Goodbye Flash. Hello SEO!

Since one of our designers at work, who happened to design our website, left for another company we felt we should redesign the site again. We feel it's important to show what our current staff can do. Because we are a creative company, we have the luxury of being able to redesign at will. We maintain our branding through our logo. Our corporate identity is tied to our creativity, so keeping things fresh is actually very important.

As a web developer, I'm helping the designer with creative input. I'm finding elements and concepts, and he's putting them together. More importantly, I will ultimately be building the site using his graphical elements. This is important to me because I can ensure the site is properly optimized for search. We've always had a Flash site because that's what our web designer was comfortable using. And he did build beautiful websites. Problem is, they were invisible to Google. Here's some interesting proof:

1. More than 25% of our traffic was direct.
2. Nearly 39% of traffic comes from referring sites.
3. Only 35% of traffic comes from search engines. Of that 35%, 87% comes from Google.

You might ask youself:

• Is it good or bad that 35% of your traffic comes from search engines? Answer - No idea, but I intend to find out!

What I do find alarming though is that 75% of those searches contained the name of the company. This means they already knew about us. Over the past 30 days, only 25% of searches leading to our site were from potential new customers.

You might ask yourself:

• Is that bad??? Answer - I can't believe it's good, so I'm leaning towards bad. Unless you're an international iconic brand like Nike or Coke, I would assume you want as much new traffic and new visitors as possible.

How do we fix this?

In short, we're not going to build a Flash site. It just doesn't make sense. Once we become a household name, maybe we'll look at Flash again. I'm also going to scour the SEO suggestions Google has posted, and make sure the new site is search engine optimized. Once the site has been updated, I'll take another 30 day snapshot of traffic, and see how the numbers compare.