malcolm coles

Did SEO failure contribute to thelondonpaper closure? 2

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Malcolm Coles

thelondonpaper is closing - with a pre-tax loss of £12.9m last financial year on £14.1m turnover. Maybe if they'd sorted out their SEO strategy, they'd have got more website visitors and sold more adverts?

They have no meta descriptions on most of their pages. Although the meta description doesn't influence your position in google's search results, it does affect users' propensity to click on each result.

With no meta description, google has to guess what to show in its results - and here's what it shows for thelondonpaper's home page.

thelondonpaper is closing - is its poor SEO to blame?

Would this tempt YOU to click through? Here's this post in video form - try it out! (If you're reading this via RSS, it won't be visible - click here to see it).

Hmm (video is here if not visible).

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2 Responses to “Did SEO failure contribute to thelondonpaper closure?”

1. 

   Dave Nattriss says:

   August 24, 2009 at 12:12 pm

   I'm a freelance developer who's worked on thelondonpaper.com for the last 2 years. Our traffic has actually beyond doubled in the 4 or so months since we relaunched our site.

   The SEO problem you've spotted it kind of irrelevant as if you're searching for 'thelondonpaper' you'll just go to the site anyway. If you're searching for something that we have an article about (ex. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=viagra+ice+cream ) then the article content is shown in the Google search result.

   Reply
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  Malcolm Coles says:

  August 31, 2009 at 5:39 pm

  Thanks for the comment. Sorry for the slow reply - been on holiday. You're right for the examples you give. But for a search on Tottenham Hotspur, for instance, the text snippet google (currently) shows is:
  "gallery: all; Tottenham Hotspur; your pics. The ladies look out over the Firth of Forth to promote their 'Warren & Hanbury ..."

  Reply