Brutal feedback required

[SEO Lady]

You know me, I like honesty.

SEO Lady

My new homepage design went live a couple of days ago, there's still some tweaks with regards to content in the centre section specifically with the content that's a placeholder.

Other than that I need your harsh feedback please.

What I'm mainly concerned about is the contact form, I've never had a homepage contact form before.

• Is it in the wrong place
• Are there too many fields
• Should the form have a white background etc

Massive thanks guys n gals!

 

[mattk]

Firstly, I don't like your logo with a white background, it should be transparent - as it looks quite amateurish.

The contact us form needs a header - contact us for xxx

It is also huge, it takes up more than one screen length. Do the textboxes have to be full width or could you have two columns, therefore shortening it? I don't think you're asking too much, as long as all the fields aren't mandatory.

I actually like the swirly background.

Same comment about the logos of your clients.

 

[WaveJumper]

As above nice swirly bit and the logo's need looking at, I gave up looking at the rest as the content went off the side of my screen

 

[SEO Lady]

Firstly, I don't like your logo with a white background, it should be transparent - as it looks quite amateurish.

The contact us form needs a header - contact us for xxx

It is also huge, it takes up more than one screen length. Do the textboxes have to be full width or could you have two columns, therefore shortening it? I don't think you're asking too much, as long as all the fields aren't mandatory.

I actually like the swirly background.

Same comment about the logos of your clients.

Client logos taken on board.

I like my white background logo, the developer did use a transparent background at first but beause the swirly bits are dark my colours were lost.

What options would you suggest? Removing the logo completely?

Thank you

As above nice swirly bit and the logo's need looking at, I gave up looking at the rest as the content went off the side of my screen

Oh is this the contact form width?
I wasn't aware as I created it at midnight and went to bed. I viewed it on desktop

I'll check now thank you.

 

[SEO Lady]

OK, changes made

 

[NickGrogan]

@2022 in the footer planning ahead

Do people still use DVDs?

 

[SEO Lady]

 

[SEO Lady]

Wow, I am such a numpty. What would I do without you @NickGrogan ?

 

[fisicx]

Looking on my phone.

Bin the logo (it’s awful)

Bin the animation video thing

White background please

As the menu is invisible, tell me what you do on the homepage.

It says I can click to read reviews but click what?

 

[NickGrogan]

https://www.seolady.co.uk/2008-to-today/

really wide, full width of the desktop

big font sizes too, your registered company info is 40px

dropdown menu items are black, but mouseover to white, which is also the background colour so they disappear.

your search box fills a 23" screen

You wrote a post https://www.seolady.co.uk/how-much-does-seo-cost/ about SEO costs in 2021 in 2020

you have a normal menu and a hamburger menu. The hamburger has titles like Pages

You mention Funky Pigeon a few times, but no idea why and how it relates to you.

 

[Fagin2021]

Leaving aesthetics and menus to others, here's something you might want to address..
Running a Google PageSpeed Test on your home page gave you a score of 8 out of 100 on mobile and 30 out of a 100 on desktop.
My own mobile took 6 seconds to load your homepage.
It's not how fast/slow your page actually is it's how fast/slow Google thinks it is. As you know, performance is a ranking factor, especially on mobile, so you wouldn't want to waste your hard work because of this issue.
The good news is that much of the problem seems related to the file size of your images and that's easy to fix.
Hope that helps.

 

[SEO Lady]

Looking on my phone.

Bin the logo (it’s awful)

Top of the list

Bin the animation video thing

Shut up, it's the best thing and well you know it. You're just looking for a fight as usual

White background please

Clarification: The contact form as white background, yes? I suggested that

As the menu is invisible, tell me what you do on the homepage.

I don't know how many eyes you have recently, or what specsavers prescription glasses you are using, but the H1 is exceedingly LARGE and I'm in the process of figuring out where to put the CSS to lessen the text size.

It says I can click to read reviews but click what?

I have a list and yes this is on it, like the blog images are rubbish, need to get above the fold sorted first.

Now go and have a hot chocolate OK?

 

[SEO Lady]

Leaving aesthetics and menus to others, here's something you might want to address..
Running a Google PageSpeed Test on your home page gave you a score of 8 out of 100 on mobile and 30 out of a 100 on desktop.
The good news is that much of the problem seems related to the file size of your images and that's easy to fix.
Hope that helps.

Looking at GA there's some inconsistency. It's been a work in progress heavily this past week, there's still some development tweaks I have asked for in terms of widget integration on the home page and Google API integration.

I have got a professional and Wordpress hosting container with a UK respected host (not going to promote them here) been with them over 12 years.

During this testing time, load is right up there along with UX and first impressions, lowering bounce and all that jazz.

I really appreciate your contribution to this thread as you're the first person to highlight this potential SEO factor from a Google perspective.

 

[SEO Lady]

https://www.seolady.co.uk/2008-to-today/

really wide, full width of the desktop.

Fkn tell me about it mate!

big font sizes too, your registered company info is 40px

Developer is slow to respond, I have been asking for CSS changes since Sunday

dropdown menu items are black, but mouseover to white, which is also the background colour so they disappear.

This is new

your search box fills a 23" screen.

Now that's really weird you should have mentioned that, I use search for my website often so today my whole 23" monitor was white with a search cursor. I didn't like it, but I was in the middle of a task and didn't want to multi task even more than I was in the moment.

I would have genuinely forgotten about that, had you not mentioned it so thank you very much @NickGrogan

You wrote a post https://www.seolady.co.uk/how-much-does-seo-cost/ about SEO costs in 2021 in 2020

ffs I just got round to changing my most popular posts in 20 minutes earlier, this gals got to deliver content about wooden fence panels, CBD benefits and Valentine's chocolates for tomorrow. I'm currently working 6/7 days a week. Honestly, I'm juggling this week.

you have a normal menu and a hamburger menu. The hamburger has titles like Pages.

I'd like to ask for further clarification on this point, if I may.

You mention Funky Pigeon a few times, but no idea why and how it relates to you.

They are the first brand name company I worked for in 2008 full time. I have case studies posted off site. When I get chance I'm going to write more case studies. Currently I'm selling SEO Leads and working 80-ish hours a week. Noted and appreciated

 

[fisicx]

Shut up, it's the best thing and well you know it. You're just looking for a fight as usual

Yes. But I'm right

Clarification: The contact form as white background, yes? I suggested that

No, the whole site

Everyone who lands on your site will be there because they want better ranking for their site. This means they already know what they want. So all you have to do is list your services on the homepage.

SEO Freelancer UK – Ecommerce WordPress + Shopify

Means zip to anyone. Makes you look like a cheap ffiver gig.

And your developer really doesn't know what they are doing. The shcema is all wrong, you don't need bakery or most of the other caggage they have installed. It' a very simple site made complicated by their incompetence.

The hot chocolate didn't work. I shall have to give you a call.

 

[Ozzy]

Can I be a bit radical here and suggest swapping the contact form and the Zoom sessions content around, so the contact form is on the right and sessions info on the left.
People round these parts read left to right, so the call to action I feel to come after reading some content. It's where my eyes went to look for a call to action anyway.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Shut up, it's the best thing and well you know it. You're just looking for a fight as usual

Background animation looks awful! Looks to me some sort of cyber sperm floating around or a Dutch rave on LSD.

Everything on your site looks poorly made and a good test case how to not make website.

UI = nothing makes sense here

Copy = really bad. Copy example "I have 20 years experience " Nobody cares if you'd have 100 years experience what results can you do for me

Website tech part: poor cheap slow hosting, cheap buggy WP theme, google page speed shows that. Gmetrix 2.5 seconds sever response time. Are you kidding me. My racing pigeons could deliver packets faster to and from the server

Design. Looks like the unit nations of colours, no consistency and this logo. It is bad. Just bad

Final words: You seems to aim for the cheap lowest paying customer with no clue of SEO based on what you write and offer. You even give a 100% ranking guarantee. At this stage I'd run away.

Zoom calls. Really you use Zoom for business. Get yourself a proper meeting service and not that pile of insecure crap Zoom offers. Using Zoom looks cheap.

Your general attitude towards good comments made by others is really concerning.

 

[Ozzy]

Zoom calls. Really you use Zoom for business. Get yourself a proper meeting service and not that pile of insecure crap Zoom offers. Using Zoom looks cheap.

I'm not a fan of Zoom personally but I would disagree with this, it's widely used by business, very widely used and it's probably the most recognised. You ask people shall we have a Zoom, and they know what you mean. You asked them shall we have a Teams or a Webex and they look at you blankly.

 

[Phil Sproson Photography]

Good morning, the hamburger menu seems to be a hangover from changing over your theme as it looks to go off to demo content, so that needs to be removed as you essentially have 2 menus up top.

Prices pages, I think I would have opted for pages rather than 'posts' as I don't like that the right hand sidebar is visible with all of the categories / recent posts. It is so distracting to look at. I think a full width page would look better, I would also use tabs to keep the content on the upper fold of the page and literally have the prices under a prices tab and the supporting extra text set out in an info tab... it would look neater, and those just wanting prices would be able to see them immediately.

A note on categories, if there is only 1 post in a category and there is no plan to add a second post into that category, would this site update give opportunity to tidy up categories and consolidate? I know this will give up some SEO gains already made.

On the homepage, not super-keen on the animation, it loaded a dark grey background for at least 3 to 4 seconds before the animation loaded... also, the 'SEO Freelancer est 2009' image on the homepage, could the text wrap around this, I think it would look better if it did.

The YouTube video on the homepage breaks onclick and doesn't play.

Hope some of that is helpful

 

[mugatea]

just my opinion. no expert.

I'd chuck the video background. Pingdom says your homepage is over 15mb, is the video worth making the homepage that size? Its also a distraction when trying to read, it competes against the text. Theres so many graphic backgrounds.

Id et rid of the seo freelancer sticker and replace it with a text heading. Is funky pidgeon and the other images clients? Cause Id add a title above saying so, if they are.

 

[computerbeing]

The background will not be appealing to most and does not enhance your message at all. The content is not well structured which puts off whichever visits the page after a few seconds. A redesign would not be a terrible idea.

 

[IWW Limited]

It feels very keyword stuffy, I don't know if this is because I'm reading this from a marketing background. But the H tags, titles and nav feels like keywords have been injected into it for SEO and not readability i.e. the balance towards SEO over readability.

'SEO Freelancer UK Nina Payne is an eCommerce Somerset-based' I would of expected "SEO freelancer, Nina Payne' but seems like SEO Freelancer UK is a target keyword. I'd of gone for 'Nine Payne, a UK based SEO Freelancer'.

This also appears the case when I look at things like image names, ALT tags and meta data; also one of the first places I look is robots.txt and looks like this is very excessive and you don't want your tags indexed? Page titles don't summarise what the page is about, more keyword stuffing it seems.

This may be my connection but feels very slow to me?

I have to be honest, on first impression of just the website, I don't think we'd engage with you as a freelancer.

I'm being picky
and negative
and I don't like it.

Sorry, I'm sure you are really good at what you do but that is just my observation.