Case study – the sports bar – part three – summer update

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

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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.

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Case study – the sports bar – part two – website optimisation

Limited by the brief (and time and budget) to reworking the existing design, rather than replace with a WordPress driven site (my personal preference), below is a list of the basic SEO and general site changes I made.

1. More meaningful title tags, meta descriptions and keywords
2. Logo/header graphic turned back into a single image and named more explicitly (no longer img01.gif, img02.gif).
3. Replaced Flash navigation with text links
4. Homepage now contains the text that had previously been on the About page and a smaller image rather than just an image and no text.
5. Renamed a couple of menu items to make more sense to users (Live Sports > What’s On, Events > Specials [the word for special offers in Czech is the same as the word for events, essentially this was a mistranslation])
6. Changed from static html to php so we can use includes for header and footer information, making further edits easier
7. Navigation inconsistencies (opening a new window for the food and drinks menu pages) have been corrected.
8. Removed Flash audio player
9. Switched Flash schedule player for a simple text file include, schedule now displays on the page, as text, and is searchable.
10. Added a Google Map to the contact page – there was no map there previously.
11. Google Analytics tracking code added for ease of statistics monitoring.

Based on the first few days of stats from Analytics we will be able to judge the efficacy of these changes. The initial keywords that are bringing in traffic are purely the name of the bar – serving to highlight that the site’s SEO was pretty poor. The Pagerank as of today is 2/10 and the site is not coming up in the first few pages of organic search results (SERPS). I will cover how this situation has changed in a month or so.

Case study – the sports bar – part one

Over the next few weeks I will be documenting the progress with this project.

The pre-match
A local sports bar, well appointed, with friendly attentive staff, serving good beer and food, with a website badly in need of a rework and an all-round ‘experience’ uplift as well.

The site is an SEO disaster area: the homepage contains no visible text. All navigation on the site is in Flash – just to get rollover and a sound effect. There’s a music player that loads up by default and makes the site a liability for someone to visit at work. The title tag says simply ‘The Pack’, the meta description is in Czech (the site was put together by a Czech web designer), the meta keywords don’t contain any references to the most popular events (English Premiership Football). The one link on the homepage that’s not done in Flash is to another company’s site. There’s no differentiation between the www. and without versions of the web address. All this combines to create a situation where the site doesn’t come up in the first 10 pages for a Google search for ‘Sports Bar Prague’ (though Google suggests ‘the pack sports bar prague’ as a related search). The content pages are a little better – there’s human and machine readable on most of them.

The ‘experience’ part of the study is all about lifting the quality of service at the same time as making sure that opportunities are not missed to improve ‘share of customer’.

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