NotaryBids.com Blog

First let’s talk about the business model. When I started NotaryBids.com my thoughts were that if I was an Escrow agent or Title company I would much rather find a way to have notaries contact me rather than me having to make phone calls. Woudn’t you agree? Take a look at this graphic depiction of how notarybids.com saves our clients time and money:

Makes perfect sense when you look at it that way right? I think so…

I never planned for NotaryBids.com to be a “free directory” like numerous other sites out there like 123notary.com and notaryrotary.com If you recall my goal is to get more traffic and more business coming to NotaryBids.com and our notaries. To that end I’ve decided to take a calculated risk and change our business model so that we now offer 2 distinctly different ways for our clients to find notaries. The first is our core service based on the graphic above. The client enters a zipcode, chooses the best local notaries then submits the signing details and have notaries send a bid. The 2nd is a free search clients can perform and then call notaries from the resulting list. The home page now supports both services. If you have not seen it yet check out the new updated notarybids.com home page.

The change to the home page was not just to add the new service but I did a complete redesign based on what I have learned about Search Engine Optimization. Studies have proven that when people view a web page they start from the top left of the page, scan to the right, then down to the left. With this in mind I moved the zip code entry form from the center of the page to the top left portion of the page (as this is what will be seen first), then to the right I placed a new short summary about NotaryBids.com and below that 2 links to start a notary search using either of the 2 methods.

In the lower center I added a clickable list of states a searcher can click to see a list of notaries in that state sorted by city and their contact info. Based on my keyword research this feature should improve our search results when a city or state is entered and the word “notary” however there is still much work to be done.

In the bottom left I added a new “Most Popular Searches” box that contains links directly to the most common cities & states searchers look for notaries. Searchers can see a list of notaries and their contact info in that area with just 1 click.

One of the main features I realize clients need is a system that shows how far away each notary is from their target signing location. To my knowledge, only notaryrotary.com and signingagent.com offer this. Well I am excited to announce that soon notarybids.com will have it too! I was working on this over the weekend and I have the code working that calculates the distance in miles from an entered zip code to the zip code of the notary on the list!. However I am not ready to add it to the site yet because I still have to figure out how to sort the resulting notary list by closest to farthest. That’s going to be rough!!!

Some other recent changes include:

• another change to the home page title tag, “Mobile Notary Signing Agent Search System”
• changed the color scheme slightly on the main menu sub menus to make it more easily readable
• some notaries and clients may not notice the login area at the top of every page so I changed the main menu to now include a “LOGIN” option
• added a “START/JOIN” option on the main menu (not sure about this one yet)
• increased the size of the font from 10pt to 11pt site wide (I always thought it was too small)

and a few other miscellaneous changes.

With these changes, and upgrades I believe the site is becoming more “search engine friendly”, more usable and more valuable to the industry but there is still much more work to be done.
- Chris