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Facebook ads: What are they and how they can help your business grow

If you’ve never considering investing in Facebook advertising, there’s no better time than now to do your research and potentially invest some of your marketing budget towards them. At a glance, Facebook ads can seem daunting but the truth is, the process is really quite simple and narrowed down, to better enhance your marketing strategy. As over 40% of the global population is on social media, it makes sense for your business to be utilising a well-planned marketing strategy. With Facebook ads you can reach a widespread audience with the potential to reach 1.9 billion people. So, what exactly are Facebook ads and how can they help your business reach its marketing potential. WHAT ARE FACEBOOK ADS? We’ve all seen them, those ads that pop up in your news feed and make you think someone is tracking your movements. You’ve visited a website, almost bought a pair of shoes and decided against it, then all of a sudden when you next check Facebook, an ad with those exact shoes appears. Despite what some conspiracy theorists believe, no one is necessarily tracking you, but some websites do track user activity on their website, this information is shared with Facebook which creates various demographics for marketing. Facebook ads are an absolute game changer in the marketing world. Facebook ads are a way for businesses to easily target their desired audience and really narrow down their marketing strategy. In the digital marketing world, Facebook ads are the best form of advertising a business can invest in. TARGET YOUR EXACT AUDIENCE One of the greatest features of Facebook ads, is the targeting opportunities. Businesses are able to narrow down their audience based on a number of areas such as locations, interests, demographics, connections, languages etc. No other social media platform offers a targeted audience feature quite like Facebook. You can also create lookalike audiences to replicate an audience you have already targeted. You can even re-target those who have interacted with your website before, by installing a Facebook pixel to your website. This tracks user activity on your website and enables Facebook to target those who were close to purchasing or making an inquiry. CREATE ADS BASED ON YOUR MARKETING OBJECTIVE Another impressive feature in the Facebook ads manager is the ability to create ads based around your individual marketing objective, including your budget. Whether you aim to create brand awareness, increase conversions, website clicks or whatever your marketing objective, Facebook can refine your ad to suit your needs. This benefits businesses greatly as they are able to get the results where they need them most, making the most of their time and money. No matter what your marketing budget is, you can spend as little as $5 and still reach up to 1000 people. With the correct strategy, your business can maximise their ROI, without excessive spending. TRACK YOUR RESULTS Facebook provides its users with great analytics reporting tool where you can track areas such as impressions, clicks and conversions. You are able to do this by installing the Facebook pixel into your website, which then tracks your visitors and their activity on your website. This helps you to better target your marketing strategy and determine which areas of your website need improving. You can also test various types of ads, targeting different audience groups to determine which ads work better and provide better ROI for your business. Having these tools accessible is highly beneficial for business owners when planning future social media strategies. FACEBOOK ADS CAN INCREASE YOUR SEO Did you know that by having a strong social media presence you can improve your search engine rankings? Facebook ads can drive traffic to your website and search engines will see your frequent activity on the site, providing you with a higher ranking. You can also create a call to action on your Facebook ad which directs your audience right to your site. This is why it’s important to create useful or catchy content which will persuade your audience to visit your page. In an era highly dominated by social media and social media management, it’s crucial for businesses to utilise advertising on these sites. With 80% of internet users on Facebook, investing in ads on the social platform bring forth a number of benefits for your business. If you’re weary about trying Facebook ads, invest a small amount of money and test it. We guarantee you’ll be impressed with the results and won’t look back!

9 digital marketing tips to help your business grow online

The internet is constantly evolving and majority of businesses have chosen to offer or promote their products or services online. Having an online platform means you can operate your business from literally anywhere in the world as long as you have a laptop and internet connection. This brings forth a number of benefits for entrepreneurs wanting to start up a business, or existent business owners. By implementing digital marketing, you can watch your business evolve not just locally but globally and reach greater opportunities like never before. Being experts in the field, we’ve selected 10 digital marketing tips to help your business grow online. 1. Plan a good strategy Planning a strategy for your digital marketing is one of the key elements contributing to the success of your business. Think about what your business sells or the services you offer. What do you want to gain by advertising online? Do you want to promote brand awareness? Perhaps you want to have more website traffic? Do you want more followers on Instagram? Create a budget and list your main goals. 2. Invest in a good website No matter what industry you’re in, having a well-constructed website will increase your businesses credibility and lead to more sales. Whether you’re creating the website yourself, or hiring a professional, you must ensure your website is fast, easy to navigate, mobile friendly and optimised for conversion. 3. Get social If your business isn’t on social media already, it needs to be! There’s no denying that social media has become such a major part of our everyday lives. We spend so much time using it and by utilising social media platforms to promote your business, you can reach a much wider audience, expanding your business on a global scale. Many businesses generate a large percentage of their income as a result of social media marketing. 4. SEO Long gone are the days where you would need to pull out the phone book and manually search the A-Z directory to find a service you were looking for! Nowadays people simply do a google search in order to find the solution to their problems. SEO (search engine optimisation), is a process which aims to boost your rankings on search engines, to put you ahead of your industry competitors. SEO is certainly the future of digital marketing. 5. Ads, ads and more ads Creating ads which promote your business via social media platforms, is incredibly powerful. You can create advertisements which target your desired audience based on a number of factors including their location, age or gender to even more specified areas such as shopping habits and hobbies. By consistently using ads, you can create targeted campaigns to ensure you spend your marketing budget wisely. 6. Use influencers to promote your brand Depending on what industry you’re in, you should definitely consider using an influencer to promote your business. Most influencers on Instagram with a large number of followers, will usually accept a free product or service in exchange for a promotion of your product via their page. This leads to great business exposure and often leads to an increase in sales. 7. Start blogging Writing informative pieces relating to your industry is a great way to gain brand exposure and add credibility to your business. By having a blog on your website, this shows your audience that you are experts in your field and will help bring more traffic to your page. 8. Customer service is essential In the same way you would promote good customer service offline, the same goes for your online presence. You must engage with your customers or clients online regularly and assist them with their queries. Having a good online reputation is essential and will be the make or break for clients to choose your business over your competitors. 9. Track your results frequently Tracking your progress on a regular basis is so important for your business. By doing so, you are aware of what strategies worked well along with what didn’t. This will help you prioritise your spending and ensure that you invest your money in areas of digital marketing which are going to benefit your business. The most important thing to take away from this is that by not implementing a good digital marketing strategy, you pose the risk of missing out on some serious potential clients or customers. By following these digital marketing tips, you will stay ahead of your competitors in your industry.

The 5 easiest and most important tips for successful SEO

In this article, we are going to be sharing with you 5 of the easiest and in our eyes, the most important tips for successful SEO. Make sure you take note on these tips and start implementing them as soon as you can. The main focus of this is based around the content that you are writing or getting written for your business and how you can best optimise it to bring in the desired result. Valuable content is king in the search engines eyes, and we want to help you improve the results from your efforts. Slow page load times Page loading speeds is a massive factor in SEO. A few years ago you could get away with a slow loading website. But those days are long gone, there is no excuse for having a slow website anymore. People are getting more and more impatient when they go online and if your site is taking too long to load, you can say goodbye to a good chunk of customers. A slow page speed does more than just losing traffic though, it paints an untrustworthy picture in the mind of your prospects to. Page speed is crucial to both users and search engines. According to a study by eConsultancy, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load”. So has that number got you worried? As your business begins to grow and you start generating more and more leads through SEO, you have to make sure your website is lightning quick, otherwise, you are wasting up to 40% off that traffic! One quick way to reduce the loading speed is to remove non-essential elements that slow down your site. If your site is on WordPress, have a look through your plugins and delete anything that you aren’t using anymore. Write to the people reading it We previously did a blog around the intent of blog writing for SEO. When writing blogs and articles for your business you must keep the reader first in mind and search engines second. The old method of SEO was to just fill your blogs with keywords that rank high on Google in an attempt to get more clicks on your site. While this definitely used to work, you can’t keep doing this, if your content isn’t relevant or doesn’t appeal to the reader you will lose their interest and they will go to the next site. In the search engines eyes, this is bad and you will suffer the consequences in the long run. You must be writing engaging content for real people. Remember, people are the ones with credit cards ready to purchase your product, not robots. Robots don’t engage with your brand or become loyal customers, humans do. So, next time you or your colleague is writing content for your business, forget about the search engines when doing so. You will find that your content will become more helpful, and search engines love this. The search engines bots track user behaviours and you will be rewarded for actually helping people. Meta Descriptions A well put together met description is often neglected by people and it happens to be one of the most powerful parts of SEO. It’s the first section that people see when you pop up on Google and can ultimately decide whether or not they click through to your website. Generally, the search engine giant doesn’t like duplicate content. Yes, there are times when there is a need to cite a paragraph or sentence from another site (and link back to the source), but if publishing duplicate content becomes your way of life, you might get penalized by Google. Another thing to consider is duplicate meta descriptions. Make sure your site doesn’t have the same meta descriptions for different pages, you will eventually get penalised and it’s not very good for the users experience regardless. If you are a WordPress user, we highly recommend that you use a plugin called YOAST. It will help you find and fix up duplicate content on your site. Use readable and meaningful URLs only Your URL’s must be readable to both the user and the search engines, otherwise, things can get confusing. Don’t worry too much about having a long URL, if it’s easy to understand for both the search engines and the users, you are in the clear. This is what our URL looks likes for one of our blogshttp://dgreatsolutions.com.au/blog/how-to-use-instagram-to-build-brand-trust/ Yes its quite long, but I bet you know exactly what that blog post is going to be about right? And so does the search engine bot. Stay away from page URLs like this:https://www.website.com/blog/news/blog20343 This isn’t memorable. You must try to keep your URL memorable for the use in case they want to go back to it quickly, instead of searching through dozens of pages to find it again. Even though search engine bots have come a long way, they still need to be guided. If your URL’s are all over the place and don’t explain what the specific page is, the bots will get confused as well. Create & publish unique content consistently to improve your rankings If you have ever written content for your company you will know how hard it can be some days to think of something new and to not just copy someones else’s blog or article. It’s ok to take inspiration from someone else’s work, but you have to write it in your own way. This not only helps with your ranking, but will help with branding too. If you are in this for the long hall, then you want to have a unique voice, people will begin to read your content purely because YOU wrote it. Fresh content is a must for any online business – if your wanting success that is. Google and other search engines love to see new and useful content being posted and shared regularly. It shows them that you are credible and that you’re the place to go

How to use instagram to build brand trust

Instagram now has over 800 million active users. It is unarguably one the most far reaching social media platforms you can get your hands on. Instagram has proven itself to be a great advertising platform for businesses and shows no signs of slowing down. eMarketer estimated the worldwide ad revenues to exceed $10 billion dollars by this year. This is quite an increase from just under $2 billion in 2016.If you’re not already using Instagram to increase the reach and build brand awareness, you’re missing out. Thankfully, its relatively easy to get your business up and running, you just need enough time and effort to implement a well thought out strategy. STUDY Your first step should be going out and finding other business similar to yours and studying what they are currently posting. Look at the colours, the type of imagery, the people in the photos, the location etc. Think about how it makes you feel when you see their content, what kind of emotion are they pulling from you, does it make you want to be a part of their culture?If yes, then model what they are doing. We aren’t saying to copying what they’re doing, but for now, write down things that you like and things that you don’t like. WHAT TO POST Now that you have some idea on what your competitors are posting and the angle they’re going for, it’s time to decide on what you want to start posting! This changes entirely on industry to industry and obviously I don’t know what kind of legal obligations you may have within yours. But, you want to be posting content that is; 1) Relative to your industry. 2) Speaks how you want your ideal customer to speak. And 3) Keeps existing and potential customers engaged with your brand. So hopefully you already know your ideal customer, or at least have some idea of who they are, what they do, where they hang out and what other kind of things they spend their money on. We have found that it is best to actually give this “ideal customer” a name, give them an outfit, hair style and friends. It might seem a bit odd, but it will help you think and realise who your target market it. And hey, doesn’t hurt to try. WHEN TO POST Instagram has changed its algorithms a lot in the recent years, to the point that it almost doesn’t matter ‘when’ you post, but more so ‘how often’ you post. Instagram favours regular, high quality and high engaged content. It is a general recommendation that you post at least once per day, twice if you feel the need to. And that’s just for the standard Instagram ‘feed’ post, Instagram stories is a whole other mind field. Now, I’m sure we all follow someone who feels the need to put every waking minute of their lives on the instagram stories, we are saying to do this. But, I believe business owners could take a leaf out of their book. Instagram stories are a great way to drive existing followers to your page and keep them in the loop! It won’t necessarily get your page discovered by new people (that’s what your Instagram Feed posts are for), but when they do land on your page and you have a story that’s been posted in the last 24 hours, they are liking to look. It helps keep your profile looking lively and active, and is just another great way to keep engagement up on your profile. Instagram the amazing platform Instagram is an amazing platform for building your brands image and communicating with your existing and potential customers. Try not to overthink your content, keep it lighthearted, keep up with current trends and keep your audience engaged.If you are struggling to come up with ideas or are just feeling overwhelmed with the road ahead for your business and instagram, get in contact with us today! We over free consultation calls, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain!

What is local SEO and why is it so important for your business in 2019

Local SEO is quickly becoming paramount to sustaining and growing your brick and mortar store. If you want people in your area to know you exist, or just make it that bit easier to find you when they need to, optimizing your website should be top priority.When it comes to outranking your local competitors your need to focus on local SEO keywords, this will drive your search ranking up and bring you more customers in! Local Directory Listings When it comes to increasing your website visibility, business directories do a fantastic job of putting your business in front of your potential customers. They also give you quite a significant boost in your Google rankings, which generally equals more customers! Most business listing directories even give you a small section for you to talk about your business and what exactly it is that you do.There many many directories out there, you want to try to be in as many of them as you can! It is definitely time consuming, but if it brings you in more customers, its small price to pay.Oh and did I mention that the majority of them are free.One tip that I want to give you if you are going to go down this road is; make sure you keep all your contact info consistent across all the directories. This boosts your SEO as Google will see all this information. We recommend that you keep a spreadsheet with all your necessary information, like; business name, address, phone number, email, logo and opening hours. This way if anything changes you have a record of it all and know which directories need to be updated. Get on Google My Business We don’t have to tell you that Google is the largest search engine in the world. So it makes sense that you should have a Google My Business listing! It’s the first thing people will see when searching for a product or service in their local area, this is where you want to be.There is a bit or a process when getting your business on ‘Google My Business’, but they make it pretty easy and straightforward for you. Once you are verified, you can start adding photos, video, store hours and other business information. Make sure this is done properly and professionally. This will most likely be your most viewed listing by far! Optimize for local keywords Local keywords will definitely help you get found, but that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice content quality. Google likes high quality, valuable content on websites. Sites with this type of content get ranked higher than sites that don’t.Local keywords will most certainly help customers find you, but make sure your content is high quality. Google LOVES high quality and valuable content, if you can provide people with value, Google will rank your websites higher than ones that don’t.So when you are writing blogs, make sure you use relevant keywords when possible. Keep in mind that you can also add location based keywords, so think of what people might search for when looking for your business in your area. If you are a plumber in norwood. People will probably be searching for “plumbers in norwood Mobile optimisation Recently Google announced they they are now indexing for mobile first. This is a whole topic in itself, which we have covered previously. So if you want to read up more on this, be sure to check out our blog here Google’s Mobile First Indexing – How Does This Affect Your Business? Get reviews There are three big places for reviews that you need to be using. Google, Facebook and Yelp. You should be pointing your customers towards either one of these sites for all your reviews. Research has shown that over 90% of potential buyers read online reviews before choosing which company to do their business with.So dont make the mistake of brushing reviews off, if someone is happy with your product or service, just kindly ask them to leave a review. Most people are more than happy to as they know it helps. Optimizing for voice search Up until just a few years ago, the only way for users to enter information into search engines was to type. Those days ended when Google introduced their voice capabilities for searching.Today, more and more people are using their voice to search for the things they want. The catch is that the way people talk is usually different from the way they type. This could mean some revamping, or at least the addition of, more voice friendly keywords. You will have to stop thinking in textual terms and more in natural speaking patterns. Answer the Public is a good place to startThis is another topic that we have covered quite recently and its definitely something you should check out! Up until recently, the only way for people to find out something on a certain topic, was by typing it in to a search engine. Now that nearly everyone either owns a Google home, Amazon Alexa, or atleast a smartphone that is capable of doing voice search, those days are over.More and more people are begining to use voice search instead of typing in their questions. Summary So to sum it all up, to keep up with the digital times and make sure you don’t become a failing brick and mortar store, you need to be utilising local SEO. It is a bit of work and can be very time consuming, but the results are short of amazing. We have helped dozens of clients turn their businesses around in a relatively short time frame, just from the SEO we have done for them. If this sounds like something you would like to hear more about, get in touch with us! We love talking to our readers and love helping businesses of all sizes!

Six reasons you need to start using paid social media advertising

If you or your business owner are still on the fence about social media advertising, here are some figures for you. More than two billion people use social media every day. The average person spends 135 minutes per day on social networks. Also, the number of small businesses advertising on Facebook has doubled to 50 million in recent months.So if you aren’t using social media to advertise your products or services, you are at risk of falling behind the competition. Paid social media is quite different from traditional outbound advertising. Big data and machine learning allows you to target, reach and ultimately find your audience with ease. Each platform has been designed to bring results for different aspects of your business, such as branding, lead generation, website traffic, etc.These platforms even give you native analytics for insights into how they recommend increasing the performance of your advertising campaign. Whether you’re looking for reach, engagement, or sales – the case for advertising on social media marketing has never been stronger.Here are seven benefits to using paid social media advertising for your small business:• Magnify your reach• Laser targeting• Branding• Content marketing push• On the fly reach• Crazy market insights 1. Advertising on social media gives your brand instant visibility. Posts from friends and family now receive priority, so organic reach for brands on social media is declining steadily – especially on Facebook. The sheer volume of posts makes connecting with your audience a statistical improbability.Due to Facebook’s change in their algorithms, posts from family and friends now receive priority over brands and pages. We aren’t saying posting on social media is pointless, but if you are expecting big results from it, you need to be able to put money behind it. Paid ads are guaranteed a place in the user’s feed, this is what we mean by “putting money behind it”. Despite the sheer volume of posts and ads being ran on social media platforms, everyone gets to be seen.To reach the most amount of people, you need to find out where your audience spends their time online. Refer to the image below from Sproutsocial.com, this graphic depicts the platforms that each different age group use the most. 2. Laser Targeting If you take anything away from this, its that Paid social media advertising allows you to reach the exact people you want! Each platform offers a ridiculous amount of targeting options. This goes beyond just basic demographics, some targeting options include; interests, hobbies, personality types, and many, many more.Look Alike Audience targeting is one of the most powerful options you can use, it allows you to take a list of people. Let’s say, your customer purchase list. You can upload this file to Facebook and tell it to find people that are most like these people, the people that have already purchased from you. You can create retargeting campaigns by simply installing the Facebook Pixel onto your website. This will track users that have visited, added to cart, purchased etc. It can even track the exact product they looked at, so you can do things like create dynamic product ads that feature the specific products that each individual customers looked at. 3. Branding Social media is one of the most cost effective ways to create exposure and buzz around your brand. If you business is appearing on social platforms regularly, people will start to recognise you. Once you become a familiar name with your audience you will start to increase credibility, drive engagement, and eventually purchasing behaviour.Statistics show that 80% of users follow at least one brand on Instagram, of that at least 30% of users have purchased a product they found on the Instagram platform. So, when you are trying to create awareness, create ads that are both informative and memorable. One of the many companies that has used social media branding to their advantage is Sydney recording studio. 4. Content Marketing Push Social media is an ideal way to distribute your best content.Social media has become the best way to get your best content out there. According to Sprout Social, nearly 75% of users follow a brand because they’re interested in its product or service. Keep your followers engaged with educational content that will transform them into ready to go buyers!Social media based ads will help drive website traffic, boost your social media engagement and, if done correctly, improve your ROI for content marketing. 5. On The Fly Reach The dispersion of social media advertising isunrivaled, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that 80% of time spent on social media is spent on a mobile device.When people want to know, find, or purchase something, the first thing we do is pull out our phones. Social media advertising campaigns will help you either get that persons attention in that moment, or hopefully, you will already have made an impression on them with a previous campaign and you will be the first business they come to. 6. Crazy Market Insights Facebook analytics platform is insane, you can find out just about every detail you could ever want or need. How did your audience react to your ad? Which platform worked best? Which ad graphic performed best? Did an image or video convert better? You can set up customised on the fly analytics that will give you live reports such as clicks, comments, website visits, conversion, any many, many more.The optimisation you can do with your ads is unparalleled with Facebook insights. Once you know your exact perfect performing audience, nothing can stop your growth. Why Pay for Social Media Advertising? Like we mentioned earlier, organic reach on social platforms is continuing to fall. Paid social advertising is what keeps your pages alive. As a result of this, businesses, small and large are having to change their social media strategies.You may have noticed some of the big fortune 500 companies showing up in your newsfeed this past couple year. The time is NOW if you want to even be able to afford using these platforms. As more and more companies with larger and larger budgets continue

Why Search Intent Is So Important For SEO

The importance of understanding intent for SEO Google’s search engine is getting more and more sophisticated when it comes to measuring how closely a page matches intent, so here are our tips on how to build a better strategy for it. Google is always updating their algorithms and there are constant innovations in the way we search (mobile, voice, etc), that and the evolving user behavior keep all of us SEO guys on our toes.The dynamic nature of the industry requires us to continuously improve and learn new skills to keep ahead, or even just keep up for that matter. However, we can’t get to carried away worrying and chasing new strategies that we forget or overlook the fundamentals of SEO. The two most important questions we always ask when clients bring us a list of target keywords and phrases are: 01 Should your site or page rank there? 02 What will we achieve by ranking for these? This forces us, and our clients to analyse the audience and search behaviors before deciding on which keywords we are going to implement in the SEO strategy.The basis for any successful SEO strategy is a firm understanding of searcher intent. Types of searcher intent Searcher intent refers to the “why” behind a given search query — what is the searcher hoping to find? Searcher intent can be categorised in four ways: Informational Navigational intent Commercial intent Transactional intent Informational People making informational searches are generally looking to learn about a certain subject or topic. These are the most common types of searches and usually, bring the most amount of search volume. Informational searches also are a great way for your business to be found by a new audience. If you can provide these searchers with an answer to their question, you have a very good chance that they will turn to you in the future on a similar topic. Navigational intent Searchers with navigational intent already know which company or brand they are looking for, but they need help with navigation to their desired page or website. These searches often involve queries that feature brand names or specific products or services. These SERPs typically feature homepages, or specific product or service pages. They might also feature mainstream news coverage of a brand. Commercial intent Commercial queries exist as a sort of hybrid intent — a mix of informational and transactional. These searches have transactional intent. The searcher is looking to make a purchase, but they are also looking for informational pages to help them make their decision. The results associated with commercial intent usually have a mix of informational pages and product or service pages. Transactional intent Transactional queries have the most commercial intent as these are searchers looking to make a purchase. Common words associated with transactional searches include [price] or [sale]. Transactional SERPs are typically 100 percent commercial pages (products, services and subscription pages or lead capturing pages). Categorising keywords and search terms in these four areas makes it easier to optimise the landing page, understanding what searchers want and ensuring the information you are providing is relevant. Optimising for intent: Should my page rank there? With a clear understanding of the different types of intent, we can dive into optimisation. As mentioned earlier, when a client comes to us with a set of target keywords, we like to ask them “Should your website be ranking for these search results?” Asking this question leads to other important questions: 01 What is the intent of these searches? 02 What does Google believe the intent is? 03 What type of result are people searching for? Before you can optimize your pages for specific keywords and themes, you need to optimize them for intent. The best place to start your research is the results themselves. Simply analyzing the current ranking pages will answer your questions about intent. Are the results blog posts? Reviews or “Top 10” lists? Product pages? Once you have had a look into the given search term and find that all of the results are in-depth articles and blogs, the chances of you ranking your product page are just about none. The opposite is also true if all the results are product pages, then don’t bother trying to rank an article. But what you can do, is optimise your pages to start showing up for the appropriate search terms now that you have gathered the necessary data. Google always has the user first in mind, and will always (or do its best to) show pages that answer the searchers intent. So you want to make sure that you have optimised your page to help the searchers achieve whatever it is that they wanted to when they made that search. On-page optimisation and backlinks are important, but you’ll never be able to rank high if you don’t address intent. Doing this research will also help inform content creators on what topics to write about. If you don’t have pages for your industries major topics, with comparable content to your competitors. You need to create one. While doing this research you will find a few opportunities where the current search results don’t do a great job of answering the searchers intent. You can easily capitalise on this and create that piece of content they are looking for. Answering intent: What will this accomplish? A key follow-up question we also ask is, “What will ranking accomplish?” The simple answer we typically get is “more traffic.” But what does that really mean? Depending on the intent associated with the given keyword, that traffic could lead to brand discovery, authority and trust building, or even direct conversion. When assigning KPI’s you need to consider intent and set your expectations accordingly. One thing to keep in mind is that not all traffic has to convert. A balanced SEO strategy will target multiple stages of the buying journey. Building brand image is essential to any business success and we have seen it impacting click-through rates by 200% – 300%!

Is your website generating sales for your business? This might be why it isn’t!

We are going to be covering three topics in this. Improving your website page load speed, improving your mobile friendliness and having a clear call to action. When you combine all three of these you will have yourself a very high converting website. Obviously, results depend on the industry and other aspects of your business, But in terms of increasing your websites conversion rate, these are the three major aspects of that. Improving website page load speed Slow speeds kill conversions. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will lose almost half of your visitors before they even get to your website. This is obviously a massive deal if you are using your website as a means of getting leads or customers. Another study shows that for the customers that do stick around after the 3 seconds mark, up to 79% of customers said they wouldn’t return to the site because of poor performance. Optimise Images Images play a huge part to websites. They allow you to showcase your services or products and allow the customers to see what you are selling and get a feel for your business. Your website should have nice images, but you have to make sure they are optimised correctly. I’ll give you an example; Your website probably has images taken with either a proper camera or just your smartphone, generally speaking, the resolution of these is anywhere between 2000×2000 to 4000×4000. Which probably look great, but the website itself is usually only displaying these at 100×100 to 400×400. This can massively slow down your load times because when a customer comes to your website, that page is essentially downloading all of those images for the customer to see. This can really add up depending on the number of images. Make sure you go through your images and optimise them! Use a simple website design Simplifying the design of your website can increase your site speed. One of the reasons for this is because it reduces the number of HTTP requests your website needs to make to load the page. A HTTP request is made for all the different elements that make up your website, this includes, JavaScript, CSS and image files. When you reduce the amount of “stuff” on your website, the number of requests go down which will cause your page load speed time to decrease. A more simple website design has been proved to convert better than their visually complex alternatives. When too much is going on, customers tend to get confused or overwhelmed when trying to find out simple information. This will potentially cause them to leave the site to find out information elsewhere, or even worse, go to your competitor’s website. A simple design allows the customer to find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently without wasting their time. Enable caching Most customers don’t purchase or call up on their first visit to your website. They might be at work or in the middle of doing something else while on your site. That or they may just be researching their options for the particular service or product you provide. If you enable caching, you can massively reduce the page load time for repeat visitors. When you enable caching on your website, the visitors will store elements from your website on their hard drive, known as “Cache”. The next time they come to your website, their browser can load the page without needing to re-download all the elements, and as mentioned in step 2, decreases the HTTP requests. Which decreases page load speed. Improve Mobile Friendliness Its no secret that everyone has a mobile phone, so your website NEEDS to be optimised for them. If you haven’t changed your website since you first made it, then you need to make sure that when you do update it (You need to asap) that you consider the following tips Im about to share with you. Another massive change that happened pretty recently, is that Google changed its search algorithm so that mobile websites are indexed before desktop. This is bad news for desktop only websites as if you don’t have a mobile optimised website they will actually lower your ranking to make room for the ones that do, this might explain why your organic search traffic has dropped significantly Optimize for touch screen One of the biggest differences between your normal desktop website and mobile websites is that the visitors will be using the touchscreen and not a mouse to browse around. People are used to swiping and pinching in and out to zoom, so you need to make sure the website is interactive and respond the way people expect it to. Choose the font sizes All too often I see websites with either way to big of fonts that barely fit on the screen or it is far too small and you spend all your time zooming in and out. Make sure that you test your website on multiple different phones with different size screens to ensure everything is easy to read and actually fits on the screen! Don’t have too many popups The last thing people want is to have to try and click the tiny little “x” to close a popup or try to navigate around something trying not to trigger a popup. Nowadays people seem to have a bunch of different popups trying to get an email on their website expecting people to either fill out a form or click on it to buy something else. Keep it simple and clean, make that information part of the page if it’s so important. You can usually get away with having email popups, chat boxes and alerts on the desktop version because it doesn’t take up to much screen real estate. But on mobile, you have to make the most of room you have. Having a clear CTA (Call To Action) Having a clear call to action is probably the most important and directly related

Google’s Mobile First Indexing – How Does This Affect Your Business?

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you would be well aware of the way in which mobile phones have become an essential part of our daily lives. Many people can’t live without checking in, logging on, reviewing a feed, checking email or simply looking at something, anything! Australia remains one of the leading global adopters of the smartphone and 88 percent of Australians now own one, with market growth being driven by older generations.[1] This is thanks to the infrastructure and relative high-income levels of Australia allowing smartphone purchase, not to mention the increasing adoption by older Australians as a way to communicate with loved ones, stay connected and engaged. Meanwhile, in the USA, a 2017 study showed that 63% of traffic was from mobile devices, up from 57% in 2016[2]. It comes as no great surprise that Google is looking to capitalise upon the global trend in mobile search optimisation and personalisation by ensuring the web is geared for mobile in a way like never seen before. [1] Deloitte: Smart everything, everywhere: Mobile Customer Survey 2017, The Australian Cut [2] https://www.stonetemple.com/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-study/ What is all the fuss about? Mobile First Indexing as the name suggests has Google placing your mobile site as the first point of contact within their index and the platform for ranking determination. The great element of ‘Mobile First’ is that your regular site can be included – which is especially important if you don’t have a mobile optimised site. However like anything in Google, if you don’t play the game and provide an experience – that being a mobile optimised site – the Google bots will punish you in the rankings, no matter how good your desktop experience may be. What does Mobile First Indexing mean for my business? Google adapting Mobile First Indexing means a word many businesses are afraid of, change. That is not to say the world is about to end as we know it, because these changes are only just coming off the production line now so your changes will have little impact if any now. What can you do to prepare? According to Google themselves, there are series of crutial elements that businesses can start preparing for to ensure that you are continuing to drive your organic and paid SEO traffic, converting and driving your bottom line (whatever that may be in your particular field) and these will differ depending on the following elements: If you have a responsive site or dynamic serving site, where the majority of your content is similar across both mobile and desktop sites – you are in the clear. If you have a site where mobile and desktop are different, this is where changes are recommended to be made. If you are the holder of a separate mobile site to your desktop, then now is the time to start planning, updating and upgrading to ensure you don’t get left behind. Here are seven of the key elements you should consider with the Mobile First Indexing[1]: 1 Content Ensure your mobile site has high quality, SEO-rich content such as videos, text and images. 2 Structured Data Your structured data mark-ups should be the same on both your mobile and desktop sites, don’t use unnecessary data if it’s not relevant to the context of the page. 3 Meta Data Your meta descriptions and title tag need to be ‘equivalent’. That is not exactly the same, as you can still use shorted word counts, however, it’s imperative you optimise. 4 Social Metadata Ensuring that your social metadata is included on your mobile site as well as your desktop is vital to the success of your site as the rise and rise of social media continues. 5 XML and media sitemaps Any and all links to sitemaps need to be valid from your mobile site including links to trust signals and robot directives your developers may have built in. 6 Search Console verification Ensure that you verify your mobile site in Google Search Console, not just your desktop site. 7 Server capacity This is one outside of your control, but in Australia many of our servers are slow at the best of times, so ensure that your services can handle the increase crawl rate if you are running a separate host for your mobile site. Does any of this have you confused? Even if you work in IT, Google or one of the many large industry players – most of whom dictate how we do business over the internet – keeping up with the changes can be a struggle at the best of times. For small & medium businesses, even large corporations it is difficult to comprehend how you can have the time to keep up with all the bot changes, algorithms, meta data and of course mobile indexing, while also running your business of course. The first – and in many cases the most important – touchpoint for customers, marketing, sales, you name it, it is vital that you do everything in your power to ensure it is running smoothly. Furthermore, if you have invested large sums of money in SEO and desktop optimisation only to find out the goal posts have now been moved, you don’t want to lose all the eCommerce or web-traffic momentum your business has established so far. Speaking with an expert is your first step, understanding the changes, if you are affected and how you and your business can take the best, most cost-effective and efficient solution for your particular business. DGreat Solutions has been in the industry for a long period of time and understand the constant fluctuation in Google’s algorithm, which has helped us to position our strategies in growing online visibilities to be dynamic. Our team of specialists are intelligent individuals who are highly skilled and educated in web development and search engine optimisation. If you’re looking for support for Google’s Mobile First Indexing and would like to ensure your business is optimised we can help. Get in touch today to arrange your

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