At Dockery Design, consulting for a business can be a day-long affair, a multi-month engagement in their office, and everything in between. Consulting for a live, working business often involves a learning curve as our team comes to understand their current business workflow, their vendor interaction, and their marketing plan. Once we see how their in-house environment shapes up, we look at where their company is today, and where they want to be. Then we set up a routine of milestone markers to discuss what it is going to take to get there.

This Holiday Season, the Dockery Design staff got together to discuss our own website, and how we can look to creating a bigger, better, more findable and exciting website in the future.

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

More to the point, “Web Designers and Web Development Team, Improve Thine own Website”.

What Started This All Off in the First Place:
After a strenuous week, building articles, and completing design work, our team took a short break to look over the numbers. Sure, we’re still tagging a few hundred visitors a week to our blog, and about a hundred visitors a week to our website, but we certainly could be doing much better. That’s when we made a strange discovery: We had miraculously gained double entries on Google’s search engines for several of our newest pages.

We at Dockery Design don’t mess around when it comes to searching. Google results are often full of shady characters and list services rather than true results. To counterract this method, we always set our office computers to receive 100 results from google per page— but not everyone does this.

For those people still only receiving 10 google results on a page, having your website listed twice can create a sizeable advantage, especially if your entry is at the very top of the google results.

What We Learned:
What we learned upon further exploration was that several of our entries using several key terms were receiving double entries. A real opportunity began to show itself. A close look at our pages showed that they could certainly use a greater deal of on-page optimization and SEO. Rather than spin our wheels, we immediately agreed to treat ourselves like a customer. Though it was tight, a quick phonecall assured us that we could set aside an actual budget for the project, and we passed out timesheets.

With a short hour-and-a-half of web design consulting, our designers were able to unearth some great facts and solutions for Dockery Design, and our website. Here are the basics:

• Over the year, we have managed to keep a steady in-pouring of new visitors, though the average stay is only about 1 minute and 10 seconds.
• Although our work is primarily word-of-mouth, we have managed to have several customers choose to work with us based on our web-presence alone.
• Our blog: Sweating the Details — is not linked to from our main website, but it is often pulling in hundreds of new, unique visitors every week.
• Our blog: Sweating the Details — is literally able to see our results in google within 5 minutes through our ping service.
• We have no outlet for news items.
• We have no outlet to our twitter account.
• We have no outlet for our Social Networking accounts.
• We have no way to promote our latest projects.
• We update the portfolio section only once per quarter. This is Far, FAR too little.
• We see a great deal of category interest with our portfolio section.
• We do not have a way to cross-promote our portfolio pieces.
• Some people find our live portfolio section tedious, while everyone seems to LOVE our private portfolio section (its for new clients only).
• We don’t have enough content regarding our process, who we are, and the categories of services which we offer.

A new iteration of the Dockery Design is imminent. It will feature our blog as a great way to tie together content for our site. We will beef up our currently static pages, and optimize them for greater exposure. New Sections for News Items will be built, and every item will include a press release and a blog entry. New projects will be showcased after their final iterations are finished in the blog, and projects will be added to the portfolio section just as soon as they are posted into the blog. All new pages will be pinged for greater efficiency.

It will be a long haul, but when Dockery Design consults for a business, you better believe that it is advice worth following. Gathering more clients from the web environment is a definite plus. Once we change our internal, on-page SEO… Well, off-page SEO is another ball of wax entirely.