Name of your website?Dragon Car Hire Malaga Spain
Your name?
Arupa
Your Location (city, etc)
Fuengirola
When did you start your website and why?
We started our website in 1997 because we felt a growing need for an online presence to help server our clients better who wished to book their car rentals in advance for Malaga Spain. After 10 years now, we realize that online booking of our cars constitutes almost 90% of all our car hire bookings and the website has grown over the years.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
Dragoncars.com has been created primarily to cater to our regular and prospective clients looking for a car hire in Malaga Spain during their holiday here. We have been providing car hire services since 1979 and as of 2007, we have had repeat clients booking with us from the past 8 years. Since cars such as the cabrio convertible need to be booked well in advance, the website caters to our clients by providing an online booking form as well as an enquiry form. We have 4 main ways of contact at the website: 1. Automated enquiry form for getting an instant quote on the preferred car hire for the dates submitted 2. Personalised enquiry quote form responded to by our Support team via email 3. Contact Us form located in the Contact Us page 4. The Booking Form for regular clients wanting an immediate confirmed booking
We also provide our telephone, fax numbers as well as our office address on the website.
Majority of our client base is from the UK, therefore it becomes essential we have a website uptime of 100% with relevant information on our currently available car models for them.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
The website was initially created by Tina, she's the owner of the company along with her husband and his brother. She had to learn html and graphics for this. Although we could have taken help from a website creation company, it was felt inhouse knowledge and skill sets always help server best. The 90s also did not have as much competition online as this era has, so from 2005 onwards we got a completely different layout to the website to compete better with all the car hire companies mushrooming online.
What has been the easist part of operating your website?
:) Tough question, lol. We hosted with a US company called Nova hosting and I guess the easiest part was maintaining the uptime because it was maintained by them. We knew and even now know after changing hosts, that whenever someone reaches our website directly or via search engines or otherwise, they will 99% of the time not get a 404 or that "this page is currently unavailable"
What was your biggest mistake?
I do not think there have been any big mistakes while creating the website. Just needed to be optimized later on.
Who maintains your website and why?
We have a SEO team maintaining the website at the moment, we feel it is required because all the other websites on the first page of the search engine along with our site for popular search terms are always trying to acquire more links, add more content to their site, some even resorting to paid links as we have seen. Therefore we must keep the ball rolling and maintain the website to compete with the ever growing competition. Malaga has now become a very busy airport and almsot everyone looking for a car hire nowadays does it online, there are of course a portion of our regular clients who choose to directly call us, but not maintaining search engine rankings would be a BIG mistake to lose out on business.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
We have had many more clients than the normal regular clients who had grown due to word of mouth publicity. If it were not for the website, we would have probably not grown so much in number of clientile. It is now one of the most important aspect of the business, the website.
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
It is ever growing, we keep needing to learn more with each passing day in order to stay ahead online. For example, the recent introduction of social bookmarking sites, we had to learn who they were and submit our site to them. The future is about learning and staying ahead.
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Essential.. since it involves making the website better so that the rankings in search engines increase, that too commercial content and relevant content which prospective clients look for. As of now, more than half of our clientile reach us via the search engines, we know a drop from the first page rankings on certain keywords would probably reduce our business to half of what it is. We maintain it via SEO.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
Helped very much, the website is currently catered to help them index us better so that more and more clients find us via them. That is why SEO is involved for our website.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
A lot of content creation and link building. But on page factor like correct html code and meta tag optimization including header tags has also been looked into.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
Havent really thought on this point, we have tried to implement everything that has been introduced along the way, from the introduction of the robots.txt file to the now google sitemap as well the url txt file for yahoo.. from beta to final versions of everything which would potentially increase our web presence, we've kind of tried it all. But yes, havent really found out if anything was not working for us. Sorry, couldnt really answer this question.
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
no paid links. healthy competition, if you are a local business compete with a well made website and dont go into shady means of beating the competition.
You can enter a question of your choice and the answer here:
Thank you :) nothing else to say.
What is your website address?
Dragon Car Hire Malaga Spain
