[annbella]

We have been in business for almost 3 years. The first 2 years we did ok ranking on google, the first few pages and
received calls daily. This season (Well it starts in April) we have almost fell of google for some key phases.
I have tried many different things, but nothing seems to work. And to be completely honest I'm running on empty now.
My son is making us a whole new website right now from scratch . Right now we have godddy and its not the easiest working in
I'm not sure if its my site or the SEO problem. Is it possible for someone to look at my site
and tell me if you see anything wrong that I'm doing? This is a part time business but would like to still be on the search engine
so we can be found. www.ctbetterbounce.com

Many people have said they hate the design or color or not enough content ect....
That is another reason why we are creating another website.

Any help on this would be great. We also do goggle adwords when our season starts but really are unsure if we are getting organic hits or paid

I'm sorry I have not read the guideline on this forum yet so if your not able to ask for help or post a website please forgive me

[Chedders]

mmm yes I agree it needs work.
If your son is upto the challenge then I would get him to look at wordpress. I am not a huge fan of it but I must admit from a SEO point of view it does a fairly ok job with just a few plug ins.

[annbella]

Thank you.. Right now he is building/coding the whole site. but I will ask him to look into wordpress

[ClickyB]

Hi annbella,

Historically speaking it's difficult to know what may have caused the problems...
When did you moved to Godaddy?
When did you last rebuild your website?
When did you last change your url structure? (and did you add redirects when you did that)?

After a quick look at the site itself, I can see some obvious problems/weaknesses:

1. The home page link in your site menu aims at: "domain/home-1.html" It should point to "domain" (no "/home-1.html").
You should change it asap... And you will also need to add a "301 redirect" to your ".htaccess file" to redirect from"domain/home-1.html"to "domain" (godaddy may help you with that).

2. Many of your page titles include underscores... For example: Water Slide_Inflatable slide rentals in Connecticut_203-710-5311
An underscore in your title is 'taken literally' by google, thus the title is optimised for water and slide_inflatable but not for "water slide"
You should remove all underscores in your titles and replace them with a space.

3. You have many images on your site without "alt tags". Thus google has no way of knowing what the images are and you are missing many chances to add keywords to your pages without any spam or visible changes!
Add alt tags to all your images... Example: (Home page first image) add this to the source code (inside the IMG tag): alt="inflatable bounce houses" or alt="Bounce houses for rent" or just alt="bounce houses"
Repeat for all images on the site (using relevant alt tags).

These are just 3 obvious weaknesses; there are more but I thought this would be enough to get you started.

Welcome to SeoChat

[edit]
Cross-posted with Chedders (yes it took me 30+ minutes... I was interrupted)
I agree wordpress (with yoast seo) would be a big improvement, (just make sure any url mapping is done via .htaccess redirects) and the above errors/issues are still valid
[/edit]

[annbella]

OMG I'm so happy that you pointed us to an area to look at. We are not computer people and did everything though godaddy. I will research how to do everything you said and try to fix the problems. ASAP
if we cant figure it out I will try to hire someone you can.. I guess I have a lot of reading to do right now.. Thank you so much

[Chedders]

I guessed by the web site your not computer geeks but just trying to promote your business. Absolutely no shame in that. Its for this reason I suggested looking at wordpress. It will hold your hand a lot of the time and a lot of the things ClickyB pointed out will be taken care of automatically. There are also 1,000's of themes you can use / try so you can have a good play until your happy with the over all look and feel. This is the route most small business's go as out of the box it gets you going really fast and with something like yoast gets all the techy bits sorted.

If at some point in the future you want to add more functionality then the platform is really well supported and you should not have much difficulty finding someone to help.

If you wanted to have a play have a look at https://wordpress.com/ but if your happy with the format and how it all works then you really need a hosted package (not a free version)

[annbella]

Thank you for the info.. One other question. Can we still keep our .com name if using wordpress? i just paid my 3 years with godaddy ;( at $475.00
I have know idea how this works but is it a re-directed thing.

I guess For now I really want to get this website working and with the correct content so goggle will crawl it and hopefully rank it or even see it would be great .Then when my new site is done it will hopefully be running smoothly (cross fingers)

[Chedders]

Firstly lets separate the 2 items here
1. the domain name this is yours (ctbetterbounce.com) and registering it should be a few bucks a year depending on who you use.
2. Hosting / email this is normally where most of the money goes and varies from free (not recommended) $5 a month to many $1000's depending on the size of the site

As you own the domain you can point that to any hosting you wish, this could be godaddy or a different supplier, I wont go into running your own server.
But seeing as your with godaddy currently, they offer wordpress hosting, so I would suggest giving their support team a call and seeing what is involved with changing your current package over to wordpress.

The wordpress.com site I pointed you to was really to just have a play so you get the idea of what its like to use and configure, that is free but I would not recommend you move your site there just have a play. It is a slightly cut down version of the full blown wordpress and limited a bit but it should give you the idea of how things work.

I am no expert myself on wordpress but there are many on this forum who are so if you go that route and get stuck I am sure there will be plenty of help offered.

[annbella]

Got it thank you