The article had some great reading and a few comments stuck out in my mind such as on in particular from andymurd

"A good way of saying "your site sucks" is to compile uncontestable statistics, for example:

* Your site has an average of 2.3 H1 tags per page
* 30% of your pages have no meta description
* You post to your blog once per day but it's RSS feed is a week old
* Your landing page takes 8 seconds to load

When you've got a few statistics like that, it's easy to offer solutions."


Sticking to business and key topics such as research findings on their website is a great example.

I like to be very prepared before I approach a meeting with a client about their website.

Starting Point:

1. Establish Relationship with Client (Find Goals)

** What is the purpose of their website is it to be only used as a portfolio or do they sell a product or service that they are trying to increase lead generation or product sales.

2. How long have they had the site, normally I have this data by looking at the WHOIS data, but it breaks the ice.

3. What have they currently done to their website?

Examples being:

- Do they have in-house designers?

- Have they worked with a Search Engine Marketer in the past?

- Do they know their current daily & monthly traffic trends?

- Do they use Google Adwords or any other PPC CAMPAIGN?

4. I normally also run a few reports to get prepared for the meeting such as walking through their site at a top level.

- I look for many things such as title tags, content, flash, redirects, server speed, spelling errors, back links, outbound links, top level rankings, and run spider simulators through the website to see how a normal search engine robot would view the site.

- I normally spend about 1hr on the review before I can really give an accurate answer about a website.

The worst think I think you can do is to go into a meeting and guess, about a company’s website vs. just spending a small amount of time to see if there is anything that needs to be done or that can be done to improve the company’s bottom line.

One thing to be think about is when you have all of this data and start pushing numbers at the executive of a corporation be prepared to backup your reports.

Normally starting out with a high level executive summary is what I like to prepare for the top of the document. Also I like to have the company website on the projector so they can see what we are discussing step by step of the report.

Establish Relationship with Client (Find Goals)