Lawn Care Website

[BearWise Landscapers]

We are working on a new website and I wanted to get your thoughts on the layout of it. We have not started adding content to it yet, and I want it to be very informative with practical insurance infromation specifically to lawn care businesses. Here is the website:

http://lawn-care-insurance.com

The goal of the website is to take a lot of the information we have on www.BearWiseLandscapers.com and only put the information practical to lawn care businesses and not the information for landscaping and tree trimming businesses. I also wanted the emphasis of the website to be the ability of visitors to request insurance quotes and be directed for each line of insurance over to our online quote request form.

I would be interested to hear all of your thoughts on the layout of the website.

I would also like to hear any of your suggestions for search engine optimization on it.

Thank you

[mdvaden]

The layout is clean.

The images are sort of cartoon character-like. Which may make the site seem a bit impersonal.

How about swapping one clipart type image for a real photo of a person? Like maybe the top one.

Sometimes SEO is only worth doing the basics for. Depends on how saturated your market is.

How big of a region do you plan to offer insurance for. How many competitors do you have online.

That may take hours to figure out. But if you can give a number for the total competing websites, and the size of region, then I'll chime in about some SEO. Whether to bother with it, or what to do.

The scouring for competitors should be right up your alley for needs anyway. Even if you need to go to page 30, of about 300 results at 10 per page.

Thanks.

:)

[kgcs]

It looks real good, just one question, do you plan to expand to Georgia.

[mrealty]

We are working on a new website and I wanted to get your thoughts on the layout of it. We have not started adding content to it yet, and I want it to be very informative with practical insurance infromation specifically to lawn care businesses. Here is the website:

http://lawn-care-insurance.com

The goal of the website is to take a lot of the information we have on www.BearWiseLandscapers.com and only put the information practical to lawn care businesses and not the information for landscaping and tree trimming businesses. I also wanted the emphasis of the website to be the ability of visitors to request insurance quotes and be directed for each line of insurance over to our online quote request form.

I would be interested to hear all of your thoughts on the layout of the website.

I would also like to hear any of your suggestions for search engine optimization on it.

Thank you

Hi Drew:

Thanks for taking time out to speak with me on the phone about insurance a few weeks ago. Your info helped me out quite a bit. About your site:

Great job on a few things: 1. registering it for 3 years instead of 1 year will help with your ranking. 2. great decision on putting the 3 keywords that most people will put in to google to find you as your domain name. 3. Great job on splitting up the insurance the way you did. Most folks new to lawn care, myself included, do not know that the insurance is split up like that.

The not-so-good: I would not have used the clipart for the icons. I would have used real photos. Real photos instead of those "cartoonie" characters will come off looking more professional. Folks are going to expect a professional look from an insurance company.

You are fortunate your HTTP header returns a 200ok, at least at the moment it does. I've seen many sites hosted with Godaddy that mysteriously give a 302. If you can't get a 200ok, google will not accept your site map. Godaddy is known for all sorts of crap like this. If your hosted site switches back and forth from 200ok to 302, you will likely suffer in your rankings and will never know why. SEO guys with experience can attest to this issue along with a large number of other problems when your site is hosted by Godaddy. Rochen is a much better hosting company, although I have my own hosting company and do my own hosting. I could go on and on about how crappy Godaddy is, but I'll stop right there.

You can read up on this issue here:

http://www.google.sh/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4248d0de0a3b0500&hl=en

Suggestions:

1. Get your phone number on your page as TEXT. The graphic at top is fine but make sure you add your phone number as text within the page.

2. I can't see your robots.txt. I assume you haven't created one yet. Step one when building a new web site is to create that file and block all bots until you get your site and URL's in order. You do this by simply having this as the content of robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Google has crawled 7 of your urls, so no big deal right now, but you may want to add a few strategic exclusions in your robots.txt to prevent duplicate content. For example, this:
lawn-care-insurance.com/?cat=1
actually resolves to this:
http://lawn-care-insurance.com/info/category/uncategorized/
if you simply add this in your robots.txt, you would prevent a duplicate url:
Disallow: /?*
(assuming there is nothing funky going on in your .htaccess)

3. When you are completely done with your website, create a google webmaster account and submit a sitemap to google. First create a sitemap within your wordpress site using this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
You'd then make sure the sitemap location is listed at the bottom of your robots.txt for "autodiscovery" so you won't have to go making web master accounts on all 3 big search engines.

4. Keyword density: "lawn care insurance" only appears 3 times on your homepage. You need to increase that in your text. You should also have it in <h2> at least once on that page. Also, I would put "lawn care insurance" as the first three words of the meta keywords and as one phrase.

5. You have at least 5 missing alt image tags on your homepage.

6. Submit your site to dmoz.org. It doesn't have the pull it used to but my sneaky suspicion is that it helps your rankings. Many folks will argue against this, but just trust me, it would be well worth 5 minutes of your time to submit it to an appropriate dmoz category. This is the google directory after all. Careful when you submit your domain, though. I noticed you have quite a few different domain names for the same company. Dmoz editors will spot this in the blink of an eye so make sure you only submit ONE of your domains to the directory.

If you need any other help with your site, just PM me. I'd be glad to help for free as my time permits.

[BearWise Landscapers]

Thanks for all of the great responses.

We currently only provide insurance to Florida lawn care businesses, but our information is helpful to businesses throughout the country. I am licensed in over 20 states, but we do not want to expand into Georgia and other states until we know for certain that our insurance carriers have the best rates in those states, like they do in Florida. I will make a big announcement on here when we expand into other states.

I went back and forth on the decision to use real images or cartoon characters. I had a website designer make those for us, and appreciate your feedback about it. I will probably switch the top image to a real photo.

The website already appears in Google under the keyword phrase of 'lawn care insurance' and I would like it to be the top result within a few months. I have a lot of information to add to the website over the next few weeks.

Thank you for all the detailed advice. I will be working on those things this week.

[mdvaden]

Thanks for putting your site out there for ideas.

Because we all view sites differently.

Theres a lot of foks who are afraid to put their sites on the line for ideas. And it should not be any big deal.


:)