SEO Companies Need to Act Like Home Lenders
To get great results on a website with search engine optimisation (SEO), a business and their SEO firm need to be able to work in partnership.
For example, a site brought to an SEO company that is technically very sound but poorly visually designed won’t convert well, meaning no amount of SEO will be able to increase revenue because users will simply arrive at the site from Google, take one look at it and never come back.
By the same token, a fantastic looking site that is SEO-technically challenged will not look attractive to the search engines when being crawled. This means you’ve got a great looking site that no-one ever sees.
If the SEO industry wants to gain more credibility, then SEO providers need to start acting more like banks that process home loans. In a nutshell, not every home loan is approved.
For SEO companies, we must look at a range of conversion, design, technical and financial factors during the assessment period to ascertain whether the client is serious about SEO, whether they have the right website for SEO and whether they understand that it’s a long term process, and not something that happens overnight by throwing a few bad links around.
When a bank is assessing a loan, they determine whether or not a person is capable of paying back the loan over a period of say 30 years.
With SEO, we need to make sure that the client has the shared vision and commitment to ensure the website is initially designed well to suit their target audience, they are ready to add SEO friendly content when requested and most importantly they are prepared to take the time to read the FAQs and understand how the SEO process works.
Without this shared commitment, sometimes there isn’t any point in doing SEO for a client as it may leave “a bad taste in the mouth” for all parties involved and eventually hurt the industry itself.
For Reload Media’s SEO FAQs, please see: http://www.reloadmedia.com.au/seo-faqs.php
Popularity: 18%
Read MoreOnline Customers Shop Offline Too!
With more and more businesses adding online stores or e-commerce systems to their offerings, the need to present a uniform business image is becoming increasingly important.
In the past there’s been a trend amongst many businesses to treat their online presence as a completely separate entity. However, as the Internet becomes more and more mainstream in terms of online buying, the need to make online customers feel comfortable with a brand is also growing in importance.
Online consumers expect to see a consistent brand image in order to be reassured that they are receiving the same level of service that offline customers are.
The Australian pizza industry is one market where there’s a range of approaches. Of the three major pizza chains in Australia, one provides a very slick online experience, allowing coupons to be added, pickup or delivery options specified and most importantly uniform pricing across all marketing channels. That is, the prices advertised in mailbox drops, TV commercials, coupons and online ads are all uniform.
This is a critical factor for an industry such as pizza, where traditionally phone orders have been the primary ordering method. Online ordering in an industry such as pizza doesn’t create a huge deal of cost savings over phone ordering, but it does give customers more convenience.
By contrast, one of their competitors has a scatter-gun approach to pricing and uniform marketing. Prices advertised on TV often can’t be ordered online, certain coupons are only able to used by phone and what a potential customer is faced with is a bizarre form of brand confusion whereby the same company is advertising across multiple mediums a completely different range of products.
However, this particular case is not unique. Countless businesses fall into the same trap of thinking there are two different types of customers; 1) ones that buy online, and 2) ones that don’t. The distinction is not so black and white anymore, and many customers will feel comfortable using both.
But this multi-channel shopper needs to see a certain degree of pricing and brand uniformity, or else they will likely switch to a competing provider.
Popularity: 14%
Read MoreIntelligent Design: Google Analytics is about to Get Smarter
As most online marketers and web designers would already know, Google Analytics can be an absolute treasure trove of invaluable information or a time sucking black hole of dead ends and dirty data.
Although many of us have a little bag of tricks for finding the data we need (a bag filled with custom reports, metrics comparisons and other analytics best practices), Google is preparing to make all of our lives just a little bit easier.
As reported in Adweek on October 20, Google is looking to add a bit of A.I into their next analytics update; Analytics Intelligence that is.
The new Google Analytics ‘Intelligence Engine’ will automatically work to find insights within your web traffic data that may have been overlooked. The new tool will have a couple of nifty built-in features but the real beauty in this beast is the fact that you can create customised alerts for each of the analytics accounts that you manage. The primary purpose of Google’s Intelligence Engine is to automatically unearth insights for web markers and designers. Sounds pretty exciting huh?
As you can see from the screenshot below (courtesy of flickr.com), Google have once again excelled in their penchant for creating slick, effective and efficient user interfaces. The design is in harmony with the current analytics interface and allows search engine marketers a quick snapshot of any pertinent analytical insights or pre-determined custom alerts.
But what does all of this mean?
It means that, in the not too distant future, when you open your analytics account you may be greeted with some juicy, perceptive and extremely relevant data to get your head into an analytical frame of mind. This is just another gift from Google. All you need to do in return is use the information provided in order to optimise your Google advertising campaigns. It’s a win-win for you and for Google.
But don’t be fooled by all the new bells and whistles coming soon to an Analytics account near you, automation can only ever get you so far. When it comes to data mining and online marketing, the real value of this upgrade will come from the statistical marketer behind the mouse. It is his/her job it is to decipher which insights are relevant to the client’s cause and which are just irrelevant, albeit interesting tidbits of information.
Popularity: 13%
Read MoreWebsite Usability: Getting the basics right
Ranking highly in Google is one thing, but there’s no point in being number one if users land on your website and leave straight away. This is why it’s so important that not only is your website well optimised to appear at the top of Google for relevant search terms, but it’s also important that your website has a solid web strategy in place to ensure it is as user-friendly as possible.
When it comes to web strategy, sometimes you might need a complete overhaul of your website’s structure. Starting from scratch with a clean slate is sometimes easier than just continuing to tack things on top of an existing deficient structure in an attempt to make things simpler, when in fact things are just getting even more out of control.
However, if your website’s foundations are simple and efficient, sometimes all that’s needed is some basics that will help to improve the overall usability of your website. Here are a few basic tips to ensure your website is as user-friendly as possible.
- If you have a lot of pages on your website, it’s a good idea to use breadcrumb pathing to increase users’ situational awareness. This can help users easily find their way back through the path they just took.
- Make sure your headings are relevant and meaningful. Most users will just scan a page of text rather than actually reading it word for word. Therefore, help your users find the information they need by ensuring you use relevant and meaningful headings.
- Write your online content using an “inverted pyramid style.” Provide the most relevant information to users at the top of the page before they get sick of reading (or scanning).
Obviously there’s a lot more to good website usability that just these three, but getting these right will put your business on the path to an effective web strategy.
Popularity: 20%
Read MoreSEO: What to Expect?
As Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) becomes more mainstream and a key part of the marketing mix, it is important to ensure client expectations are met. After all, it’s the clients who are paying for the SEO service with their hard earned dollars.
At Reload Media, we make sure we stick to a quality process to measure expectation management that includes:
- Clearly defining that a good quality SEO program is a long term process. We work over 12 month SEO programs as SEO needs this amount of time to meet keyword position targets and guarantees.
- Gain a clear understanding of the most important keywords to the client. Although we might optimise for numerous keywords as part of our SEO programs, there are always ones that the client really wants to get higher up the rankings. Sometimes however, these generic keywords they select may be too ambitious for the amount the client is paying per month. This is often due to their industry already being highly competitive on these generic terms.
- If in a given month a search engine bounces some keywords around, then clearly discussing this movement with the client is important. As often other sites will have experienced the same reshuffle of positions as things always don’t stay the same in search engine land.
- Discussing with the client that we need to access their website to make changes to the meta, footers and other key areas. Some clients haven’t understood that we actually need to change their web pages. Working with them is important to gain the required trust that we won’t crash their site!
- Finally, re-emphasising that it takes patience to be on the first page of the search engines.
If some or all of these areas are done on an ongoing basis, the expectation “bar” can be raised for everyone in the industry. And this will be a good thing for us all.
Popularity: 14%
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