Great River Electronics Website SEO Review
Let me give you a bit of a background on why search engine optimization (SEO) is important: your website may be invisible to search engines, and that means no one can find you. My goal with these reviews is to give these great companies some guidance on how to market their websites better and make it easier for people to find them.
My first focus is going to be the company that makes one of my favorite modern mic preamps—the Great River MP2-NV. I’ve never met Dan Kennedy, but if he’s as cool as his products are, then he’s a very cool guy.
First, take a look at the source code for www.greatriverelectronics.com. They’ve tried to cram every single search term into the meta keywords tag. Even though the search engines largely discount this tag due to heavy abuse back in the day by spammers, it still should be concise and relevant. Keep the keywords relevant to the page content and as this is the home page, find the general terms that cover the product range that Great River makes. Or, you could find some of your top search queries within Google Analytics. Look under the “All Traffic Sources” section and then “Keywords.” These are the words that people searched for immediately before arriving on your site.
By the way, you are using some type of analytics program, right? That’s priority number 1! You need to know how people are getting to and using your website. If not, it’s like not listening to what your customers say about your products, except here, you don’t have to ask anyone—the data is right in front of you. It’s based on every visit to your site and all you had to do was install that tracking Javascript within the <body> tag.
Second and still looking at the source code, go to another page and pull up the source code for that second page— note that the title is the same. It shouldn’t be—the title should follow the main themes of any and every page. For instance, the “About Us” page should be titled, “About Us | Great River Electronics”. The title is one of the most important tags you can easily control on a webpage, so make it count. The meta keywords tag should be relevant to the page’s content. The meta description tag should also reflect the page’s unique content—Google will occasionally use this tag in their search results, so it makes sense to accurately describe what is on that particular page for deep searches.
Third, there are no H1 tags. Everything is done with the paragraph (P) tag. Google uses the H1 tag to help determine the main idea of a paragraph or as something “extra” important. You have to remember that SEO is about a lot of incremental changes, not one big idea. Tagging a heading as slightly more important can help, if you make sure that important keywords are contained in that tag. Again, good SEO is as much about good “keyword management” as anything else.
One thing that Great River has done is use keywords well. Their products are mentioned, and even on the home page, “mic pre”, “microphone”, and “preamplifier” are all used. For someone searching for a mic pre but using different terminology, this keyword use is great thinking on Great River’s part. It is really important to figure out what the top search terms are that people use to find your company.
You can also develop some pages to grab the long tail of keywords too that drive less traffic on their own, but together can make a bigger difference. Some of the longer tail keywords for Great River Electronics might be, “best mic pre”, “neve 1073 mic pre”, or “Steve Albini’s favorite preamp” (Disclosure: I have no idea what Albini is using now or then). Keep in mind that the main pages are the place to optimize for general searches that drive a lot of traffic, and deeper pages or an AdWords campaign are great places to optimize for the long tail of keywords.
Speaking of AdWords, Great River might consider running an paid search campaign for misspellings, at least. Take for instance a search for “mp2 mic pre”. It’s possible someone is searching for the MP2 NV but doesn’t know what the thing is really called. Or, they’re searching for a product name that doesn’t show up as a Great River website page in a natural search. The solutions are to either optimize landing pages for these searches, or spend some cheap money with AdWords to guarantee you show up for them. Having said that, letting your dealers do the job for you is good, as Sweetwater’s ad for the MP2-NV comes up when searching for certain related terms. However, you lose control of the content. I always advise companies to control what they can when it makes good business sense.
Site maps are important. Create a site map (both one for users and an xml one for the search engines) and make sure that your important pages (especially landing pages when you make them) are within two clicks from your home page. If you don’t do this, there is always a chance that your pages won’t get found by the search engine crawlers.
Just in case the terminology wasn’t apparent, what’s a landing page? It’s simply a webpage that is optimized for a particular search. If someone searches for “Neve 1073″ which they undoubtedly will, have a landing page that is designed with SEO in mind to rank in Google’s top 10 results for that search. There are paid search landing pages and natural search landing pages, there are landing pages optimized for email campaigns and landing pages optimized for affiliate campaigns. Tons, really!
Also, Great River and most other companies can do a better job of “alt” tagging your images. Google can’t read pictures, so you need to tell the crawlers what they’re looking at.
Good linking advice is to make sure that inbound links don’t just say “click here”. They should ideally be constructed like this: mic pre or best microphone preamplifier. This way, you’re telling the search engine what the destination is all about. In other words, you are summarizing it for them. This is very important.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of work that can be done for a great website that looks good and has been around for years. There’s much more to do than what I’ve covered here, but even doing these basic tasks well will help a good website do even better when it comes to search results. Search results drive traffic and everyone can use more quality, targeted traffic.
