How to improve SEO on an under-performing website

An important article highlighting the difficulties both the Pattaya SEO company and the customer in Thailand might face when providing SEO services on a pre-existing underperforming website.

Whilst working on a difficult project to help a Pattaya based client with SEO for their established restaurant and bar in Pattaya, we came across some major and minor problems with both their website, and their expectations. This article will address some of the problems both the client and customer faced, and how we tried to resolve them.

It will also address how problems arose, due to working with multiple designers from  other web design agencies who were also providing advice and assistance on the design elements of the site. It will demonstrate how these issues can have negative impacts on the progress of the SEO work, and also highlight how you can save your website from the same misfortune.

It’s important to note that these SEO problems came about due to the restaurant and bar business in question having made the same mistake that many people make in hiring the wrong web designer in Pattaya to undertake work on their website.

Hire the best web design company in Pattaya

Get your website off on the right track from the very start and make sure you hire the best web design company in Pattaya to build your website!

First and foremost, the website design in question was not built by our web design company. This was a job commissioned to a lower rate web design company in Pattaya who, in short, did a terrible, terrible job.

When you design a website, you must make sure it is SEO friendly, and you must provide honest and straightforward advice to your clients so that they are aware of what it takes to really establish your website into a high ranking position in search engines like Google.

“Don’t be fooled by unrealistic (instant results) sales talk about SEO! True SEO takes hundreds of working hours to achieve desired results.”

I explicitly told this client that if all web designers and SEO companies were true SEO experts, then they would not be wasting their time or resources building websites for other people. They would be multimillionaires because they would, in theory, be able to put any website top of organic search results for the best keywords for any product or service they so desired.

So when you hear any SEO company in Thailand say they are Thai experts in SEO, think very carefully about what they mean by SEO. Chances are, they are experts in providing services for Google Pay per click adverts and nothing more. Why? Because true SEO takes months, years to achieve the results you require, and we are taking working full time almost 7 days a week.

“Only pay per click paid advertising can guarantee an instant top spot in the major search engines like Google”

I can’t give an exact timeframe on how long it takes to place a website on top of the organic, free Google listings, as each website is unique in that no market is the same. For example, trying to get your Thai website ranked highly when you are in a competitive market such as real estate in Pattaya, or a massage shop in Pattaya will be a great deal harder than if for example you are a Thai/German butchers with your shop located in Jomtien. Just how many real estate companies are there in Pattaya compared to Thai/German butchers in Jomtien? A lot more is the answer.

So yes, getting your site listed no1 for Thai German butchers in Jomtien would be a walk in the park compared to getting your site ranked first for Pattaya Real Estate. You are, after all, competing with sites who have potentially held top spot for decades. It’s slightly arrogant or too optimistic to think you can spend a month or so doing what these companies have been doing for years to get those top spots.

Don’t get me wrong, it can be done, but these things take time, but time as you know it does not work the same way with regard to SEO and the internet. We will explain that further below.

Hiring multiple web design companies in Pattaya can be a hindrance, not a help

Ever heard of the proverb “Too many cooks spoil the broth?”. It’s a very famous expression for a very good reason!

The second major problem we faced was that there was more than one web design company already providing advice, guidance and assistance to help the client with his website. This became a stumbling block to our company, as there were certain elements within the site that we felt were doing more harm than good. It then became a little friendly battle of one coding company vs another with respect to what we deemed as essential vs non-essential elements of the website.

I am certainly not the best coding expert around, far from it! But I have been coding websites from scratch for over 20 years. This started in Hong Kong, working for the largest EDI company in Asia at that time. I learned to code starting with blank documents using raw HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CGI. I was brilliant at it. One of my best skills was taking a page of code with say 2000 characters and turning it into a page of code with 200, all the while achieving the same look and design. This old-school method of programming considerably helped me progress into the world of SEO as I soon learned that less code = better SEO results.

“SEO is in so many ways related to the pages of code that your website uses for display and functioning purposes.”

This is something I tried in part to relay to the other web designer in Pattaya, who questioned why I found issue with certain code on certain plugins that were being used. I simply don’t have the time to argue, teach or educate for that matter. I would rather let them decide if they want to take my advice or not. Furthermore, I believe if you hire an expert, you should at least take his advice, especially if what you have got is not doing its job properly. Our business is the most consistently ranked web design company in Pattaya that holds and maintains the best positions in Google for all the major keywords for web design searches for Pattaya, and Thailand for that matter.

With multiple people accessing and editing the site, and giving their opinions, then for the most part, you are getting yourself into a bigger mess than what you had when you first started. You will be banging your heads against brick walls. Not to be nasty, but I had never even seen or heard about the other web design company in Pattaya who were giving advice and assistance to this company. I had never seen them in any web search for the types of services they provide in Pattaya. That doesn’t mean they don’t know how to build websites, but SEO is another ball game altogether, and is directly linked to how your website is constructed.

Throw websites into the mix that are constructed with WordPress and this becomes even more evident. Why? Because with WordPress comes plugins. Plugins that have been built independently by multiple companies around the world. With that in mind, you are letting your website run with hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of code. Code that can at times, make or break your website.

“If you hire experts to do a job, then try to be open to their ideas based on their expertise, experience and their knowledge. They want to help you!”

So the bottom line is while nobody can say they are the no1 expert in SEO, I always believe common sense would dictate that if a company you hire for SEO services is consistently at the top of Google for multiple searches in relation to the services that their business provides, and especially in a market where they are competing with the very same companies who are hired to do that very job, then they must be taken seriously instead of being questioned. It’s not arrogance on their part. It’s simply that they must know what they are doing, otherwise they would not be in the position they are in.

Be careful what changes you make to your website

If something is good, don’t change it. At least, not if it makes your website even worse after all the hard work you put in to make it better.

The 3rd major problem we found is connected to the 2nd major problem above. Having multiple people edit the website was causing some of the most important changes we were making to the pages being overridden. Our main focus was getting the main website home page ranked into a top position for one main keyword at first. This would ensure the search engines know exactly that this website is solely about.

“By doing this first, it opens the door to achieving better all round page rankings for the main home page.”

You might see for example what you might consider as visually “ugly text” in page titles and descriptions when you perform a search on Google and see your home page listing. You are not trying to be pretty, you are trying to be popular. We use and write meta text in such a way, that it will help to assist in giving your site a higher page rank for the main keyword.

There is a reason we do what we do because the idea is to push your site higher up the list for one main keyword search term. You then focus your attention on the other pages within the site, by improving the content on all the pages and posting articles in relation to your services. What then happens is over time, your site should/will eventually go higher for all general search terms with regard to important keyword searches in relation to the services or the products you provide.

Don’t be impatient – Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Putting too much pressure on staff or people in general can at times yield negative results. Countless authors in best-selling motivational books have repeatedly written about this.

A big problem with so many company directors or managers is that at times, their demand for success can mean they want the impossible. Sometimes it doesn’t matter to them how you achieve what they want, they simply want what they want and pressure you to get or do it. So many bosses are used to getting their own way, or having staff beneath them to do as they’re told. While others can simply be very optimistic, which is great and can be very motivational, but can also lead to disappointment when instant results are not seen.

Having extremely high demands and putting constant pressure on a company or individuals, who are independent of you and your business, may not serve you well in the long run. Especially if this company or their staff are making huge sacrifices in their private life, working extra hours above and beyond what they were hired to do, but with little thanks or appreciation for their efforts.

There are some bosses who think only about themselves or the survival of their business. It’s a human trait and instinct, after all, to want to survive when your business might be facing hardship. This is especially true in these days and times, aka the year 2021. Some of these bosses might also be thinking about not just their survival, but the fact that their business hires staff who are like family to them. Staff who have been with them since the beginning through the good times and the bad. So their business survival is not just about them, but about those they hire too. So the pressure or demands can come from them simply out of wanting to save their business family through the act of caring.

There are, however, some bosses or business owners who might act like it’s their staff they care about, but in reality it’s their ego they care about more. They are more concerned about saving face, and thus will push you to achieve the impossible in order to save their own skin. Fortunately, we haven’t dealt with people like that and never wish to.

“There are still many hard-working people and companies in Pattaya who genuinely want to help you and your business move forward.”

Pattaya, unfortunately, is considered a bit of a low life city by many people, especially major media channels offshore, who commonly write negative articles about Pattaya and those who conduct business in the city. To be fair, this reputation is warranted on many levels because you do get a lot of unsavoury characters who reside there, who, to make a quick buck, would not hesitate to rip as many people off in the process.

So how does this relate to SEO services in Pattaya or website services in Pattaya in general? Perhaps it can relate in such a way that when a company might not see instant SEO results for something they have paid for, despite the fact no instant promises may have been made, then some people might assume that, given Pattaya’s record of having so many people who you can’t really trust all around you, that they might have been hard done by.

As of writing this article, It’s now 4pm on a Sunday. I should be out playing with my daughter or perhaps watching TV to relax after a very hard week, yet I am here writing this article to better help people understand the difficulties they might face when either hiring a specialist SEO company in Pattaya or running an online business and taking on work like mentioned here today. I have been up since 6:30 AM, working non-stop. In fact, I only ate my first meal at 2 PM this afternoon. My backside is killing me and my back is sore from sitting in this chair all day, yet I still keep going because it’s in my nature to do so.

Unfortunately you will find that despite your work ethic, that for some people this is not enough. They might still push you and demand impossible feats, despite the fact you have worked so hard to help their business get back on track online. Why, because they generally don’t understand the concept of time, and just how long SEO work takes.

“It’s impossible to put a time on how long it will take to get your website listed no1 in Google for your chosen keywords and search terms.”

Having a mindset that the rules of the internet or the rules of Google or the rules of SEO are things that can be seen or analysed on a weekly basis is incorrect and wrong. What is time? Time is simply an illusion and man-made. We like to use, judge, analyse and measure time in ways that our brains are used to dealing with. Perhaps this is why some people think a weekly SEO report will be a good measurement of progress. Reality is, there are certain things in life that don’t follow the same time measurements as us.

With all SEO work we undertake, we say from the very start that we cannot guarantee or confirm when website search ranking results will get better or improve. We can’t measure results on a daily and weekly, or even monthly basis because search engines just don’t work that way. Google might for example make a major change say, once per year that overnight pushes your site to the top position. You might not have even touched your site for 3 months, but then find yourself in top spot. The reality is this is how it works.

The results will happen over time. It’s important to remember that with respect to time, the web works in a way we can’t really judge. We can only really see the changes when we see our site in a better or worse ranked position in the search results, and that will happen when it happens.

Writing good, relevant meta titles and descriptions for the website is crucial

You want your website to achieve a better position in organic search results, and so you must write relevant page titles and page descriptions to help achieve this!

One of the biggest problems I explained above this list is that is too many changes that we made to improve a site’s ranking were changed to make it worse. This could push a website further down in rankings for the site’s main search terms and phrases.

You must always try to differentiate between human and machine when it comes to certain elements of SEO. We write page titles and page descriptions not to look pretty, but to get web pages to the top of the organic natural search terms in the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing. No spamming of keywords or writing incorrect data and information about what that page is about. Simply telling the truth as to what every individual web page is about. That’s all that counts when it comes to SEO.

“To achieve a good ranking in the search engines, you must write good page titles and descriptions that accurately refer to what that page is discussing!”

When you open a newspaper or magazine, you don’t start reading an article because of the small print, your eyes always scan the larger headlines and whatever word or words stand out. You will then generally start reading that article after your initial scan has taken place. From a search engine perspective, we don’t want their robots to look at pretty text that visually we see with our human eyes, we want the search engine robots to see relevant text and information.

If you are relying on search engines to bring you traffic, then you simply must write page titles and descriptions, so that the search engine robots know who you are, and what you are selling/offering. If your website is high enough in the search results, then people will generally click your link regardless.

Never change the page website URL individual page address/permalink!

This common mistake can break your website and destroy your business and hard fought gains overnight. Beware!

One huge mistake that many web designers or website owners consistently make, is they are forever deleting their website pages, or changing the structure and address of their website page names. You should never change page links often, or perhaps never at all. Certain online free or premier SEO tools will sometimes recommend you change some page URL’s page addresses to improve SEO on your website. But this can be extremely costly and is only good if you are starting afresh and perhaps have a good year or so to devote time, money and resources on new SEO for your website.

One major practice that kills site rankings in search engines is when designers redesign a website, and get rid of all their site pages. We have to confess, we did this when we changed our company site from our main keyword of Website Design Pattaya to Website Design Thailand a few years back. We had to give our site a massive makeover because we could not compete with the existing web designers in Thailand who ranked top for searches such as web design Thailand etc. These web design companies had maintained their good ranking for many years. For the most part, they achieved their rankings by spending hours, days, weeks, months and years working entirely on SEO for their website. Most of them have or hire individual SEO staff who work daily to achieve their top organic search rankings and work daily to maintain them.

Whilst we were able to get our website into Google’s top 10 listings for website design Thailand, we lost all our major rankings for web searches for Pattaya related web design. This hurt our business a little, but did not kill our site completely. However, to get our old results back, we had a big purge of all our page content, all our page URL’s and started fresh. I estimate it took around 1 and a half years to see our site go back to the top.

So to summarize..

This article contains important information that can help so many online businesses achieve better free organic search engine rankings.

The bottom line is, never expect miracles to happen overnight with SEO and Google. The reality is it just doesn’t work that way. Instead, focus entirely on improving your website content and soon enough you will see your site climb up the rankings for your chosen keywords.

Try to remember that you are not alone in the services or products you sell and so are competing with many other similar companies as yours who are, at the same time, fighting hard to get to the top just like you.

“It’s a constant battle to get to and stay at the top but with hard work you can do it. Good luck!”