Overnight Success With Technical SEO
My fastest success ever happened overnight
on the American College Of The Building Arts website.
This site had been up for 5 years when I was offered a deal
to exchange office space in the haunted Old City Gaol
for Techical SEO analysis on their website.
I analysed the site through Google's Page Speed Insights and discovered that some of the site's images were thousands of times bigger than they needed to be.
I soon discovered that an unnamed college web intern who'd uploaded the site's images long ago had not optimized them for the web but had left them at print quality sizes.
Over night they had gotten 6 prospective student emails...
While the intern had good intentions and wanted to create visually appealing images, the larger file sizes were causing problems with the website's loading speed and performance.
As a result, some images were not displaying correctly, and the website was taking too long to load.
I properly sized the images and reloaded them and afterwards I found
my efforts had yielded significant improvement in the website's loading speed and performance.
The next morning one of the administrators came in, clearly shaken,
and inquired what I had done to the site.
Over night the website had gotten 6 prospective student emails,
she also explained that they had never once had one in the previous 5 years of being online.
It was actually hard to say who was happier about my results, the administrators or me.
ACBA has long since outgrown those facilities
and moved to a new campus.
One of the coolest things about having worked there is that often,
in those strange dreams one is apt to find themselves wandering in just before daylight, I find I'm roaming through those ancient ruins.
Luckily, I've never run into Lavinia.
If you'd like to learn traditional timber framing or stone masonry or architectural blacksmithing, you should reach out to
The American College Of The Building Arts.
If you need help getting your service industry website to rank higher then reach out to us.
My First #1 Appliance Repair Site
I got sick of working for other people in my early 50's and decided to launch my own business. I'd been working as a web developer for about 5 years and was absolutely sick of tech culture and sitting behind a desk.
I took my years of experience and access to SEO courses and combined them. In roughly 8 weeks, I had ranked ApplianceRepair-Charleston.net to the #1 position on Google for the keyword "appliance repair charleston".
I was ecstatic, my phone was ringing off the hook,
I decided when and where I wanted to work, my life belonged to me again.
Appliance Repair Mt. Pleasant
I realized after a while that I was losing too much time trying to cover too broad an area with my marketing.
I was spending more time driving than actually repairing appliances. So, I decided to focus on one specific area of Charleston, a place just across the bridge called Mt. Pleasant.
I decided not to game the system as much as I did on my first site. It took about 12 weeks to rank #1 for the term "appliance repair mt pleasant sc".
One of the reasons I attribute my success to in those early days was the framework I had developed.
I had started with Boileplate HTML 5 framework and stripped out all the unnecessary code to create an easy to code framework that would throw a 100 score on the Google Page Speed Insights tool.
My Framework - Blink 5.5
My early success in ranking I attribute to my early studies in the Mobile first theory of web design, that is designing the site to function well on phones first and foremost, since even then, ten years ago that was the coming wave.
Now Google says over 60% of users searches are done on their phones.
One of the most valuable features I built into Peregrine was to have the call and the text buttons situated in an ergonomically hot area.
In other words, on the mobile version the call and text buttons are intentionally placed to be right under your thumb and remain there, so that when the client is ready to call, all they have to do is follow their natural response and drop their thumb.
I also stick the menu to the top of the screen so that at anytime visitors feel inclined, the contact buttons are right there in plain site, ready for their thumb to fall down on.
One user experience big no you see a lot of these days is hiding the menu on the mobile version of the site. Don't make me think author Jay whoever really breaks this down by relating it to other things people have to navigate. Their cars!
He makes the point that the reason that from the cheapest to the most expensive car, they all have the steering in the same position.
Why? Wouldn't it be more clever to put the gas or the brake in the back seat? What if you actually hid the steering wheel under the seat? Wouldn't that set you apart from the competition?
It would he says, but it would also make your vehicle useless, because it would make it extremely difficult for the driver to get where they are going.
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