It’s every owner’s wish to see their business up and running and going gangbusters. But how do you maintain that momentum? You launch a dream project backed by your belief, skill and passion that is in demand in the market, your business is a success, people are walking through the door and sales are going well. However, over time, you find that there are similar products launching in the market and people are always curious and keen on the ‘latest’ new ‘thing’, resulting in a decrease in your sales numbers. What can you do to reignite interest in your business? The first idea that should come to mind is… ‘My business needs to be online to attract a new and wider reaching audience’.
This leads to the question: ‘How do I create an effective website’?
Websites are a group of web pages that are hosted on a web server. You need to purchase a hosting domain URL to enable your website to ‘go live’ and choose a hosting provider to host the site. This is a highly underrated but important step. Hosting with a company is dodgy will give you nothing but grief. Their servers will often be unreliable and, whilst you got the ‘dream deal’ in terms of price per annum, you will have nothing but headaches going down this route.
There are many programming languages and pre-built platforms for developing websites. ‘Which website development platform should I choose’? Our favorite is WordPress. Trying to save money by using a free template based program and doing it yourself is once again a big mistake. ‘Would you try to build your house yourself if you were not a bricklayer’? – well this is actually the same. Setting your website up the wrong way can make it invisible to Google and other search engines amongst other negative aspects including actually being penalised and being sent to the far reaches of Google.
WordPress is the most sound choice when building your site for these reasons:
- WordPress is an open source Content Management System. It makes use of PHP programming language with MYSQL/Maria DB database.
- Designers make use of themes and plugins (often free) in WordPress which help them to create attractive and responsive websites without much coding.
- Many customisation options are available and any type of design can be developed according to the client’s requirement.
- WordPress themes and plugins are constantly updated to include new features and fixes.
- WordPress websites are extremely easy and require a low cost to maintain.
- There are some very good plugins for site safety.
Other than WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Weebly is pretty popular and you could choose any one of those but be warned, they may not take you where you want to go.
If you are still confused or if you want to create a professional website that will actually achieve sales and get up in the first pages of Google (if you purchase an SEO package with us), then you can always contact us – contact@bygeorgedigital.com.au. We have excellent packages for websites starting from $2500. We can get your business website online quickly and efficiently – you hardly need to do anything, just leave it to us.
Website Security:
Website security is very important for all websites, especially for sites that store and handle personal information. Make sure you purchase themes from authorised sources and do not download any free themes to avoid hackers getting into your website.
Logos:
A logo is an identity for your business. Every business, big or small, needs a logo. Once again you can choose free logo creating software available online or go to a cheap overseas designer – once again you will get what you pay for… A professional logo is vital for good branding and recognition in your chosen market. Think of Nike, NAB, Coke, KFC – do you think they would entrust the design of their brand to someone offering to knock them up something on the cheap?…
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Now, there are millions of new websites created every single day. Creating a website is easy, but creating a website that will ensure conversions IS NOT easy. First, you need to ensure that search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo know that your website is available for everyone to access. Their search bots have to be able to ‘see’ it and to consider it a favourable website for useful information within your area.
So how do you tell Google for instance? That’s where the Google Webmaster tools come into the picture. Google Search Console accounts help website owners to understand if Google has a problem in crawling and indexing your web pages. There are a lot of options available on the search console that will let you know if something on your website seems wrong or needs improvement. We specialise in managing this resource for our customers as it can be very confusing.
Secondly, you need to optimise your website to appear on the first page of Google or any search engine’s result page. Since most of the users in the world rely on Google to search for any information, we will concentrate on Google. What exactly does the term search engine optimisation or SEO mean? According to Wikipedia, the definition of SEO is “Search engine optimisation – this is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results and excludes direct traffic and the purchase of paid placement”.
There are more than 200+ factors determining the rank of a website. For example, consider that you have a website selling groceries online and you are based in Hobart, Tasmania. Whenever a potential customer searches for the keyword like “grocery online” “grocery home delivery”, “Online groceries Hobart” or for any other grocery product, your website should come in first place on the first page of google. There are many tips and honest tricks in order for this to happen, this changes from one website to another. Hence it is difficult to explain in detail. Having said that, there are a few points though that you could implement on your website in order for it to rank better irrespective of the type of business you are in.
-
Title Tags:
Title’s help defining what the web page is about. Having a meaningful and relevant title will not only help Google to crawl and index your content better, but also will result in achieving a greater CTR (Click Through Rate). CTR is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions. Impressions are the number of times your website has shown in the search result page for a particular user query.
-
Meta Description:
A meta description is not exactly a ranking factor, but it is very important from a CTR perspective. Make sure you add a precise and apt meta description to all your web pages. In case the meta description is missing or if Google feels the meta description you have mentioned is not very relevant, then Google will choose to display a part of the content from your web page as the meta description.
-
Website Content:
Google’s sole aim is to provide the exact information for what the user is searching for. Hence your website content is by far, the most important aspect when it comes to optimising for search engines. Google considers the E-A-T rule when it comes to judging content and deciding which website to rank more highly. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Make sure your content is keyword rich and complies with the E-A-T rule.
-
Keyword Research and Keyword Difficulty:
For every industry, there will be some keywords that will be beneficial for your business to rank for. If you are a digital marketing agency in Hobart, you might want to rank for keywords like “digital marketing agency” “SEO agency Hobart” and so on…. You will need to do thorough research on the keywords your industry uses and try to include them on your website. Avoid keyword stuffing -this can be a reason for Google to consider your content as low quality. Google ranks only high quality content and so you should probably be working on your keywords and content if you feel your website is not performing well for a lot of keywords across the site. Sometimes keyword difficulty or popularity can be a reason for your web pages taking time to rank for a particular keyword. For example, keywords like “insurance” “digital marketing” are of high difficulty and content around these keywords will take a longer time to rank due to a lot of competition for these keywords.
-
Website Structure
Website structure is the way all your web pages are put in place to form a whole functional site. It is like a blueprint of your website. Having a simple, clear, and easy to navigate website structure is something expected by all visitors to your website, not just the search engines. Make sure all your menus are short as if there are too many levels the Google bots will find it difficult to crawl and index the web pages or they may not index them at all.
-
Page speed
Page speed is considered an important ranking factor. Understand what is important on your page to be loaded first and try to improve your page speed. Make use of GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Page Speed Insights to understand the areas to improve the website page and load speed. Any web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load is considered slow. Also make sure the website is loading faster on a mobile device since a growing high percentage of user searches are on mobile devices these days.
Search Engine Optimisation is a long, regular and continuous process. Google regularly rolls out updates to its ranking algorithm which will definitely affect many websites across the world. Care has to be taken to monitor the websites during these times and make them stable once the Google update completes. There are many tools like Moz, SEMrush, Screamingfrog, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and so on… that help in monitoring your websites, rankings, and to understand the areas of improvement required.
You then need to consistently work on your site to make your website the best service provider in your marketplace or area of expertise. It is tough to achieve all of this single-handedly and that’s where a web design and Digital Marketing Agency like ours comes into the picture. By George Digital Australia is your one-stop-shop for all your website needs. Georgie Fenton – Founder and Owner of By George Digital, is an Australian expert trained in the UK. She has 30+ years of experience in Graphic Design solutions for business brands, website development and online Digital Marketing (SEO), etc.
Our award winning agency can take care of all your design and marketing needs as a ‘One Stop Shop’:
- Logo design
- Brochure design
- Website design
- Website keyword-rich content
- Blog writing
- Setting up Google My Business and Google Analytics account
- Monitoring your Google Search Console accounts
- Monitoring your website ranks and improve them
- All SEO
- Make your website result in better conversions
- Avoid Google penalties for your website
- Help your website recover from a Google Penalty
- Fix a hacked website
- Google/Facebook/Linked In Ad Campaigns, Social Media and more…
