Use SEO or not?

Savvy_Sue

Putting your home page in a post is against the Forum Rules so I've asked Forum Team to look at those posts where it appears.

Future contributors should note that the OP's home page is in his profile.

[Deleted User]

Thanks all we really appreciate your help and advice, keep it going :-)

Horace

Your offering is confusing - are you a caterer or do you provide helium balloons? You also need to sort out your spelling - menu's means belonging to the menu and not what you are promoting which are menus.

Rather than doing balloons and hiring out candy carts and the like - stick to catering because at the moment you are spreading yourself too thin and you are giving out mixed messages. For instance when organising an event, I would not go to a caterer for balloons, I would use a balloon specialist and for a candy cart I would use a sweet shop - I would not go to a caterer.

Plyvine Catering gets lots of hits because they have been around for a long time plus they provide a great service and get fabulous testimonials. If I was looking for a caterer in the West Midlands, I would go to Plyvine as their site is much more professional and I tend to go by recommendation too.

Maybe you need to think about having some testimonials on your site? I also tend to agree with other comments about photographs - take your own or get a professional photographer to take some for you rather than using stock photographs.

If you are promoting catering for weddings, the wedding season starts in March and all the wedding fairs will be on, you need to get a stand at one of these fairs, that will get you in front of people.

Percy1983

If you haven't already tried and get some quality backlinks going, I would recommend freeindex and yell to start with.

I will say in my case as much as my page doesn't come first if you search for my company my freeindex page is at the top, not ideal but better than nothing.

[Deleted User]

Thanks for the advice.

The reason we have so much going on is because we find that people take the extra services when booking the one they looked at us for.

As for the site, someone else has built the site and added most of the content. I'm now going through making the suggested changes and hope to come back with a better result.

Wish me luck as I'm not really sure how to do this :-/

terra_ferma

whoever did your site made a basic mistake.
<meta name="description" content="lorumuyuytuyt kjglgljhg" />
the content field should be a catchy sentence to entice people to click on your website on search results (it's the bit you see right underneath the name of the website). Right now it's picking up your menu titles, so you may be losing some clicks there
Also my personal opinion is that pictures of burgers may not be too inviting for a wedding.
Again personal opinion, unless you really need to attract people who are planning a funeral, using wedding and funerals in the same sentence would put people off.
Finally have you tried Adwords? For some people it's worth it, for some others it's a waste of money.

IronWolf

If you want a good SEO company then type in google something like "SEO" and see which is highest - that right there is an indication they are good at what they do.

Don't pay over the earth though and be careful, its all about building quality backlinks and the search engines are getting better and better at sniffing out those that are paying to get rankings. If you use a bad SEO service they will spam blogs with your links and the search engines will find out and really damage your ratings.

Also I hope you didn't pay a lot for your website design because I can tell straight away, having designed my website from scratch, that it is just a basic wordpress theme, so didn't take a huge amount of effort. You should go into the wp-admin section and install a plugin like Yoast SEO (its free). It will give each of your pages an SEO ranking on the admin section and suggest ways to improve them.

I would take some time to learn about wordpress and how to design a website with it too. Then you can improve the site yourself. It isn't that hard once you get the hang of it, I did it myself coming from no experience whatsoever, and I have somehow managed to build a site with a personalised look, fully functioning paid membership area and affiliate scheme. All just by watching a bit of youtube and using wordpress and its plugins. Surprising how easy it is really.

The basics behind SEO aren't that hard either, so I would learn a bit about it yourself before hiring a company. For example backlinks, and their anchor text, are very important and you want a company that will focus on helping you build quality backlinks and not spam ones.

GolfBravo

Another vote for Yoast SEO (free wordpress plugin). It can sort out your meta descriptions, etc.

Just make sure you read their Wordpress SEO guide first. No need to waste £2400 on SEO. Firstly identify all SEO issues and then start fixing them. If you ever get stuck then hire someone to help you.

Horace

Still think that you should ditch the candy cart and the balloons. If you networked with others in the industry then maybe you could recommend a company that offers these services rather than offering them yourself and you may get a discount from the firms that you recommend.

Instead, of offering the balloons and candy cart, why not offer linen hire as well as crockery and glasses, plus flatware - at least then people would have a more rounded offering especially if they are holding their wedding at home or in a marquee as they would then want to hire these things and where better than from a caterer even if you are not doing the catering.

Just a thought really - I spent a long time working in the wedding industry.

[Deleted User]

Thanks for the advice, the candy cart and candy floss are our main business lines at this point.

Can anyone help us with this work? Any self employed people that don't charge too much :-/ ? Thanks