New Website Coming Soon: What should i expect?

[redlinemaxed]

My website Redline Maxed - Home has been very unsuccessful as its 9 months old with no page rank and making only a sale a week at times. Therefore, i have arranged for a brand new site to be made from scratch and then the domain will be transfered.

I am paying about £2,000 for the new site, which will be done by John Allsopp (John Allsopp, provider of professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans). The price includes everything from design to SEO. We have arranged for me to do some of the basic work myself to save on costs.

What kind of performance should i expect from the new website both when it is first launched, then say 6 months and 1 year down the line?

I am expecting this one to do much better as i am spending a lot more money.

[OldWelshGuy]

HI Redline,
How did you find your current designer, this John Allsop guy? I am asking as he is holding up as a showcase site on his site mykitchen.uk.com but although the site was built in 2004, it is NOT spidered properly. site:www.mykitchen.uk.com - Google Search 8 pages in the google index and it is not ranking for any competitive phrases (it is ranking for 'buy fitted kitchen cabinets' but no one is competing for that phrase.
LOOK, there is only ONE PAGE competing for it properly, yet his page is second in the SERP's

intitle:"buy fitted kitchen cabinets" - Google Search

I always tell it like it is and I do not see this new site doing any better if it is built along the same lines as the mykitchen.uk.com site. You are in a competitive area, I have worked in automotive arena (I have a client top 3 google for 'number plates' ) and have also worked on automotive accessories and customising sites, you are going to need a LOT of hard work, and more importantly some serious keyword research.

Are/have you used adwords at all? I have had a lot of success with adwords if used properly. it is no use just slamming a load of words together, one or two ads and letting rip, as it will cost you a fortune.

Here is an idea for you, set aside £300 use it on an adwords campaign using the keywords your man has suggested. Run it slowly one advert per word using 2-5 words. MOnitor the search terms used, put in place VERY good tracking software, and you will instantly know what phrases are converting for you . Compare these to the phrases your man has suggested, and this will tell you how good his keyword research is. It will also earn you some sales along the way.

Sorry to be telling you what is probably NOT what you want to hear, but after seeing his site, I felt I should

[redlinemaxed]

Thanks for your reply. Although it was a bit negative, i still appreciate the help.

I chose John because he was locally based and able to meet me personally to discuss things. I had communication problems with the guy that built my previous website and wanted to avoid that kind of thing again.

If you look in his "Case Study" section, there are quite a few sites he has built and i contacted the webmaster of each one. Every single reply was positive and they had lots of good things to say about John.

Also, I searched for "Oxo Tin" on google and one of his sites was number one. I also like the design of a few of his sites (In particular the Peter Cooper American Car Spares site).

I actually have done the keyword research myself under his instruction (To save money as he is £45/hour).

I have used Adwords in the past but using only my own knowledge and i wasn't that impressed. I'm sure it was just because i didn't do my research.

John said something about creating a landing page and using the site i currently have with Google adwords. The plan was to buy visits and see what the conversion rate was. Therefore we could make sure the project would be successful before i spend lots of money.

He is on holiday until the end of the week though so i can't really do anything until then.

When i met John, i was very impressed with his knowledge and qualifications and he seemed like the man for the job.

unfortunately I'm still at uni so can't really put too much time into it. Hopefully all will work out in the end though.

Grr, i seem to have too much bad luck with websites recently