Transcript
Joe Troyer: All right, so next up, we are going to audit a fun one, I think very different. We are going to audit an escape room website. Dan Jacobs sent this one in. The website is TheFinalDoor.com all right, so TheFinalDoor.com. Here we go, so this is TheFinalDoor.com. So, the title tag says “Columbia”, so I’m assuming Columbia, South Carolina, escape room.
Joe Troyer: We’re just gonna do a quick search. Oh, so there’s a movie out called “Escape Room,” that’s interesting. Gonna kinda mess with the Google search results for everybody about an escape room, right? All right, let’s take a look at the website first then. First thing’s first: this has gotta go. This is way too many things at the top, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 buttons in your top nav bar or 14 links, so I would peddle that down, whittle that thing down. Try to get down to four or five links, four or five links.
Joe Troyer: And what you gotta think about is your first-time visitors. That’s who you gotta cater to, right? So, cater to the first-time visitors and the goal is our website, first and foremost, has to cater to first-time visitors to get them to convert, to get them to come in and to do business with us and to make a sale happen, so that we can show them how amazing they are or how amazing we are, how amazing our service is. If we’re doing an escape room, how amazing the escape room is and how we crush everybody else and how this is a great activity.
Joe Troyer: And then, we can get their email address and their phone number and we can keep marketing to them and keep them coming back over and over and over. To kinda bring that point home, do you think when somebody lands here that most of the people are going to be interested in planning an event? No. Do you think that most people that are looking right now for an escape room are looking to buy a gift certificate? No. Are they interested in deals? Definitely. Definitely interested in deals.
Joe Troyer: Are they open to or interested in news? Probably not. Photos, yeah I mean I think that’s cool, but photos of the facility, but I don’t know, a whole tab dedicated to team photos when you’re looking at going to an escape room? I don’t know, is that value to visitors? I wouldn’t think so. All right, so yes this is in Columbia, South Carolina, so just think about that. Think about that first-time visitor, website experience and what they’re gonna wanna see.
Joe Troyer: I’m not saying you can’t have pages for all this other stuff, just don’t have it at the top and right in front and center. Next up is the headline, right, and sub headline, so high immersion, escape rooms, captivating fun for friends, families, and work teams. I love that. But when we scroll down, this is kinda the same thing, right? Columbia’s number one escape room, rated one of the top 20 escape rooms in the nation. Couldn’t we blend these two together?
Joe Troyer: That’s what I would do and if you did that, all this area’s gonna be gone. You can shift up the review, so now your reviews are above the fold as well. Excuse me there, my throat’s a little scratchy. I think it’s also a little deceiving that these are all images. Let somebody click on this and show them a preview of your favorite 20 or 10 reviews from Google. Open up Trip Advisor, do the same thing, Yelp, Facebook, whatever. You don’t have to send them off your site if that’s your concern.
Joe Troyer: I also don’t think that, for me anyways, and this is a big monitor, this is a 27-inch monitor, I don’t think that you do a very good job or the site does a very good job of this text being very readable. It’s pretty small. Would you guys say it’s pretty small for you guys too? Right, it’s not very readable. Yeah, definitely, okay great. So, focus on the readability. I think this is great, “featured by” all these local places that have talked about them. I would get that up further for sure on the page.
Joe Troyer: Subscribe, like, why do you think somebody’s gonna subscribe here? Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Unless they’re a diehard fan of The Final Door and they come … I don’t know what’s a frequent visit number for an escape room? I’m not really sure. They come once a week or every other week, they probably don’t really give two shits about receiving news and updates. I wouldn’t have this here. I think a natural place to put this could be with the deals.
Joe Troyer: So, it’s like subscribe and get updates on deals. That makes sense. There’s a real reason for somebody to opt in then. It’s just opt in to stay updated, it’s not a very good reason. All right, so I don’t wanna spend too much time just on the site audit, gonna poke around, see if I see anything else. Email, Yelp, Twitter, Four Square, Pinterest, and they actually do have all these profiles. So, that’s okay.
Joe Troyer: I see a lot of people list all these profiles, it’s in like default with their theme, but then they don’t actually fill these out, so they’ve got a bunch of empty links on their site, but these are actually filled out, so that’s fun. All right, so always, always, always for me, name, address, phone number, website, and email needs to be formatted well. I would do probably a three-column or four-column footer.
Joe Troyer: Getting your terms of service, getting your careers, getting your waivers, getting your privacy policy, getting your careers page, getting your NAP in the correct format, get in the little map, get in your social, right? All these links up here that we’re gonna drop from the header get in there. And use your footer, like Google uses the fifth page of the Google search results. Put that down there where you don’t want everybody to go necessarily.
Joe Troyer: The pages that you’ve gotta have, but that aren’t the most important. So, let’s take a look at … I kinda wanna nerd out and look at the rooms, but that’s probably not the best use of our time. Yeah, it looks really cool actually. All right, so let’s take a look from a marketing standpoint. Let’s just log into H Graphs here, hang on one second. All right, so looks like site went live somewhere in May or so of 2016. We’ve got some good keywords, 79 referring domains, let’s take a look at this.
Joe Troyer: All right, so got a lot … so, free image hosting, traffic directory, so I’m just gonna take like the top 10 domains here and look at them. To me, most of them look pretty spammy, like image hosting, traffic-directory or trafficdirectory.org, I don’t even know what that is right there. Your top links look pretty spammy. PBM links, that could be … join Nigeria’s number one social network site. I don’t know, whoever did SEO for this John, is it John? Dan Jacobs, I’m hoping this wasn’t you.
Joe Troyer: All right, so this is some kind of escape room authority, so this relevant. It’s on target, so this is good. This looks like a PBM, this looks like a PBM. Most of the top 10 links that I just went through, if this was my site or my client’s site, I’d be disavowing these links, like these are bad. I would be really concerned with that if I were you, like really concerned for my client whether you did it or not, it’s something that needs to be rectified.
Joe Troyer: The way that I would rectify that, you can use a service like WL Marketing, but go get in some citations. Those are links that you should have, so do the local business listings and if I were you, I’d do it right and do it nice and I’d go with the 300 enhanced local business listings. They’re gonna be more of a complete profile build out. It’s only $180. So, I would do that. And then, just try to think about what else you can do for quality. I’m gonna stop and just create a couple notes here, so we’re talking about back link quality, font is questionable.
Joe Troyer: Essentially, I’m telling you to go get some pillow links, but authoritative ones, not spammy ones. So, a good source would be local directories and I don’t care if you’ve got a local site or you got an e-comm site or whatever, I think back citations are a good way to get pillow links and build root domains. The other thing that I would do is I’d do a press release and I’d pay for some good distribution, not just the typical $20 press release distribution pack.
Joe Troyer: I would look at my options, I’d weigh out my options and I’d try to get on some more authoritative sites with some extended release options. Again, you can build more root domains and quality, because frankly, these aren’t quality, this concerns me. All right, so on the site then, we talked about top navigation, get down to five items or less. I’m gonna say consolidate the header CTA, which these two areas are pretty much duplicates. This could be one solid, really good option instead of two.
Joe Troyer: That’ll slide everything up and then, the rest is just readability of the content. And on all browsers and devices, so whether you’re on a 27-inch screen like I am or you’re on an iPhone X or you’re on iPhone 5, it should be easy to read. Let’s take a look at how he’s actually ranking. Again, this is gonna be hard. The domain is The Final Door. I’m just trying to get the map pack to trigger. So, Great Escape, The Final Door, wow. Holy shit, 451 reviews.
Joe Troyer: Wow. That is crazy. Lots and lots and lots of reviews, so great job on the reviews. 4.9 out of 5, so this is great. Yeah, so let’s get these website issues fixed, like you should be frickin’ destroying this. I’m sure the site’s already doing really well. Then, next is sorry, folks. All right, so then after that, definitely re-targeting and what I would be doing if I were you with the re-targeting specifically is I’d be focusing on authority and showing your authority, showing your frickin’ crazy amounts of reviews and social proof.
Joe Troyer: And then, also I would do pictures to bring out emotions, so pictures of people from the escape room during or after escape, room. Then, I would also do is make them offers. Take your deals page right here and make retargeting offers based on this. Now, you’ve got one, two, three, four, like six offers based on deals page. Six offers based on the deals page. All right, so that is it. I think that will give you a lot of legs here. So again, top navigation we wanna get down to five items or less.
Joe Troyer: We wanna consolidate the header call to action, we wanna focus on the readability of the content on all browsers and/or devices. The back-link quality is my number one concern with the organic viability with this site for the long haul. And with all the back links and all the reviews that they have, I wouldn’t wanna have to move this thing to a new domain, right? To help battle that, I would definitely disavow all of the questionable, shady links and then I would go get more links, better quality from not quote, unquote questionable sites.
Joe Troyer: Two tactics to do that just to start out would be local directories and then also, press releases. And then in terms of a marketing initiative that could get rolled out immediately is definitely doing retargeting and I like doing this for businesses and literally, I can set up their retargeting in a day and I can automate that retargeting for the next 12 months. And I can say for the first seven days, do this, for the next 14 days do this. Then, for the next 30 days do this and then and then and then and I can just keep changing up the audiences and what they see, the ads that they see.
Joe Troyer: And it really isn’t that hard. You guys can do the exact same thing. Would you wait to disavow for new link building? I wouldn’t worry about it at all. I just walked through it in this order, just because that’s what I went through. All right, fantastic. I hope that was good value for you.
