Your website design & development company promises SEO—make sure they deliver.

As a New Hampshire based website design & development company, we visited a prospective client just outside of New York City about a year ago. They liked us, but they were located just across from Manhattan and decided to go with a fancy New York firm that promised an elegant site and beautiful content. They also said they “knew SEO.”

We always take a look at the results prospects receive if they’ve gone with another agency. The fancy New York website design & development company did indeed deliver an elegant website and the writing was witty, concise and informative.

So, we called the client back. “You were right,” said their marketing director. “They made us a very pretty site and the writing was great. But what good does it do us if no one knows we exist?” he said. At that point, we knew that hiring a New Hampshire website design & development company was looking more interesting.

When the new website went up, the number of people visiting their site dropped precipitously. When Google Panda was released, they notice an even larger decline in their website. It wasn’t long after that, that they fired their fancy New York website design & development company.

“I’ll never forget that day in May when Panda appeared,” the marketing director said. After doing a quick analysis, we discovered that they did indeed have a Panda penalty for having unnatural links.

The Geographical location was also missing on all pages. The same was true for the Meta descriptions on all home pages except for the home page. No geographical location based keywords were used anywhere in the content. The address was also missing on the website footer. The almost universal absence of geo location for a company that is locally operated is a big problem.

This company paid a lot of money for the site—about twice what a New Hampshire website design & development company would charge. They got a pretty site. What they also got was a decrease in business because the website company actually reduced their website presence!

SEO is boring. Still, it’s the nuts and bolts of a good website. Interestingly, the nuts and bolts were the only things this chastened client wanted to talk about before they assigned their SEO work to us,- a small-city New Hampshire website design & development firm that knows SEO.