Often tell clients that once the website is built the work only really starts to get it ranked highly, you can’t expect any new site to rank highly and to attract lots of visitors immediately, the site needs to get ‘accepted’ by Google after the website makes its first impression and hopefully that first impression is good, be assured that we know how to make a good first impression.
Once the website has been live for a while its common for the business to grow / change / evolve and the website so change to reflect that. Most new websites now have a news section (blog) to enable the website owner to add their own news to it, this really is a great opportunity to add as much unique / relevant / interesting information and news about your business by adding text / photos / graphics.
But what happens when you want to start a new service that is not featured on your website? You need to simply add that new service to your website, to be displayed next to the existing services you offer, this benefits the websites search engine visibility and gives your website visitors more choices and gives them reassurances that you are the ‘real deal’ and your business is not stuck in the stone age.
The very worst thing you can do when you decide to start a new service is not put this new service or any mention of it on your website. The next worse thing is by advertising that new service on your site but linking this to a 3rd party landing page, commonly is made by the supplier from duplicated text and photos. The following sample instructions have been passed to me a few times now but luckily my powers of persuasion and reasoning and stopped this ever happening as it really is a bad idea on all levels, read the sample exchange demonstrating this
[3rd Party Service Company] As you know I have permission from the website owner to request the changes to his website so please can you implement these changes on their website. Please see banners attached and amend the website front page to show this new service the website owner wants. You just need to select the one you like best with the following text and then get your web man to link via the banner that will be on your website to the web page we have created.
Let me know once this is done so I can check it out. The website owner has approved our new website page we have created. We now need to get this linked on to his website. I am having some banners made that I will send to you. You will need to pick one and then ask you web designer to link through the banner on to the web page that we have created.
If you right click and then select ‘open hyperlink’ on the link below you will see the webpage that we have created using your company banner.
[Website Designers] Hope you don’t mind me giving my opinion here as I think what your asking is wrong and could be done in a better way. I hope you don’t mind me suggesting (strongly) that you don’t do this, but will obviously complete the change for you if you acknowledge my educated reservations on this change.
Are you suggesting we add a new revolving banner image for your new service then link it to the suppliers website? If so this is a terrible idea, I have seen a few suppliers try to suggest it previously and it’s both a short-sighted and ‘potentially damaging’ change from a usability and SEO perspective.
Here are some facts / thoughts
1 To have your website rank for any service you need information about that specific service
2 To link your website for a service to a 3rd party supplier will benefit the supplier’s website SEO. (they would really benefit from this link to their site from your established ‘ trusted ‘ website)
3 If your website was found by someone looking for one of your services then they decided to browse to the new services page they would be ‘lost’ and not have an obvious / easy way to return to your site.
4 The suppliers linked service page is simply a cloned page using copied text from the rest of their site.
5 If you simply created a new page / section / gallery on your site for this new service with unique text / photos and get us to SEO / optimise the page you would ‘naturally’ start to rank for carports and this may benefit the rest of the site also.