Web Development
Not long after arriving, I was asked to look into replacing the existing web site. The site looked ok but it was a small 5 - 10 page site businesses pay $1,500 - $2,500 for and never get a single lead from. In the case of the particular site, it appears to have not even been indexed by any search engines. Within a day, or two, I was told to setup a template site ASAP. The template site was offered by Calyx Software who was the vendor of our loan origination software named Point.
I expressed my concern that while a template site can be fast to setup and looks good, such site was unlikely to produce desired results. However, the difference in time to develop a site from scratch versus setting up a functioning template site heavily influenced instructions I was given to set up the template site ASAP.
As is so often the case with template sites, they look good but are very restrictive in what they allow you to do. These templates were no different.
Abandoning the old site and switching to the new template site yielded a slight improvement in that after submitting the new site to the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing had indexed the site. We now had some search engine visibility whereas with the old site there was none.
Previously, a search of "Atlantic Mortgage" (without quotes) via any search engine would never find the company. I examined over 500 search results but nothing was ever there. The problem being, the site wasn't indexed and the words Atlantic and Mortgage are highly competitive alone or in combination.
Not long after the template site was up, the company name (Atlantic Mortgage) began appearing but maybe 30 pages down in search results. After about a year of adding content, optimizing, linkbuilding and cost effective advertising, native search results for "Atlantic Mortgage" (without quotes) were not improving much higher than the 5th search results page although, one niche product page had risen to the first page of native search results and was generating steady business. Several other niche product pages had risen high enough to occationally generate leads.
As I added content pages, I noticed native search results for Atlantic Mortgage improve but just barely. Ultimately, the site had about 75 content pages.
With a general recognition that the template site was at it's limits, I was given the OK to create a new site from scratch. I was also told there would be no paid advertising on the new site. All business was to be generated via native results.
