It's quite frequent that we have a RV Dealer refered to use our services from another marketing or ad agency. One of the positives of having that relationship is that they tend to 'keep an eye on us' and make sure we doing what they feel is best for the mutual dealership/client. Recently, we received feedback from an agency related to a mutual client website where they had used an automated seo and design analysis tool to see how well we had done for the dealer. What you can't see is the initial email/feedback they sent to us, but you'll get the idea. Here is most of the email that I sent back to them...
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First, I appreciate the fact that you are ‘checking up’ on the work we do. We welcome it. We don’t always like it, but it always proves to help us do better for our clients. I’ll try to break down your feedback below...
This is a brand new url/domain. So, out of the box they are disadvantaged. They won’t get ranked by Google for quite a few months even with the grandest of efforts, at least in any value added keyword areas. They don’t have the benefit of having been around awhile and other blogs/forums, etc.. linking to them. As far as DMOZ.org is concerned, it is a plus to be listed there, but it’s also a crap shoot getting listed these days, but their new site has to be submitted to even have a chance for sure.
That being said, it is critical to have both in/out links. Typically, with a dealer/client we will do the basic/fundamental seo on a site and for 50% or more of our clients that does very well for them. The other 50% want to do more because they see the benefit of the fundamentals working in their favor. Adding in/out links, submitting to blogs/forums, creating profile pages, adding target links to our RV industry sites, and things like that are part of an advanced SEO Service that we offer. It’s really reasonable for our clients and works quite well for them. It starts at $49/mo and goes up from there depending on how aggressive they want to be. We have a package that is $149/mo for 12/mo that is a good balance/blend of site improvements, in/out links, profile page, and targeted consumer links.
As far as the use of flash is concerned we use it sparingly and where it makes sense. It’s always an object on the page like a video or slideshow and not the whole page. We definitely don’t rely on any text in the flash object to be considered for seo purposes because as you mention the search engines can’t crawl through flash very well at all.
I will have one of our designers look into the deprecated HTML concern and see what that is all about.
Is the SEO Analysis reporting you use from Raven SEO Tools? They do a good job, as well as a few others, in giving quick feedback and raising possible concerns to review. I also think it’s important to take things on a case by case basis and balance automated feedback with actual results. There are many super successful sites we’ve helped produce and market that have a good balance of flash objects. New domains though do take some time and it’s super beneficial to put some extra effort in to building credibility with a good linking strategy so search engines start to trust the new domain as quickly as possible.
Please write back with your thoughts/feedback and if you have some suggestions for adding links or maybe encouraging them to take advantage of the advanced seo services we offer or maybe something you could do for them.
Kevin
President | InteractRV
800-515-9672 ext. 101
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The moral of the story of working with new RV website domains ... be prepared to put in some extra effort and be willing to wait patiently for results. If done correctly the results will come.