Changing Web Companies
For some clients, changing web companies is and can be a miserable and gut-wrenching experience - how to tell your old company you are firing them and then hoping your new web company actually can deliver what they say they can and are going to do.
Marketing is a huge grey area and their a lot of opinions floating around - just ask your in-laws who may or may not be a marketing professional. If they are, they may fill you ear full of why to stay with your current web company and why 3plains isn't the way to go; Why 3plains is the best or why you should trust them to do a website with them as a freelancer.
In this case, Cary was just ready to find a web company who's opinion he could trust and a website company who would give him the truth - enter 3plains.
I took over the project after we had finished the design and dove into the marketing. I was surprised to realize there was 4 websites and 3 of the websites were duplicates of the main website (gandjoutdoors.com) and sold as "SEO sites". Here they are:
www.rooseveltelkoutfitter.com
www.rooseveltelkguide.com
www.nevadasheepoutfitters.com
Now, anyone that knows me I don't talk bad about web companies or my colleagues, but this is ridiculous. Each of these sites had one page of content and 3 links to the main website. Very unprofessional. However, the sad part is, some web companies don't know any better. It should be noted I redirected the 3 websites to the main G&J Outdoors website.
The bottom line is, who do you trust? I have been doing websites and internet marketing since 1997, when I started in college. So there isn't much I haven't seen. So here's how we tackled the project:
1. New Logo & Brand
Cary and our 3plains design staff worked together to come up with a new logo. You have a comparison with New and Old logos. Cary's new logo shows exactly what he does and what his core business is: elk hunting, mule deer hunting and bighorn sheep hunting. Take a look below. You be the judge:
G&J Outdoors New Logo - The G&J Outdoors logo design features a elk in the upper corner and a mule deer in the right corner of the circle just above the mountains along with a Big Horn Sheep at the bottom with the G&J Outdoors text in the middle rounding it out. We redid the logo from what G&J Outdoors had and the owner enjoys his new logo vs. the old one.
G&J Outdoors Old Logo
2. New Website Design
Cary's website was not responsive before - although his former company had told him it mobile friendly (which it was not), so we redesigned the website and launched the new responsive website and reorganized the content.
New website:
Old Website:
View the old mobile site vs. the new mobile site:
http://quirktools.com/screenfly/#u=https%3A//www.gandjoutdoors.com&w=320&h=568&a=37
3. SEO
SEO is really misunderstood in the outdoors, hunting and fishing industry. Most people think SEO is a commodity and has a price point and can be shopped per the price point. That is completely false. SEO is a manual process that takes man hours to accomplish. SEO is not $99 a month or something that can be automated. Anyone in your marketplace that is on top of the rankings is paying hundreds if not thousands per month to be there - because, some marketing professional is putting time into the marketing campaign for the client. Time is money.
In this relaunch for G&J Outdoors, they were getting penalized and killed in Google, Bing and Yahoo for all his duplicate content and thin pages done by his old web company. I fixed that up and on relaunch May 26th, you can see the average results below:
The SEO and website content was crazy how bad it was. For most searches, G&J Outdoors were not showing up even in the top 100. We fixed that and within a week had searches showing on the 1st/2nd/3rd pages.
Example: Take a look at Nevada bighorn sheep hunting search: https://www.google.com/search?q=nevada+bighorn+sheep+hunting G&J Outdoors is on the 2nd page after not being found in the first 20 pages of Google. Now, obviously the goal is to be on the 1st page, but things don't happen overnight. This process takes time.
Note: Each website design and SEO project is custom so SEO results vary.
4. Customer Testimonial
Ryan - I just wanted to let you guys know how happy I am with my new logo and website. I have been in business over 20 years and had a lot of bad experiences with website companies. You guys got this done on time and it looks great. I just got online and did some searches that clients might do to find me and I am already coming up much better on the search engines and in one case, on the first page and it's only been a week. Thanks again for everything I will definitely recommend you guys to others, you're the best!!!
Cary Jellison
Owner of G&J Outdoors
Posted in: Web Design, Logo Design, SEO / SEM, Branding, Hosting & CMS, Advertising, Content, Consulting