This week I’m doing a quick review of About Loft Conversions by John Essex. John approached me having seen the review I did for Tenbank.net. Here’s what John had to say:

If you get the time I would really appreciate you taking a look at http://www.aboutloftconversions.co.uk – I’m running out of ideas and its been stuck in the same position on google for ages (keyword is loft conversions).

I’ve varied the KW on the anchor text, but mainly use “loft conversions” .

Do you think the site is good enough to try putting a link in wikipedia? I’ve submitted to DMOZ, but wether it will get accepted, your guess is as good as mine!

I’ve run out of ideas for on site stuff (other than adding more content) and all I can think of now is to work on getting some more backlinks, ideally from loft conversion websites, but these are hard to come by as most of these loft conversion companies have little interest in web based stuff.

– John Essex

About Loft Conversions - Home Page

Things you’ve done well

• Clean looking website, easy to navigate.
• You’ve hidden items in the sidebar, avoiding overloading the user with menu choices.
• Your keywords appear in the domain name.

SEO Tweaks

Keyword Ideas on Google

• 1) You mention that you’re targeting “Loft Conversions” which is a very highly competitive search term. This means you’ll be spending a lot of time competing with people who have massive budgets. I suggest you target “long tail” keywords, which are much less competitive and easier to rank for. If you can get a number of these bringing in visitors, then you’ll grow your traffic. Sources of keywords to use:
  • Google Analytics – look at the different keywords used to find your site
  • Use the predictive part of search engines by starting to type “loft conversion ” (without quotes)… notice the space at the end. This will give you more ideas of what people are looking for.
• 2) Given these longtail search terms, use these in navigation titles and headers so people find exactly what they are looking for.
• 3) Don’t hold your breath with DMOZ, nice if you get it, but you don’t need it.
• 4) Forget Wikipedia, they no-follow all links since it was being abused. Your time can be better spent on writing content and getting backlinks elsewhere.
• 5) You’re not using the HTML <title> tags to their full effect.
  • Consider adding more keywords to the titles. Make sure the keywords are relevant to the page though, don’t stuff the titles with keywords for the sake of it.
  • Consider adding your website name to the end of each title too. e.g. Finding Builders and Loft Conversions Specialists | About Loft Conversions
• 6) Getting backlinks is always difficult. I suggest writing articles as guest posts for home improvement blogs. BlogCatalog is a great source of blogs, particularly in the home improvement niche.

Design Tweaks

Books Section

• 7) There is a lack of images within text. If you added them, it would make the site more appealing to look at. See my Spy Gadgets to see what I mean.
• The loft conversion books look nice, but thumbnails are too small. Make them around 125 x 125px
• 9) Break up FAQ section into individual mini articles. This gives you an opportunity for more keywords in the title tags (<title></title>), header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc) and in the menu.
• 10) Blog (as a page name) is misleading, it’s really more about news. The articles look old though, I suggest re-vamping the pages to newer dates, or turn them into pages without dates at all.
• 11) Most of the pages feel quite light on content, so definitely add more content. Add a table of contents at the top too.
• 12) The placement of the adverts are discrete (i.e. not in the way), which is great from a usability point of view. You might want to consider testing different placements and colours using Google’s Website Optimiser to see what combination can boost your earnings.

Feedback from John

This is what John had to say about this review:

“I have a fairly good knowledge of website design and SEO but my Loft Conversions website needed improvements in both design and SEO. I felt like I was stuck in a bit of a rut and desperately needed some ideas to improve the site.

The review that Dan provided was excellent, I liked that Dan had a good balance between making the site user friendly and search engine friendly. Not only has Dan provided fresh ideas for the site, his review has given me renewed enthusiasm and I look forward to getting the improvements live!”

– John Essex

Update:

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