylistically different home page versus the local information and our agents page. If you add the design of the blog to this, then you get something that is just nearly impossible to connect together visually, with even the header graphic not remaining entirely the same from page to page.
Validation - With the site only two simple errors away from completely validating, someone should take a quick minute and replace the "&" characters with the html code "& amp;". This will make the site valid, which is never a bad thing. While this may not help search engine results, I believe it an important indicator of the quality and professionalism of a site.
Blog
Not having the blog be connected to each part of the site, and look similar is a mistake. Also, the blog is currently on a sub-domain, which some search engines consider a separate site. I think the blog would be better able to perform its function if it was tied into the site better, in both design, and URL structure [Ryan tells me that he wanted to run WordPress but the site is running on a Microsoft server and thus the subdomain was necessary to run WordPress on a separate server]. Also, I don't think having it being a "blog" is a smart marketing move, as the average consumer still doesn't identify with a blog. So links from the site, to the blog should be called something else. I'd prefer it be given a name that is keyword rich like "Sea Isle City Views".
The blog should also be updated to the latest version of WordPress, and some form of SEO plugin should either be added, or the theme customized in such a way that it does better with regards to search engine optimization.
Also, this is another perfect place for images. And the blog could use some posts under the "link bait" or "resource bait" categories. Given that this is about real estate, a post on "the most beautiful properties on the shore" might be a great way to get people interested in the area, and could gain some back links from tourism, property rental, and vacation websites.
Calls to Action
When you see a great piece of marketing, they tell you what to do. With Sea Winds of Sea Isle, there are very few places where I feel compelled to complete an action. The text surrounding listings should give me many opportunities to contact an agent and work in sales text that sounds more active. Something along the lines of "rent your summer home today!" or "this property could be gone tomorrow, please click here to contact us now!"
The site design can also go a long way towards improving the calls to action: big, bold, colorful buttons work like a charm.
To see an example of a site, one of their competitors, with excellent calls to action throughout check out Sea Isle Realty at http://www.seaislerealty.com/
Sitemap
I thought when I clicked on sitemap in the footer, I was going to get a search engine approved sitemap, but instead, was transported to a page that listed the main pages on the site. This is a horrible way to do a sitemap as it doesn't list the various blog posts, or other information, and since it isn't the XML sitemap that is search engine approved, I have a feeling that this extra page is doing very little for the site. While it might be convenient for larger sites, I don't think that a sitemap page such as this is required here, and the Sea Winds of Sea Isle site would be better served with a true XML sitemap that featured the various blog posts being created.
Overall Thoughts
While ranking well, this site has a long way to go. The biggest issue is conversions. The whole point of this site is to take interested people from finding the site, to buying a house or rental. The lack of professionalism in design, information organization, and cohesion might be turning off otherwise ready-to-buy customers. The site could use more content, but that is a secondary concern after the design, and is only needed to further work towards the goals of the site: ranking well for very focused searches that are likely to convert to sales. Calls to action, inspiration regarding the location, images to evoke an emotional response are all content oriented concerns that should be addressed.
One of the most frustrating parts of online marketing is when you have a good amount of focused traffic, but still get little to no conversions or sales. With some polishing of the design, some link-worthy content, and better integration of the blog into the core site, Sea Winds of Sea Isle should be able to draw in a larger percentage of qualified search visitors, and hopefully sell some more beautiful beach front properties.
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I have always found WordPress to be lacking a theme that gave a full set of tools to the user, making sure they could customize their blog in an effective way without any PHP, xhtml or CSS knowledge.
