Stove & Spa Center – Atascadero, CA / Grade C+

Website Analysis

The performance of the website on Google is mixed. Of course you do well in your home town and a few other towns, but there are a lot of holes in the ranking in key markets for many of your important products and services.

YOU CAN SEE YOUR GOOGLE RANKINGS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS REPORT

Overall the site is very attractive and a good representation of many of your products. The clean look with lots of white space is appealing. The site is created using a “responsive” design so it looks good on all devices. It appears that the site was recently updated from a very outdated design (shown below). This link from the WayBack Machine will take a while to load but shows the old site – https://web.archive.org/web/20180826185502/http://www.stoveandspa.com/

The videos on the site are great for sure, but the home page might do better with a video mixed in that included the ambiance of a fireplace. The home page video tends to overpower the user experience and make it a bit difficult to decide what to do next. Since it can take up everything “above the fold” on a laptop, this may stop them from looking any farther. The navigation is on top of the video and can be overlooked. The navigation is not quite as user-friendly as we like to see. The top navigation may get overlooked and on a bigger monitor the site seems to spread apart too much. The drop-downs do not work so well especially in the 3rd tier navigation.

There are some key metrics that seem to be a bit on the weak side. The MOZ Page Authority is 27 and the MOZ Domain Authority is only 18. This indicates that the site may not have the “link strength” it requires to compete.

However, offsetting that – is CONTENT.

The site has a HUGE amount of content which is a real plus. The SEO is done fairly well with Title Meta Tags being completed. Many Description Meta Tags are missing and Header 2 tags are not optimized fully. Alt Text Tags on Images have not been utilized fully.

The site has a SSL certificate so it is in compliance and renders as https. The site is trusted by Google because is has been around since 1999. This is a BIG plus.

No photos of store, inside or out. No photos of staff or techs doing service. People buy from people and they love to see your store online. All photos appear to be manufacturers images. People would love to see real photos from your store and images of real staff that are installing, servicing or delivering your products. This makes you more than a stock image, it makes it personal. A showroom tour video would encourage them to visit in person.

The Hearth Remodeling and Product Installation pages are light on details. These pages don’t show the visitor that you are experts in this area too. Remember, most people don’t read too much – so it needs to be bullet points and photos to tell the story. Telling your story is part of what is missing from the site.

Blog seems to be an afterthought. There is only one blog about fireplaces and a few about Spas. The Blog can be a great tool to publish good content on a regular basis that can then be shared on your Social Media channels. This increases brand awareness and educates the potential buyers. We all know that an educated buyer is usually a serious buyer. By providing good content on a regular basis, your store will become the “top of mind” choice when a buyer is ready to purchase.

The Spas & Hot Tubs sections seem to have much more content than the Fireplaces & Stoves sections. The content is light on store specific language and heavy on manufacturers photos and verbiage. Original content is what helps a site do better than a site that only has manufacturers info.

Great Google Reviews! 99 reviews with a 5 star average… almost too good to be true – we know that it is true but the public has this perception that you can “game” the system, so actually a 4.8 or 4.9 will do better than a 5.0 believe it or not!

It is also great that you highlight your actual reviews on your website. This makes is easy for the visitor to see them. If these were done in a different way, they could also add valuable keywords that Google would see. Currently this data comes via a feed and doesn’t really reside on your site.

Social Media

The Facebook Page only has 292 people following it, for a store of this size this number should be much higher. The engagement with the posts are not good. The posts are good, but without a paid Facebook promotion it is unlikely that many people will see or engage with the posts. The Facebook reviews are great.

Instagram is VERY important in today’s Social Landscape and should be included in your Social Mix.

The YouTube link goes to a manufacturer instead of going to your own YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ0DlJjmF_QuiRkG0dmh4yQ) and this channel has very few views.

Twitter is being covered with the same good content as Facebook, but there are only 156 followers so this will not be very effective for branding with such a small audience.

Pinterest is another channel where the content is light with not enough boards, and very few pins on most boards. The monthly viewers number is only 248 which is very small for a typical Pinterest account.

We see the the company is posting on Google My Business which is a smart thing to be doing.

Other Tools – (screenshots below)

Website Grader

https://website.grader.com/results/www.stoveandspa.com

———————————————–

Google Mobile Friendly Test

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=yYIE4xX9vBwnpMx5rB9mbA

———————————————–

Pingdom Website Speed Test

https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3a620452000000

———————————————–

RankTracker – Estimated Google Ranking for Keywords / Towns

Your company is doing quite well for many keyword searches – Currently you only show up on Page 1 of Google (Top 10 Results) for 124 of the 225 Keyword Phrases we tested. Very few potential customers go past page one and most go for the first few results at the top. The 17 results that you have in Google “Local Pack” Results is a good thing!

TODAY’S APPROXIMATE GOOGLE RANKING RESULTS FOR STOVEANDSPA.COM