7 steps to find the RIGHT web developer

Photo by angelsk, via Flickr

Sites that don’t function the way they should make me angry. People have given good money to someone who seemed reputable, but who provided a solution that didn’t solve their problem.

Today, I reviewed a website for a law firm. They called me because they wanted marketing help to increase traffic to their site – so it will help them generate sales leads. But their site isn’t ranking organically. At all.

My team pulled up their site. It’s built in tables, which is tech from 1998. You remember 1998, don’t you? The year of the Lewinsky scandal. And as this site was built last year, you have to question the competency of the company who created this site.

Because the site is built in tables, none – that’s right, I said NONE – of their copy is in text form. So while visitors can read the text, the search engines are only seeing the META tags, and no content. On top of this, the META tags their developer used are generic terms that have extremely high competition. They make no use of long-tail phrases (like adding in your location so that it reads “personal injury attorney Columbus, OH” instead of “personal injury”) to help narrow down the field. Heck the site doesn’t even rank for its own name!

When I talked to some of the law firm’s employees about the site, they told me that the company paid a lot of money and just had the site built last year. And that the developer had said he’d “taken care of” the SEO.

What this means is that there is a marketing firm that’s using outdated technology, claiming to know how to “do SEO” when they build a site, and delivering a site that no one can find without typing in the URL. And this is supposed to build their sales? Sheesh! Our own SEO states right in his own blog that developers don’t really know SEO – but this is ridiculous.

If you’re looking for a website developer, I BEG you to follow these seven steps before you sign any contract:

1. Create a list of what you think you want your site to do.
2. Share the list with NO FEWER than three development companies and ask them to develop a proposal that highlights their own recommendations. And if “attract new traffic to the site” is one of your goals from step one, make sure that you also talk to an SEO specialist. Not someone who does website development and claims they know how to do SEO, too. Someone who states that they specialize in SEO – that this is their area of expertise. (Someone who specializes in SEO, but also creates websites is usually okay.)
3. Receive and compare proposals from the differing companies.
4. Have the differing companies defend their proposals in light of recommendations that others may have made. They may request to revise their proposal, but that’s okay – it means you’ll be able to compare apples to apples.
5. When you have it narrowed down to two choices, do a thorough background check. Ask for client references and call to see how things went.
6. Select a firm.
7. Tell everyone about your experience – whether it went well or it went poorly. Your word-of-mouth will help those companies that are taking people for a ride go out of business so that they won’t rook anyone else.

Any steps you think I missed? Let me know.