Speaking at a retirement village marketing conference last month, I’ve decided not to hold a prepared monologue, but instead asked the audience to volunteer their website for analysis. Two websites were discussed for relevance, content, professionalism and then search engine optimisation.

My take on SEO is to ensure that a website can be understood and evaluated for its relevance by search engines. Focus points are the title tag, content hierarchy and text content. In order to be able to quickly communicate what the insides of a website look like, I’ve created a simple web-based application which strips out the relevant SEO information. The application requires little knowledge, however, the results may require some explanation.

The podcast for my presentation can be found on the Dealers’ Group website.

I’m pleased to report that the efforts in terms of SEO for villages.com.au have more than paid off. Since  relaunching on 1 October, average daily visits have quadrupled, and as above graph indicates, the additional traffic is pretty much based on organic search engine results only. While Villages Publishing is still running their Google Adwords campaign, it is now no longer their predominant source of traffic, resulting in lower cost per visit for Villages Publishing.

Note also, that we’re in the initial stages of villages.com.au being indexed – many pages have not received a proper “value” yet, so we expect traffic to increase further.