I have just been speaking to a prospective client who sells insurance for nursery fees and childminding. They have had their website designed at quite considerable expense by a web development agency who have government bodies and the NHS amongst their clients.
Our prospect described them as “experienced” and a “professional outfit” and explained that their supplier designs websites for the NHS and other government bodies.
However, the website that this web design company has put together is completely lacking in even the basic page structure and information vital for Search Engines including meta data and header tags. For example the title tag for the home page of the site is simply “Home”. Another example is the home page of the ‘nursery’ section which is entitled ‘Nursery’.
Not only is this disregard for proper meta data inadequate from a SEO perspective but also presents a poor user experience. If a user has several web-pages minimised on their computer, and this particular site displays a generic title such as “Home”, little is done to remind the user what this particular site was about - this can only be negative and possible lead to a lost interest, enquiries and possibly sales.
While it would be fair to expect a web development company specialising in public sector web design to include relevant and informative meta-data for every page of a website they develop, it is probably true that they are not considering the wider SEO benefits of good page structure since. Why? Because, natural SEO may well be a low priority for a public health campaign website in favour of paid (PPC) and offline advertising.
When we undertake website design for insurance clients or companies operating in any other sector we deliver natural SEO friendly web-pages by default. It is true that things like meta-data are changed because marketing messages and target audiences are refined but the basics have to be present on the site from day one, not just for SEO but for your users as well.
