To assist business owners as well as graphic artists and web designers we offer expert SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services. This covers optimising your website and online profile.
This is our primary focus – Helping businesses generate website traffic using on-site + off-site SEO together with related ‘pay-per-click’ Adwords or Facebook marketing.
As needed, we may include ‘Web 2.0’ CMS upgrades (static html to WordPress conversions), Facebook & twitter integration, Google Apps, analytics, hosting upgrades, security hardening etc.
SEO has changed… Is your Web Designer keeping up?
As outlined in several of our articles on this site, SEO is ever-changing and the old ways many web designers have adopted simply don’t work any more, often doing more harm than good. (Read our related article ‘YOU like your Website, Does Google?’). Most web designers are still using techniques Google made redundant in it’s 2003 Florida update. SEO suddenly became hard. Until then, on page optimisation would have revolved around placing ‘lots of keywords everywhere.’ and until then, it seemed to work.
The next significant upgrade occurred in August 2010 when Google introduced their caffeine technology, shortly followed by enhancements (28 October) of their Maps and Places business directories. Few web designers or developers took note of these updates, even though it was designed to make it easier for small business to be found online.
Here’s what most web designers and developers believe still applies today when it comes to optimising a website for Google, essentially being pre-2003 practices:
- Just drop in lots of meta tag keywords and a description into the header of the website. This doesn’t work now and since 2003 has been ignored by Google and most search engines. (Google reference here).
- "Submitting your site to multiple search engines". This is no longer required, doing little good. Anyone offering this is either totally ignorant or running a scam.
Build lots of backlinks, ‘guaranteeing’ more traffic. Google now (Feb 2011 ‘Farmers update’) heavily penalises these ‘quick-fix’ strategies. A company using low quality paid-for backlinks may be removed from a search result! Building backlinks and directory listings is important, but should be done in a highly responsible, controlled and localised manner. - The site branding is more important that anything else. Wrong. On the net, if you can’t be found, you don’t exist. To be found a site must be ‘code-clean’ and well structured, allowing it to be easily indexed by Google with no errors. Google simply doesn’t care what the site looks like visually. Over 50% of websites today are a real mess as far as Google is concerned and need to be totally rebuilt in order to get organic traffic.
Content rules
The way Google now works, generating interesting and relevant website content each month is critical. Not only will it reward you with more traffic, but reinforces your online profile. We took one of our clients grading from 6/100 to 85/100 just using this strategy. Content and ‘the message’ really does rule!
Our big concern is that most Web Design/Development training in NZ is still teaching outdated, often counter-productive theories. They ignore the changes Google instituted in August-October 2010 (read more). This has obviously annoyed many business owners too, who have seen their website traffic drop away.
The end result of these poor practices is a downgrading of ranking for many small business websites and abysmal business results
Why is this happening?
Google is changing things to make the search experience better and more relevant for the user. This means it’s no longer just about ‘optimising the website‘ itself (which is seldom done correctly), but equally about building up a company’s online profile across multiple third party websites, directories and customer reviews. Google is essentially looking to serve up to users companies that are reputable and trustworthy.
It’s now a longer process requiring working through a big checklist of ‘to do’ items and then having results monitored on a regular basis, tweaking as needed. Things most graphic designers (and most IT people) are quite naturally loathed to do. It’s all data entry, analytical and geeky stuff, with zero design skills needed – Hence little job satisfaction – Hence isn’t done. Too much a ‘black art’.
Yet if we follow Google’s guidelines, it actually puts small businesses is a far better position than they’ve ever been before to be found online. The chances of getting to page one can be increased a hundred-fold.
Now there’s three ways to be found
Google has made it easier to be found online, if you know the tricks. It gives businesses three opportunities to appear on page one being AdWords, local Maps and Organic placement! Some lucky companies manage all three and obtain hundreds of hot sales leads per week as a result, killing their competitors. (example)
Email and social media drives traffic too
We’ll also help with email list building and e-marketing strategies too. Regular, relevant email campaigns are great for driving traffic and inquiries, typically giving a 200-500% monthly traffic boost. And let’s not overlook other channels that drive website traffic like Facebook, Youtube as well as offline.
Don’t believe you need us? Check the grade of your websites
There are countless tools available from Google and third parties that let us checkout a websites score in terms of SEO and ‘Google-friendliness’. Some are very geeky, almost requiring a PhD to understand them.
However we’ve also discovered a simple geek-free online tool for business owners and web designers that looks at a website not just from a pure SEO perspective, but a websites overall ‘marketing effectiveness‘. We often use it as an additional guide of ‘things to do’ when building (or re-building) a client website. Simply enter your own and one of your client’s website url into this Marketing/SEO grading tool, provided for free at www.websitegrader.com
The goal is a grade of at least 80/100. Our own studies show that under 10% of web design companies in NZ achieve this for their own websites, let alone their client projects. Not surprisingly, small independent designers fare the worst with their client sites averaging under 35/100 and gaining very little traffic - Meaning they’re not being found and there’s no strategy around building traffic.
Now let’s talk
email us zn.oc.gnitekramizenull@nivek or fill in the form (right) and we’ll get back to you within the day.
