Turning a flash failure into a SEO success – the key to avoiding online invisibility
Online invisibility. It can be a nightmare realization. You’ve just invested thousands…tens of thousands…into web design for your sleek, sheik, cutting edge company. You look great – people rejoice at your jaw dropping animations and fluid navigation. You’re happy and content knowing your company will be perceived as sophisticated, modern, and tech-savvy.
Referral traffic from search engines is abysmal. You haven’t had one conversion in months. No one is contacting you through the web. You have no idea what people are doing on your site, or if they’re even experiencing your site at all. Your analytics are useless…because there’s nothing to track. Mobile web users can’t even see your homepage, and your competitors are all over the SERPs – taking your new business leads uncontested.
You’re stuck with a worst case marketing scenario – you have no idea how to quantify the effectiveness of your brand in a digital world.
Although there have been announcements in the past about this topic and advancements in the ability of search engines to crawl and assign relevancy to flash websites (there’s even a few techniques for optimizing flash content) – the bottom line is that earning business from the web and flash websites just don’t mix. Forget ecommerce, forget landing pages, forget SEO. Your seductive flash web entity just doesn’t stand up outside the agency walls.
You need a solution.
Regardless of your budget…there’s an answer…and no it’s not twitter or other social media paraphernalia.
Adapting your navigation, primary content pages, and contact page into a melange of HTML and CSS isn’t an incredibly complicated task in comparison to a ground up recreation. In fact, you can still preserve most of your flash website and just rebuild your homepage as well as several primary navigation pages.
The first step is to prioritize and categorize the IA (information architecture) of your site. Obviously, your homepage is of crucial importance…but what about the pages which enforce your CTAs? From a search engine perspective (also consider the keywords you want to target), which pages do you really want to position for discovery in SERPs?
The second step is to make your contact page as accessible as possible. Sidebar quick contact forms, intuitive “tell us more” pages, and placing contact CTAs in high visibility areas of your site is a sure fire method to increase conversion. Give people a reason to contact you…and make it easy…and you’ll be on your way to getting more business from the web.
The third step, and probably the most important when making the migration from pure flash to hyrbid – is to get your blog operational and as optimized as possible. A blog is a chance for your company to establish its voice in the digital world…it’s a platform to host linkbait…it’s an opportunity to create an information resource or hub within your search market. Essentially – a blog hosted as a subdomain of your site can serve as an anchor…and a sure-fire solution for you to target long tail keywords effectively.
