For years, we heard that we should make the Moraware.com website better… we were invisible on Google, and even countertop shops looking for scheduling and estimating software couldn’t find us easily. But, we finally changed what we were doing last fall. Here’s what we did.
WordPress.
We switched to WordPress for our entire website. In about a day, we went from a painful environment that only one person could use to a site that could be changed easily by multiple people. We’re also using the Genesis framework (actually that’s $60, not free) – which meant that we got all of the tools we needed to build a nice-looking website. Just a little bit of tweaking, and we’re really happy with the design and layout.
Page titles.
This was the simplest change we made, but it had a major impact on where our pages ranked in search results. Now, every one of the titles of our web pages is descriptive, and includes the keywords that are relevant to the page and our overall site. For example,
Before: Moraware – JobTracker
After: Countertop software – Moraware JobTracker
Blog.
There are 3 reasons we write on our blog: Communication with customers, search engine optimization, and thinking about our business. Even though it takes some time every week to write a post, it’s totally worth it.
I’ve found that it helps clarify the way we talk about our software and company. And, after writing hundreds of blog posts, our website can offer something valuable to our customers and prospects on a wide range of topics.
Analytics.
How do we know what’s worth it? By looking at the numbers. Google analytics is free, and it lets us figure out what’s working on our website and what’s not. You can see which pages are getting traffic, how much, and from where.
We also use a free Firefox plug-in called Rank Checker that lets us know where we rank for various keywords. We want to make sure that the customers who’re looking for us on the web can find us when they search for phrases like “software for countertop fabricators“.
Updated pages.
Before we made these updates, our website only got updated every few years. For example, we hired a designer to give us some prettier buttons in 2006, and that was the last time we really changed things. Now, we can keep improving the website in little steps, which is much easier and actually gets done.
Once it’s easy to make changes on the website, it’s important to actually make updates. Every page we have can be clearer, more specific, and have examples. It’s a never-ending process.
Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling and estimating software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a place to buy and sell stone remnants with fabricators near you.
