It’s a decision companies sometimes make to save money and support that friend and his cousin. After all, getting a web site going and getting into the online marketing game makes good business sense since so much of the customer journey happens online these days. And sometimes, the cousin is brilliant at what she does, understands digital marketing and the web site performs well in all the areas it should. But not always. Here’s the story of what went wrong for one company site we analyzed a few months back.
The company is a mid-level service provider with revenues over $100 million. It’s well known in its field and has service providers on board doing excellent and important work. They have online marketing bios, are engaged in decent content marketing, and regularly make national news. Plug a few keywords into a search engine and they should pop right up. Except they didn’t. Several offices across the nation, lots of employees, a high profile in their field, and zilch on search. Huh?
What The Cousin Didn’t Know About Online Search and Digital Marketing Results
From the outside, the site looked great. We didn’t ask how much it had cost to build, but the company told us they had another site being redesigned with the same dev shop. So we took a look behind the the site. What we couldn’t tell them pre-engagement was that the site couldn’t be ranked in search at all due to an unfortunate oversight on the part of a tired coder. There was a big, deadly typo in the code.
To make matters worse, when specific pages where searched for, the URLs for the results didn’t point to the company, they pointed to the web development company. A good third of the content on the company’s site was being used by the web development company to boost its own rankings. We couldn’t tell if this was dishonesty or incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. The site was being hijacked for non-client search.
And remember the part where this site was new and the next one was coming online from the same company? Guess what? The platforms for both sites had been outdated for a while. Ouch.
The Good News
So, the moral of the story is, choose your web development company with the same consideration you’d use in choosing your bank, your accountant, or anyone else whose function is critical to your business. Here at Boost! we work with third party design and development teams that build for Fortune 500 companies all the time. And they’ve proven their honesty, work ethic, and devotion to client success. Every single time.
The good news is, if this has happened to you, it’s totally fixable, and not as expensive as you’d think. Give us a call if you’d like to talk about how we can audit what you’ve got, help you fix what’s already in place, or get you over onto a great platform and going in the right direction. Once you’re on the right rocket ship, the stars are the limit.
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