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Dec 31
2008
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Buzzbee Homes - Why they can't be found in GooglePosted by camthecameraman in Website, strategy, SEO, Branding, Advertising |
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In my previous blog about Buzzbee Homes I mentioned that I would begin to explain why I think Google cannot find them. As you may be aware Google uses a range of factors to determine a sites "relevance", while some of these are well known others are guessed at and some factors are rumoured to gain better SEO results. I am settling into my new role at StewArt Media I am researching and finding out more and more about these factors and how they affect a sites ranking for a particular phrase. StewArt Media has procedures in place that they have proven over the course of optimising numerous sites to be successful in causing a page(or site) to rank.
While not breaking any commercial confidences I thought it would be an interesting exercise to demonstrate why Buzzbee Homes doesn't rank for even their own name let alone relevant key phrases related to the products and services they sell.
One of the first things we need to do is experience the site, as a normal user then as Google would see it. Check out Buzzbee Homes now if you haven't before.
They open up with a splash screen, written entirely in flash, this is attractive to us humans but almost unreadable to a "bot" from Google or one of the other search engines. I don't think the human experience of seeing a nice flash site is entirely necessary as, in my experience, most people just "skip" this anyway. My understanding is that Google prefers a site that "jumps" directly to "real" content. The question to ask I suppose is,"Can we do with out the splash screen?"
Looking at the main site we can see that it is populated with good content, well laid out generally but not all that easy to find the key facts that I, as a buyer, am looking for. As mentioned in the previous blog, my wife and I are genuinely interested in finding a builder. We want to be able to find their display homes and where they build, not the easiest thing to find on this site. It took both my wife and I a bit too long to find this info, when we did there is no mention of opening hours. I realise this moves a bit from SEO to usability type issues but I believe that Google does try to be as "human" as possible and these little things can mean something to the performance of your site. The menu is built in flash, this can make it hard for Google's "bot" to navigate the site, some footer links utilising pure HTML may help drive users and Google to key pages on the site.
Google provides a rang of tools to help webmasters understand how their site is tracking. Some provide statistical analysis while others help webmasters understand Google's "index" or in other words, what Google knows about your site. Using a very simple command in Google search "site:http://yoursite.com" you can find out what is in Google's index for yoursite.com. Doing this for Buzzbee Homes returns only one page. Check it out here.
As you can see only one page is indexed and it is the splash screen, and the words indexed as the title are "LOADING... L LO LOA LOAD LOADI LOADIN LOADING LOADING... LOADING ." So Google see this site as only containing gibberish, in this small snippet of the site you will also see that the company name doesn't appear. They may rank somewhere for the phrases "making your dreams a reality ...making your dreams a reality ...delivering " as these appear after the gibberish but hardly providing any "relevance" to Google. Google clearly doesn't follow the "skip intro" link and doesn't get any further into the site than this superficial splash page that it sees as gibberish.
In summary:
- We can see that Google only sees one page of this entire site.
- The page it sees is entirely written in flash
- The text Google sees is not relevant to the content in the main part of the site
- If Google could see the main part of the site, i.e get past the splash page, the menu is written in flash therefore making "bot" navigation difficult.
Great post.
Even though I wouldn't expect many purchase desicsions to be made through a website (because a house is such a high envolvement product), I think its about making longer term impressions and developing brand attitudes. But yes, it is vital that a company can found via 'Googling' variances of their name. Even if it is just to find a phone contact number.
I agree a purchase decision on this type of purchase will not be made over the net but if you cannot be found you cannot even compete for the work.
As this situation is my own it is very interesting that an extensive radio campaign did not put this company "front-of-mind" when we begun our experience. This is despite the radio station that they advertise on has a policy of "no more than two ads in a row" supposedly causing greater brand recognition etc. Didnt happen for us.
Then when we heard it, we couldnt find them, others may have given up but due to my interest in search I followed up and then wrote these articles.
Thanks for your comment Joel
