Evan Carmichael reviews a cookbook website and identifies key fixes: clarify whether it's a cookbook or novel, add keyword-rich content to boost SEO, fix redundant title tags, expand the About section with personal stories and photos, and populate the Testimonials page with real reviews or remove it until you have them.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to be doing another one of my Fiverr gigs. I'm reviewing a website, giving my feedback. This one comes in from website Grandma's Old Cookbook. Let's read this up and see what we can find out about it. Interesting. I like the play on words, so cockbook instead of cookbook. I like the website design in general. Looks fun, looks professional. You can see it's about your grandmother. I like the background. I like being able to see you. I'm presuming this is you. Layout overall looks very nice, very professional. So good job from the start here. Looking at the homepage to see a little bit more about the book. So she had a novel way of describing a chicken dinner made for nervous laughter and red faces. She freely interchanged the words chicken and cock. She was completely innocent of the slang, but the family was never quite ready for the cock bomb. Okay, so interesting. Again, I like this. I like the story. I like the play on words. I like the picture of the book. I'm not quite sure if this book is a recipe book. Is it a cookbook or is it a novel? You might want to make that just a little bit more clear for people who are coming to the website and are thinking about buying this book. I'd also try to add a little more content. So if you're writing such on your homepage, you're trying to rank for different keywords, it helps to have it on here on the homepage and longer to give yourself a chance of ranking better. Looking at your title tags here, it says chicken recipes, grandma, and grandma. So you don't need grandma in there twice, but It sounds like it is a book of chicken recipes, so I try to put that in here somewhere, that it is a chicken recipe cookbook, and maybe show a few screenshots of it. Just generally add more text to this page as well. Mm-hmm. Let's go and see what else we've got here. So let's look about you, about Steve. So again, very short. First thoughts, you want to add more text and show a little more about who you are. I put a picture. It looks like you have one in that video you have from the homepage, but I put more about you in here. Put a nice smiling picture of you so people can learn a little bit more about who you are. So you work with all things creative, you write adult and children's books, you create marketing plans, work with a variety of clients. So if you've written other books, I'd put that in here too. Put links to the adult and children's books that you've written. Show a little more about your history, why you wanted to write this book. If you're talking about your love being a family, a father to your sons, put a picture of them in here. The more personal you make it, the more of a connection you make with people who come to this website. And the longer they spend and the better they feel they know you, like you, trust you, they're more likely to take the next step and buy the book. So definitely fill out that section a little bit more. What else? Let's see, about the book. So there's a link on this side, on the side about the book. Let's load that up. The call came late Saturday afternoon. It was mom. So it looks like you're telling a story here. Scroll down. So it's a— good food, good laughs, can't go wrong. It looks like it's a story about your grandmother, which is great. Again, I'm still not sure reading this if this is a novel or cookbook. From the homepage title tag, we saw that you're trying to rank for chicken recipes, so I'm assuming it's a cookbook. But from this, it looks like it's a story and not a cookbook. So that confusion may cause people not to buy because they're not quite sure what they're getting. If it is a book of recipes, you may want to say, you know, included are 45 fantastic chicken recipes from your grandma, or whatever it is, or have some screenshots of it. Or if it's a novel, clearly say it's a novel and you're telling a great story about your grandmother. So just make that a little bit more clear, but it's great that you have more content on this page. You should try to aim for that on all of the pages as well. Not a lot of pages here, so let's see the testimonials one. What others are saying. We'd love to hear from you. So there's no testimonials yet. That doesn't look great, especially if the book has been released. I would try to fill that up, even if you get your friends and family to leave some testimonials at the beginning. Try to find if you have any author friends who people may recognize, or some people who have written a cookbook who may be able to put something on here. Until you get something, I'd probably take this page down because it doesn't look good to come to a testimonials page and see nothing. But I'd still just try to get a few testimonials and put them in. And once you do get some testimonials, I'd put them on the homepage as well. So when I'm visiting this homepage, it's great you have the video, you've got your quick intro, you want to fill this up a little bit more, but if somebody wrote, you know, "Best book I ever read," or "Best chicken recipes I've ever seen," then that will add a little more credibility to it as well. But overall, I think the page is an awesome start. The layout is really nice. It looks professional. It's kind of funky and quirky. Fits, I think, the theme of your book. I'd just do a little bit better job of the content, adding more in and explaining a little bit more about what it is that you get with the book. And I think you're well on your way. So congratulations. So for those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you have a comment about this website or you have a question for your own business, feel free to leave in the comment section below. I always read those and love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
