Just a quick update on the website situation
Web traffic is holding steady (even though it’s off-season for their main sports).
Now number 2 result on Google.com (above the local 10-pack) for a search for “Sports Bar Prague”. Beating out sportsbar.cz
click to enlarge
click to enlarge
Not performing as well on Google.cz (which Firefox defaults to when you’re in the Czech Republic) because there is no Czech version of the site. Though the Czech language version of the Facebook Fan Page that we set up does make a showing lower down the first page, compensating somewhat.
When clicking through to the Local Business Results, the fifth entry (E).
So what has brought this about:
- The changes listed in part two of the case study
- Google Local Business listing claimed
- Facebook Fan Page
- Twitter Bot sending out upcoming event tweets
- Youtube video uploaded (thank you Animoto!)
Confession time, I employed a fair but not 100% repeatable trick of buying an expired domain name of a now closed competitor and have that link through (after a short delay, and showing an explanatory message) to The Pack’s website. That brings just 1 or 2 clicks day from the directory websites that are too lazy to remove it or note that it is now closed – no Google Juice in terms of pagerank was hijacked in the process – that had long drained away because the original site had been offline for months.
Next steps
- Train staff on entering events in Excel and importing that to Google Calendar (currently a text file is edited on the server to populate the What’s On page)
- Switch to WordPress blog platform – numerous reasons, but particularly: ability for the client to update their own image gallery, highlight upcoming events, implement a decent contact form, the availability of plugins to read Google Calendar
- Switching to WordPress will allow the easy use of the translation plugin (as used on this blog to provide machine translations) meaning an automatic translation to Czech can be provided, enabling better results on Google.cz (which prioritises sites in Czech, unless you change the settings)
- In-bar advertising of their facebook page
- Encourage reviews on the sites that have their reviews aggregated into Google Local reviews (and Google itself)
Watch this space!
