We have just introduced a new service called website healthcheck. This came about because lately I have found myself offering advice to many businesses that already had a web presence but were concerned about its performance.

It’s a very common scenario: they had someone design their website – often a friend or relative who told them “Yeah, I can do websites, don’t waste your money hiring a professional” – the finished product looks good, it’s getting some traffic from Pay-per-click advertisement and direct links, but for some misterious reason it’s getting nowhere with Google’s natural search.

In many cases people have already thrown money at various SEO “gurus” promising all sorts of magical results and charging silly money for invisible services.

I look at their websites and come up with various suggestions for improving their look, usability and search engine performance. Results are often almost immediate and I feel an amazing sense of satisfaction having fixed something that really didn’t need that much work, just a bit of an experienced touch.

It dawned on me that it would be a great service to offer for a small fee: I make suggestions, the client is then free to pass them on to his own web designer or alternatively – having realised his web guy isn’t very good – he will hire me to put things right.

It seemed like a win-win situation to me, so I packaged the service and here it is: our unique website health check. Cough please…