A website is nothing but a glorified business card without SEO
Ceramico makes an excellent point on SEO. It's all great on having a nice looking tillers website but without search engine optimisation it's worthless. Essentially it's like have a master piece but keeping it in a vault.
Small business tilers owners like yourselves, need to approach a SEO/website developer to do the work for you, unless you have the budgets to pay for both services separately. Your primary focus is to get your website in the top 5 results for a particular search terms. Once your site is gaining traffic, then the site design then comes into play, showcasing your skills, giving the potential customer enough confidence that you can do the job. However most importantly is getting traffic!!!
You should focus your time on SEO and I would suggest you focus on keywords search as
- Tiling *location name e.g. " Tiling East London", "Tiling Ealing", "Tiling Wandsworth", "Tiling WC1", etc etc..
- Tiler *location name e.g. " Tiler East London", , "Tiler Ealing", "Tiler Wandsworth", "Tiler WC1", etc etc..
I would not focus on just the word "tiler" without an geographic terms as this is nationwide and most tiling businesses are regional. You don’t want loads of calls from the other side of the country.
With Regards to costs
I recently built a plaster site
Plastering East London | D Davis & Sons Ltd. . The same principle applies to tilers...
and the goal was to rank for a couple of terms.. all are which are with the top 5 in Google.
"Plastering East London"
"Plastering Leyton"
"Plastering Wansted"
"Plastering Loughton"
"Plastering Hackney"
Hopefully this will give you an idea of what you need to do for your tiling business. As the same principle works.
He decided to have a go at doing it himself...so there are some dodgy designed pages!!! But the good foundations of the site, some SEO training and the added pages he created got him ranking for:
"Plastering Enfield"
"Plastering Walthamstow"
And others…
Traffic Volumes are important!!
You need to think about traffic volumes. If your site ranks well for x number of keywords that generate 7000 searches per month and you get 4% of that traffic from Google (because your site in top of the rankings) that’s 280 hits per month to your site (9.3 per day). If you convert just 3% of that traffic that lands on your site 8.4 jobs per month. That probably pays for the website in month 1 and only SEO contracts you might do.
Hopefully this explains what you need to do and the importance of SEO and having on agreed plan of action prior to commencing work. Speak you seo & webveloper and agree on what terms your expect to be ranked for prior to getting your site done. They are no gaurentees on position as it all depends on competition from other sitesd but your developer SEO guy should be able to give you a plan of action to work towards this positions.
One Last comment - Slightly off topic
Google is showing a decline in People searching for Tilers in London.. I dont now if this is a national average because of the recession. Link here but it's not good reading..... for you guys
http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=Tiler London, London Tiler&geo=GB&date=1/2011 24m&cmpt=q
I would be interested if a admin could let us know if they have seen a decline in the number of new threads on the Jobs section over the last year to back this up
And yes feel to P.M me
