Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

I was speaking today to a company who is producing an online directory. I was representing a client, sitting in on the meeting between them and a salesperson. This salesperson was in charge of developing the "one and only Lincolnshire directory" online, claiming that they will deliver new customers to every one of their listed businesses and in doing so, he explain about the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are listed on their directory. And, that they get thousands of hits from the top search engines every day.

So where is the search engine optimisation scam?

While he was talking to us I turned my laptop in such a way that he couldn't see what I was doing and I searched on Google to see how many pages of their directory were listed. Now bear in mind that they were claiming that hundreds if not thousands of businesses were listed and were getting traffic from the search engines to their listings on this directory - I found that only 90 pages of their website (directory) had been indexed by Google, non of which were related to the different business categories or to the individual businesses themselves.

So I looked even further. I went to their website, and I looked up certain business categories, and, because the client I was working with on the day was a double glazing company, I went into the double glazing section. I looked at a several double glazing listings.

Non of the listings (or categories for that matter) had a search engine friendly address.

They did not have search engine friendly titles, and it certainly wasn't a search engine friendly page layout. And the links to the listed websites was the phrase "visit website".

Complete lack of search engine friendliness!

For this service they want to charge the bargain price of £695 a year.

Obviously, I advised my client to pass and save the £695.

What they had failed to to look at is where this particular client web site was listed on the phrases they were trying to sell.