Updating Your Website Without Sacrificing Your SEO

We all need to keep up to date with web trends these days, and usually that means every three to five years you should consider redesigning your website. But often a client does not think what impact this will have on their SEO (if it’s optimised well to begin with).

Why should you consider SEO in a redesign?

In short, because you have a lot to lose. Let’s say your website’s ranking really well. Rankings are strong, organic traffic is flowing and revenue is growing. Do you really want to undo all that hard and expensive work?

However, by thinking strategically, you can take the opportunity to improve a site’s performance after a redesign.

This diagram shows a steady increase in traffic followed (from the red circle) even during the re-indexing phase. If you do a redesign correclty, you won’t lose any traffic or rankings; in fact, you’ll gain them.

Below is some tips that can help you understand the test site being built and your current site from an SEO point of view. This is ciritcal when changing your website around.

Tip 1 – Think about your SEO

First thing is to think about SEO. Very often clients don’t stop to consider the impact SEO has changing their website. They chuck away valuable content from historical pages or completely change every single URL without redirecting the old ones.

This happens because they misunderstand how Google reads a website and how URLs hold credibility. It’s no fault of their own, it happens.

Tip 2 – Crawling the existing site

You should know what your site’s structure looks like, you will fail if you don’t. Grabbing it’s meta data and URLs is critical to identifying exactly what is changing and why.

How do I do that?

Your SEO crawl will give you a road map of what your site is currently set out. The best way to do this is to use a tool like Screaming Frog. Once you have the current site’s meta data and structure, you will know how to match with the new site.

Tip 3 – Auditing the old site

Free tools like Woorank will do, but we advise you to get your hands dirty so to speak, and manually do it yourself. There’s nothing like getting into the nitty gritty of your site to find any problems.

Why audit the site?

You need to know what search engines like and don’t like about your site. This helps you recognise any problems, but also enables you to see which areas must be retained.

What am I looking for?

Here are some tips to check. Using Screaming Frog, I advise checking the following:

Duplicate page titles
Missing H1 tags
Duplicate H1 tags
Multiple H1 tags
Missing meta descriptions
Missing page titles
Duplicate meta descriptions
Canonical tags
Canonicalisation
Broken internal/external links
Image alt text

You should also be checking for:

Robots.txt
Site speed and performance using Google’s PageSpeed Tools
Duplicate content (do exact match search “insert content” or use Copyscape)
Pages indexed by Google (do a site: command in Google)
Site speed and performance (here’s a tool to check)
URL structure
XML sitemaps
Pages indexed by Google

Tip 4 – Noindex you’re test site

If you’re working on your test site, you do not want Google to index it. If you have added new content, it will get indexed. So when the new site is ready to launch, the new content will have no value because it has been duplicated because of the index while you were working on it.

A site can be noindexed in two ways by your web developer.

If you have WordPress you can simply check the box that says: “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” under the Settings tab.

This adds the following code in the <head> of every page:

You have a second option which is to block the site in the Robots.txt file. This is a little tricky however; which is why most CMS have a box-ticking option which is easier.

If your CMS doesn’t allow for this, you can put the following in your Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Tip 5 – Crawling the test site

You need to understand how your test site will be structured. Using a site crawler crawl the test site again to see how it looks in comparison to your current site.

What do to:

Open the first crawl of your current site and make a copy. Click “Save+As” and name the file for example “Current Site Crawl for Editing”. This will be your editable copy.
Then crawl the test site. Export the test site crawl and save this one as “Test Site Crawl”. Make a copy and name it “Test Site Crawl for Editing”— this is the one we’re going to use.
Take the new created old site crawl (Current Site Crawl for Editing) and do a find and replace on all the URLs in a program like Excel. Then replace your domain name: “domain.com” with your test server’s domain: “test.domain.com”.
Select all the URLs and copy them into a txt file. Save this one as the “Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog”. You should have the following files:
- Current Site Crawl(xls)
- Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
- Test Site Crawl(xls)
- Test Site Crawl for Editing(xls)
- Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
Using Screaming Frog, find the Mode in the menu bar and select List. The system will change, and you’ll be able to upload a .txt file.
Locate your txt file (Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog) of all the URLs you just changed and load that into Screaming Frog. Then hit Start.
If followed correctly, you will end up with all the URLs being crawled. If it didn’t, you have to go back and make sure you didn’t miss anything. You will need to allow the crawler to crawl blocked/noindexed URLs. Click Configuration and Spider. Then you’ll find a tick box that says Ignore robots.txt. You may need to tick this. On the same part in the tab called Advanced, you’ll see Respect Noindex; you may need to un-tick this, too. Have a look below at the example.

Now download all the HTML files and save it as an Excel file. Name it “Final Crawled Test Site”. This can be the test crawl you’ll check later. But also, hold onto the very first crawl we did of the test site (Test Site Crawl).

You’ll have the following docs:

Current Site Crawl(xls)
Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
Test Site Crawl(xls)
Test Site Crawl for Editing(xls)
Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
Final Crawled Test Site (xls)

Now you have the data in Excel format, and you can see what works on the test site. This allows you to understand what’s missing from the test site that is on the current site.

Tip 6 – 404 time

If your’e pages have a 404 error, it means that the page doesn’t exist anymore. So we’ll need to do one of two things:

Create this URL on the test server.
Redirect the old URL to the test server’s new URL.

Here’s an example of a 404:

What do to with a URL that isn’t on your current site?

Like with any page on your website, it has to be optimised correctly.

When you redirect pages to a new site you will lose around 10%-30% of your link equity. But you’re giving search engines the best opportunity to bring over your old site’s strong reputation.

Tip 7 – Checking all the additional checks

Rank check

A rank check measures how you’re site performs for a host of keywords in the search engines. You can use this data as a comparison for the new site. If things change, you can react and identify the problems when you check the results.

This is what to look out for:

If a keyword jumps from page 1 to page 10, you could have a problem. Look out for any big or unusual movements by checking the following:

Did the URL change?
Did you change any of the meta data?
Has the page lost all of it’s content?
Is there a redirect in place?
Does it have a noindex tag in place?

Content

Don’t delete anything you don’t need to. You might think your old blog posts are old and useless, but they are all adding to the credibility of your site. Without these, you’ll lose a chunk of SEO value.

Google Analytics code

Make sure you place your Google analytics code back in the <head> section of you’re site. It’s really important to check the e-commerce tracking and goals if you currently have those in place.

Unblocking the site

It’s time to check the new site to see if it’s allowing search engines to index it. Just do the reverse of blocking the site to what you did before . Whichever method you used to block it, just do the reverse. If you don’t do this it will create big problems.

In summary checklist

Here is a checklist to use that will help you run through it again.

Think about your SEO from the start of the website

Crawl the current site

Audit your existing site

Stop the test site from being indexed

Crawl the test site

Find and replace URLs

Check 404s on test site

Optimise all new pages

June 19, 2017 admin Google, SEO, Web design Comments Off

How Video Creates SEO Results

Video has become a very important feature for anyone who is concerned with a good SEO ranking, conversion rates and brand recognition. That’s pretty much all of us.

So how does video marketing affect your website’s SEO, and how can you use it in your content marketing strategy? Below are some key SEO tips, and some practices for using video to climb the search engine ladder:

Higher CTR
Lower bounce rates
Quality backlinks
Improved SERP rank

Videos Rank in SERPs

Google SERPs prioritise video results. Ranking on Google’s first page is a SEO priority. Pages with videos are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Why is video marketing more likely to rank than say plain text based content? There are a number of factors that influence ranking, one is the recent Google search algorithm update – Hummingbird – which prizes “quality content” over keyword optimisation. It’s all about “quality content”.

Google cares less about whether you have optimised each individual page on your site to using keywords, it’s more about whether your sites content answers the question presented by your user.

80% of the video content served up in SERPs are informational videos. Results aren’t simply viral lolcat videos, but rather more useful content that answer a user enquiries. And this is where video marketing is perfect tool for explaining your service easy and eye catching.

Here are some best practices for video SERP:

Keep Your Videos Short – Keep them around 4 – 5 minutes (attention span fall after 4-5 minutes).
Create Rich-Video Snippets – This is the thumbnail beside the description of the content on the page. Follow this guide to creating a video sitemap.
Transcribe Your Script – Google is good at parsing video content for meanings, transcribing text helps the spiders crawl your content for searcher relevance.

Videos Make Users Click

Study show that search results with videos have a “40% higher click-through rate.” This happens because of rich-video snippets beside search results on Google’s window.

These thumbnails show quality video content, and make results with embedded videos stand out in a text-only field.

YouTube automatically makes these thumbnails (because it understands how powerful snippets really are), but don’t rely on YouTube to do the work for you. Rich snippets from your YouTube channel can take your user directly to YouTube – not your website.

If you have worked hard to create a quality video, so sit back and enjoy the rewards by embedding the video directly to your website – like on a home page with a clear call to action, Vimeo and YouTube offer increased reach, but nothing beats the SEO benefits of a home page video marketing right on your site.

Here are some best practices for High CTR:

Embed Video Directly to Your Site – Don’t slow your site down by uploading video to your server.
Rich Video Snippets – Entice your users into clicking with an alluring preview.

Videos Can Make Your Site “Sticky”

The average attention span online is less than ten seconds. A high bounce rate is when people leave your website after viewing a page, this will hurt your site’s SERP ranking, and people leaving isn’t the best way to sell a product. A engaging video is the easiest way to make your customer stay at your page.

Google introduced a new metric into their search ranking algorithm called “dwell time,” this monitors the amount of time a user spends on a website after click-through from the SERP. The longer the user spends on a website, the more likely the content is relevant. Google gives relevant websites more weight via a “Page Authority.”

Page Authority

Visitors who view a video stay two minutes longer and are 65% more likely to buy than other site visitors.” Combine a high time with a low bounce rate, and you’ll have a amazing one-two SERP ranking pull.

Here are some best practices to reduce a bounce rate:

Embed Video “Above the Fold” – The fold is the imaginary line where a user has to scroll to see more content. On most web browsers it’s around 550 – 600 pixels.
Make Sure You Use Accurate Video Titles – Don’t trick users with misleading headlines. No one likes being misled, and if they feel betrayed, they will never return.
Panic Not – A 50% bounce rate is ok.

Videos Can Build Links

Having a video compared to just text will nearly triple the average number of linking sites. Video generate links.

You see people are the ones creating links to your content – not the bots – which mean people love video. Content we create is for the user.

We live in a world where articles get skimmed, videos are lanterns of conciseness, and also a signal of intent that says yes, I want to communicate something to you. This “content” is going to be something you will enjoy. Videos are easy to consume, and that is why they generate audiences.

There is a saying “A video is worth 1.8 million words”. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video shoots at 30 frames per second, so a 60-second video really does have the equivalent of 1.8 million words.

People like video because they are useful. People don’t share content that is rubbish. So, to get the success you’re looking for, it’s really important that you really think about who you want to share the video with.

Video can communicate useful information easily, they allow people a chance to sample the content before committing to reading lengthy and sometimes boring content, and a quality video with a specific marketing goal creates high backlinks to your site.

Here are some best practices for Link-Building:

Embed Your Video – Don’t just add a link to YouTube because it won’t help your SEO.
Focus The Video on a Single Topic – Keep it simple, but entertaining.
Create High Quality Video – A Amateur video can make you look unprofessional, and that’s bad for business.

Quality video will improve the way you approach SEO. That in itself is worth more than all the search engine tips you can find.

May 16, 2017 admin SEO, Video Comments Off

Speed Is the New SEO

If you’re website doesn’t load in one second, you’re web developer is building it wrong.

We are in the age of mobile devices. Nearly every person in this world uses a mobile device when looking for information online now. So for this reason alone, businesses have catered to the needs of the mobile users worldwide to ensure a positive and satisfying experience. Google gives a mobile-friendly site a boost in search engine ranking in relation to its recent algorithm update.

Google has updated the page speed ranking factor to look at the page speed of your mobile site.

But once a business has gained a competitive advantage by making its website mobile-friendly, what should be next?

Speed, and why it matters

Page speed is the to the time it takes a page to display its content (i.e. text, images, etc).

Google uses a point-based system that ranges from 0-100 that looks at two main components of page speed: time to above – the-fold load and time to full page load.

When optimised correctly, page speed can work amazingly for your brand. Fast sites that load faster, receive 25% more views in ads and lower bounce rates.

That’s why your page speed directly affects your sales and conversions. Basically, the faster your web page loads, the more revenue you’ll make.

Optimisation for speed

The first step to optimising a website’s speed is to analyse its current page loading. Then, if and after confirming it has a slow loading time, businesses can get started with speeding up their sites by optimising the images, using a caching system and minifying code.

One great way to guarantee a fast website is to use a website builder that has pre-designed with speed in mind. Then you don’t have to optimise page speed yourself, which can take a lot of time and effort, and knowledge.

There are a bunch of website builders that vary in performance in speed, these includes SquareSpace, WordPress, Weebly, Wix and Duda.

How fast does the site need to be?

Google looks for a minimum speed of less than half a second. But, to be fair they have set the threshold to around 2 seconds. Beyond that, your site is slow.

Because the best way to building speed is starting with a CMS platform that has already been optimised, we need to look at the actual Google PageSpeed Insights test results of the above leading selected website builders out in the market.

WordPress

WordPress scores 62/100 on a mobile device and 83/100 on a desktop. This was based on WordPress first theme (Edin) for businesses.

Weebly

Weebly scores 48/100on a mobile device and 58/100 on a desktop. The was based on Weebly’s LoveSeat theme.

Wix

Wix scores 48/100 on mobile device and 71/100 on a desktop. The was based on its Barista theme.

Duda

Duda scores 91/100 on mobile device and 97/100 on a desktop. The was based on one of Duda’s websites.

Out of the four, Duda has the highest score for speed performance.

Selling Speed to your clients

Small businesses have accepted mobile optimisation, and therefore followed the best steps to gain a loyal customer. The next ranking factor is page speed. While brands can tap into methods to speed up their sites, building their online businesses from the start while using a platform that’s designed to the latest speed advantages puts them ahead of the race.

Customers are making quick judgments about you the moment they arrive at your site. A few seconds of delay creates a strong negative impression.

Summary

So, speed is important and does already play an important role in SEO. Page speed is fast becoming the critical element that any online business cannot ignore. Make your customers web experiences enjoyable. Don’t give them any reason to choose your competitors because you failed to optimise your site for speed. Using a platform built for speed is a sensible way for you to guarantee a better and higher conversion, a better Google ranking makes customer satisfaction.

April 11, 2017 admin SEO, WordPress Comments Off

How to create a High Converting Landing Page

How do you create a high converting landing page that drives maximum conversion rates in Google?

What’s a landing page?

A landing page is what your customers view after clicking through Google’s search engine.

These web pages are designed for one purpose: to convert a visitor.

Whether that conversion goal is to get people to either buy a product, or to book an appointment, it can be done by strategically arranging elements on your landing page.

What’s the difference between a landing page and all the other pages on my website?

Most businesses have an “About us” page, a variation of a “What we offer” or “Services” page, and a web page dedicated to your customers. These pages, help make your website — the purpose of which is to teach your customers more about you’re business.

Landing pages work different. They’re designed specifically to convert visitors into leads, which means they need to be persuasive than any of the other pages on your website.

The people who land on these pages don’t want to learn your vision, or meet your team. They’re there because they’ve been enticed by your promotion and want to see what you’re offering.

So how do we go about creating a landing page layout that will boost the chances your visitors convert?

The best landing page layout, above the fold:

If you want to make a good impression, place your important elements above the fold. They will help you quickly convey the benefit of your offer, and show prospects what they need to do to claim it.

Your logo

If you don’t include your logo somewhere on the top of your landing page, your’e visitors may wonder who are you. It’s important to practice consistent branding, so that customers know they haven’t been redirected to some spammy site.

Like most sites, this company has placed their logo in the upper-left corner

You need to do the same, because the upper left corner is where most of your customers will look to find you.

No navigation

A landing page is a little bit like a well-designed trap. Your customers should be able to get in, but not leave, unless they buy.

That means no navigation menu across the top for visitors to escape with. The only three ways they should be able to get off your landing page is:

By buying
Or by hitting the “x” in the corner of their screen to exit the browser window
Or by clicking the back button

A strong call to action

Your call to action should be the first thing your customers read when your page loads. Use big, bold text to draw attention, and communicate your unique selling proposition in a way that explains how it will benefit them.

Here’s is a great example from Five Four Club:

Call to Action headlines

Their unique selling proposition is that they deliver your clothing to your doorstep. So how does that benefit the customer?

They don’t have to go actually go shopping.

When thinking of your headline, think about the problem your customers face, and communicate how your business is going to solve it for them.

Without a great call-to-action, your landing page is could fail.

Remember, the entire purpose of a landing page is to get your customers to take action, and this is how it happens. Your visitors have to click a button to convert.

If you have a contact form, position your Call To Action button just below.

Engaging media

More and more these days we process the world visually through gestures and facial expressions. We’ve evolved to prefer images to text when processing information.

The quickest and most efficient way to get information across is to show it.

A Hero shot helps your customers imagine their lives after they have bought your product; infographics like charts and graphs help them better conceptualise the information; videos and case studies help them understand your product in a easy way.

Engaging Media

A detailed form

You may or may not require your customrers to hand over information about themselves in exchange for what you’re business is offering.

If so, you will need a lead capture form, like the one below from Salesforce:

lead capture form

These contain a combination of fields, allowing customers to submit more information about themselves, but forces them to at least give you the bare minimum you need.

Include a lot of required fields and you’ll get more information from your customers who may convert. More information allows you to deliver marketing messages, on top of giving you a greater insight to your target audience.

But, sometimes the more you ask, the likely your customers are to fill out the form properly. They may not have the time to finish a form that is too long.

On the flip side, the less you ask, the more likely it is your customers may finish filling out the form, which means the more leads you may generate. But, they won’t be as much as the leads you generate from a longer form.

Benefit-oriented copy

“What’s in it for me?” That’s what your customers want to know when they land on your page. Don’t waste time getting to the point by fluffing around. The more direct, the better.

Something else to keep in mind when writing your landing page copy is that people don’t like to read block text. Big text blocks were the last thing people want to look at.

Make it simple and small.

Minimal footer

There should only be a couple of ways off your landing page: the back button, the little “x” in the corner of the browser window, and your call to action button.

When it comes to creating a footer, it shouldn’t include a sitemap, or links to your social media sites. The only thing you should have in your footer is:

Terms & conditions
Privacy information
Copyright information

Here’s an example of a footer.

simple Footer

Remember that any link that isn’t your CTA button simply acts as another way for your customers to escape your page without buying.

Contact information

If your landing page has done the job, your customers will be able to decide whether or not to buy your offer.

But it’s not always easy to anticipate all your customers questions. Sometimes they want to talk to a person, and a contact information lets them do it.

Add yours to your footer, or even to your header.

contact info

October 5, 2016 admin SEO, Web design Comments Off

SEO Tips for Designers

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a important component of any website. As a web designer or graphic designer, it’s important you understand how SEO works. There is in fact a serious lack of resources for designers who don’t know about SEO out there. Here are some easy SEO NJ tips for designers that will immediately improve the SEO on all of your websites.

Tip 1: Do Not Cheat

Do you think you could outsmart a room full of genius scientists with PHDs? No. Google has many genius scientists with PHDs, and their job is to work tiring hours a week to make sure you can’t fool Google. No matter, what you do, you can’t outsmart them. Just ignore trying to cheat Google and focus on making a web site with great content, and your site will show up fine in the search engine.

Tip 2: Use Your Keywords

Pick some keywords or phrases that describe your website. Use words related to them, whenever it’s natural to do so. Repeating keywords is no good, use them in headlines, sentences and links.

Tip 3: Yes, Content is King

Users search for content. If your website doesn’t have the content people want, then no one will look at it. It’s that simple.

Each page should lead with a relevant H1 tag with one of your keywords, and the first paragraph of text should be a summary of the rest of the page.

Tip 4: Clean Code is Searchable Code

Build your website and write clean and readable HTML. It should follow the conceptual structure of your page, this means navigation is first, followed by the H1 tag, then the first paragraph. Try to use descriptive tags when possible. For example using UL for lists, P for paragraphs, H tags for heads and STRONG for bolded text.

Your site can still look great, this is why you CSS.

Tip 5: Home Page is the Most Important Page

The home page is the secret to your website being found by Google. It has to summarise the rest of the site, and give a clear, compelling reason for a user to look at the other pages in the site. It needs to sell your product or company, see it like a advert. You have one shot only to attract the buyer.

Tip 6: Links Need to Have Meaning

Links

Search engines do pay a lot of attention to the links on your website. Never use words like “click here” or “see more” for a link. The link text needs to describe where the link will take the user, for example “examples of CSS web design” or “learn how you can improve your SEO.”

The more relevant the links on a page, the easier to find the page becomes. Don’t go overboard, and don’t link to anything irrelevant.

Tip 7: Title Tags

Every page in your website should have a title with the site name and a short description of the page. About 70 letters in total. Include one keyword. Remember the page title is what appears in Google’s search results, it should give your user a reason to click on it.

Your navigation links should have title attributes that match the titles of your pages. This looks like <a title=”name of page” href=”link”>. It’s a small thing, but it will give you a significant SEO improvement.

Tip 8: Alt Tags Do Matter

Every image on your website needs to have an alt tag, especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on clothes for example, then label a screenshot “car for sale”, this will improve your page’s searchability. Labelling it “Pic-001” or “image” will not help.

Tip 9: Ignore Meta Tags

A long time ago meta tags were the secret to good searchable SEO. Those days are behind us now. The only meta tag that really matters now is the description tag. Some search engines may use it to provide the text under the link to your page in their results, but make sure it describes the page in a way that explains why a user searching for your content would want to look at your page.

Tip 10: Must have a Site Map

Just make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the breakdown of pages in your website. Make one, and upload it to Google.

Just remember that search engines are designed to find what a user want. This means the best way to make your site findable is to design it for a dummy (make it dummy proof). Your job as a web designer is to solve a problem, not make art, or feed your ego.

Your problem is to provide your users with a website that is easy to use and have helpful information for what they’re looking for. If you can do that, then the search engines will find you.

I recommend this page also SEO Guide for Designers.

June 1, 2016 admin SEO, Web, Web design Comments Off

BOOST YOUR SEO RANKINGS WITH GOOGLE+

There seems to be an on-going debate if you can boost your SEO rankings with Google+ really helps your websites SEO ranking. I have heard both sides of the coin, and there seems to be sceptics and believers. At DesignLab, we are true BELIEVERS! I mean if you want to be on the first page of Google then why would you not use of all Google’s free add-ons (i.e YouTube, Google Analytics, Google Maps, etc). Any blind person could see that if Google own the SEO market, then you would be crazy not to take opportunity of all they have to offer.

It should go without saying that a businesses Google+ Page signals (any Google property’s signals) have a significant impact on its organic — and more specifically local pack — results. And while many discredit the influence of Google+, the simple fact is that studies of SERP ranking factors continue to highlight the influence Google My Business signals (and therefore Google+) have on your company’s organic rankings.

Google My Business now makes it easier than ever to manage your company’s presence on Google. But setting up an account and a Google+ Business Page is not enough to keep your business ranking in a good position. It takes a little bit of time, in the following steps will help you with the SEO benefits of Google+ and maintain your local rankings.

boost-your-local-google-plus

Pizza New York

Example of Local Pack results for a search query: “Pizza New York”

A Google+ Guide for Local SEO Success

The following guide presents recommended steps to boost a local business online presence.
Note: these steps apply to a Business Page for local businesses and not a Brand Page.

Set Up Your My Business Account

Visit Google My Business to create a business listing on Google Maps. You will then be prompted to verify the listing with a unique code that you can choose to receive by phone call or a postcard (be wary it can take a few weeks to post, and Google only give you 30 days to activate the code). Once verified, your Business Page is ready!

There is another scenario in which you may now — or already — have two Google+ pages for your company:

a pre-existing Brand Page (where you actively post updates)
a local Business Page (connected to Google Maps and displays reviews)

Luckily after the release of Google My Business, Google introduced a feature enabling you to transfer core data from the local page (Google Maps pin, location and verification, as well as reviews) to your brand page, creating one united Local Business Page (connected to Google Maps, displays reviews and you can post updates, add images, interact with others etc). Google offers very clear instructions for connecting the two pages.

Once you have verified your Business Page, it is important the business information you supply is 100% complete, accurate and up-to-date. The following are core Business Page elements that when properly optimised, help push your organic and local pack results in the right direction.

• Business Category

Make sure you select the correct category tags for your business to ensure Google displays your SERP result for the right searches. The category describes what your business is (e.g. real estate agency), not what it does (e.g. property valuations) or the product it sells (e.g. houses). You can set a primary category followed by secondary categories, but it needs to accurately represent your business.

• Set the NAP (name/address/phone number)

These are displayed below your business name and profile image on your Business Page. Your business name, address and phone number should be referenced in the same manner across your Business Page, your website and any other platform where they are displayed. Google now has strict guidelines for representing your business on Google+, including:

Your business name on Google+ should reflect your business’s real-world name as it is displayed on your storefront and all other marketing material.
Use a physical address, not a PO BOX, so Google Maps can pin your business to the map and your customers can find you! Trust me we have had many customers with PO box issues.
Use your local/landline phone number, not a 1800 toll free number.

• Business Information

Put your business’s official website because this will create a link to your site. Ensure the company introduction is filled out, making sure it is clear and concise. It is beneficial to include keywords your site already ranks for as the introduction is used as your page’s meta description in Google’s SERPs.

• Opening Hours

Check your opening hours are correct- there are reports that Google may not include your Google Plus page result in its local SERPs if the hours listed indicate the company is closed and especially if no opening hours are listed at all. You can also add information regarding payment options and images for better engagement if you like.

Optimise your Page for Better Local Organic Rankings

Now that your account has been set up, here are some additional actions you can take to increase the SEO of your Business Page.

Encourage Reviews From Your Customers on Google+

Encourage customers to write positive reviews of your business by clicking ‘Write a Review’ on your local Business Page or from the SERP or knowledge graph results.

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Reviews can increase the authority of your Google+ page with more high quality, positive reviews, the likelihood of ranking well in the local search pack increases. Just take a look at the Local Pack results for a local search (example above), or the organic results and knowledge graph for a local brand-name search and you will see exactly why reviews are so important- because Google loves displaying them in search results! Users also trust reviews, so the more positive reviews your brand has, the higher your CTR and conversions. So, start encouraging your customers to help you out!

Claim a Custom URL

Once the local page has been verified, you can claim a custom URL to match your brand. This incorporates your brand name in your page’s custom URL to increase your brand’s visibility in Google’s SERPs.

Connect Your Business YouTube Channel

Your Businesses YouTube channel’s settings provide the option to link your channel to your Business Page. Once they are linked, your channel’s videos will be displayed under an additional “YouTube” tab offering additional elements for engagement on Google+. A link to the Business Page will also appear on your channel, sending more valuable traffic to your Google+ page. With the additional activity on your Business Page, the social signals from your business’s account will also play a bigger role in your rankings.

Remove Duplicate Business Pages

Run a search for your business in Google+ to track down any duplicated Business Pages. If you have access, you can remove the pages or if you do not want to delete the page, leave an update directing visitors to your active Business Page. It is quite common to find a number of Business Pages with your company name (such as additional local pages linked to an old location on Google Maps, different Business Pages set up by different accounts etc).

Promote Your Google+ Page to Gain Followers

It is not enough just to set up a Business Page and integrate it with other Google properties to achieve top results in local search. You must maintain the page and use it to interact and build brand awareness across the web. The following are some tips to gain followers and increase your page’s engagement:

Post updates frequently and keep your profile fresh. Users are more likely to engage with a page that is up to date, active and complete. Always use hashtags related to the topic you are posting about for better searchability. Incorporate images and videos to encourage engagement from your followers. All simple steps.
Add influential people and pages to your circles (especially in your local area). The key to building your following is to engage and interact with other personal and business profiles by commenting, sharing and +1’ing their relevant content as many will often reciprocate these actions. The more activity and engagement you receive on your content, especially +1’s, the more likely Google will favour your page in SERP results.
Encourage your website’s visitors to visit your Business Page by embedding the Google+ badge on your site. This allows your site visitors to directly engage with your page, consolidating +1’s from your website and your Business Page.
Include a link to your Business Page in other marketing material such as your company’s email signature and your AdWords advertising campaigns.

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In summary the key to Google+ success, as with most social networks is to remain active, to engage and be engaging and to send a consistent message to your users. With a little bit of time and effort, your Google+ Business Page has the power to keep your business highly visible both within Google’s local pack and local organic search results and organic results overall.

October 28, 2015 admin Google, Google Plus, SEO Comments Off

Is your website prey to Google Mobilegeddon?

Its been almost been two months that Mobilegeddon made its debut, and so far it seems that its not that significant..so far. So how far is Mobilegeddon ( Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm ) affecting your site? To find an answer to this question, the team at DesignLab has researched a bit and we have some good as well as bad news for you.

The Good News

Is that if your existing website is not mobile friendly, then this really has got nothing to do with your desktop & tablet ranking. This means that if your website was performing really well in the desktop results, then it will most probably be there were it is and MobileGeddon has got nothing to do with it.

MobileGeddon was officially launched on 21st April and is still under a implementation stage. So, untill and unless your website is not crawled by the Google spiders, there are chances that it will most probably stay were it is. This gives you some extra time to get your site mobile ready. So hurry up!

Bad News

Google is saying that 60% of its searches come directly from mobiles. So, if your website is not mobile friendly then there is a real string possibility that you might attract only 40% of the audience that searches for something on a desktop.

Apart from this, we have seen a big drop in some of our clients ranking. The websites that were ranked in top 10 for mobile results have just dropped to 20 position. So, even if Mobilegeddon is in the primary stages of its implementation, there is still a possibility that your website may fall prey to it, and maybe already has while your’e reading this.

So, what should be your approach towards MobileGeddon and how seriously shall you take it?

Before making any decision , just go through a few points that you must keep in your mind:

1. Googlebot must be allowed to crawl CSS & JavaScript to pass the “mobile-friendly” test

2. Mobile friendliness is determined at page level – not sitewide

3.Tablets such as iPads will not be affected by this update

4.Google is currently working on a dedicated mobile index (stay tuned)

Now the first thing you must do is just go ahead and check if your website is mobile friendly or not. To do so, just enter your website in the text box below and hit submit.

What are the solutions ?

1. If you are running a WordPress website, then you can go ahead and just install any of these 3 plug ins which will convert your website into a Google Friendly Mobile site. But this is a temporary solution as it simply just uses a pre defined theme and even though if it makes your website MobileGodden friendly, it can badly damage the UX for your website. But if you wish to just go ahead and use it, then feel free to download it from the below links:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/

2. Send us your website and we will get back to you with a quote for converting your existing website into Mobile friendly site. We convert existing static websites into responsive websites and even Responsive WordPress websites.

I know this seems daunting, especially if you have just recently designed your website, but as I keep saying to all our clients web design is always changing and ever evolving and if you want to run your business online you need to keep ahead of the game.

Call Spiros on 0431 926 575 anytime, he is happy to answer any questions.

May 29, 2015 admin Google, SEO, Web Comments Off

Hints to help you get to the top page of Google

How to get on the Top Page of Google!

There has been many statistics which prove people don’t click beyond the first page of Google search results, so if you want to be seen, you need to be in the top listings on first page. To do that, you need to learn a bit about how search engines work and how to optimise your site, more commonly known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Once the search engine knows your site exists, they scan your site and index the information, then analyse the content to determine how and where your website should display on the results page. If your site isn’t optimised, then it won’t rank well at all, and could end up well below your competitors.

Some Key Elements to Help Increase Your Rankings:

Each search engine has its own set of rankings and listing criteria, but they all work the same way, let’s look at the same basic elements.

Keywords – These are select words and phrases that someone would use when searching for your product/business. You want to choose 5 to 10 words or phrases that best represent your product/business, then use those words and phrases frequently on your site (but only where it makes sense — whatever you do, don’t cram them in because Google will know).

Title Tag – The title tag is a short summary of what potential customers can expect from your page. It displays in a few important places, including the browser’s title bar, and as the title for your listing in search engine results. If you target a specific audience, possibly consider including that in the title, like “motorcycle accident in Arizona.” It helps if each page on your site contains a unique title, but keep it concise — around 65 characters.

Description Tag – The description tag displays below your website’s link in search results and should entice people to visit your website. Every page in your site should include a unique description using the keywords for that page. Keep your descriptions less than 250 characters and avoid non-alphanumeric characters.

Header Tag (H1 Tag) – Every page in your website should include only one header tag. It doesn’t display in the search results, but it’s the largest or most prominent text on your page. The header tells a visitor what they’re reading. Keep it brief – no longer than a short sentence.

Page Content – Your content, the text that your visitors will read, is really important for search engines. Use between 350 and 650 words, including those keywords we mentioned above, one good thing is to bold each of the keywords once on the page. And always make sure everything on your site is original material, do not copy and paste from other competitor websites. Google will know.

Interesting Fact: Google can tell (and will probably penalise you) if your content has an excessive number of keywords.

Link Building – Links can be a big factor in how search engines rank your site. There are two: interlinks and back links. Interlinking is creating a link from a keyword or sentence on one page to another area of your website. For example, the sentence “Find an lawyer near you” would be linked to the list of office locations on your site. A Back link are other websites that link to your site. Google weighs this more heavily when determining your site’s rank, and unfortunately these are more difficult to achieve. An easy ways to create back links are listing your business with online directories (such as Yelp, TrueLocal and social media). You could also contact other business owners online in your area of business and offer them a link exchange.

Menu Navigation – Navigation refers to all the links on your website. Visitors and Google both rely on good navigation to get around your site. Broken links are like hitting a wall, so be sure to check your links regularly and make sure they are all working.

Sitemap – A sitemap is essentially the map of all the pages in your website. Sitemaps will guide a search engine throughout your website with the names and locations of pages. They can speed up indexing and, in some cases, increase site traffic by indexing previously buried pages.

Image Tag – Images are good to break up the text and add a visual appeal to your website. Be sure to include an image on every page, and format it with an “alt” attribute using those keywords we mentioned. Because search engines can’t see images the way we do, they depend on alt attributes to appropriately catalog and index the image.

Tip: Optimising your images, so the file size is smaller and the image loads faster, can also help your search rankings.

May 20, 2015 admin Google, SEO Comments Off

How to get to the top of Google rankings

We have all heard the phrase “Location, location, location!” in real estate. This also applies to your search engine ranking for your website — the higher your site is listed, the more traffic you get. Getting to the top of Google is what every business wants to achieve. And there are some simple steps to getting your business high up the Google rankings. And it’s possible to do it without spending a dollar.

Here are some of our tips:-

1. Understand what the demand is for your product

First step is to spend some time understanding what your customers are already looking for, and then align your services and content around that. Google’s Keyword Planner & Google Trends are free tools to use, and will give you an idea of what people are searching for online. If you can place a search box on your site to help you discover what your customers are looking for.

2. Prioritise key words for your website

Think about how relevant the key word term is, and how you can best compete with other online businesses. For example, we target the term “graphic design adelaide” rather than just “graphic design.” Despite having far fewer searches, this keyword is far more likely to convert to a lead, also because targeting a location helps better narrow down a potential customer finding you geographically.

3. Keep your site with good internal linking

This helps Google understand what pages are important for your’e site, and will allow users to find helpful content. And there are many tools online to help you spot and fix code errors, one example is the IIS Toolkit.

4. Track everything – for free

There are a number of tracking tools available to help you understand how well you’re doing online. Google Webmaster Tools will give you an indication of exactly what Google sees when it visits your site. Factors such as site speed, 404 errors, broken links and site significance are all listed here.

5. Ask others to link to your site

Make a list of the people your business deals with on a daily basis and then ask them to link to your site, pointing out the fact that your site ranking well will also benefit them. Also try searching your own brand name online to find people who already talk about you, then ask them to add in a link. Another easy win is to submit your site details to relevant directories.

6. Get your business out there

Get involved with your customers on social media. Share your insights and thoughts with your market to show search engines you’re an authority in the space. Not only will this give you an advantage over competitors, but it will encourage your customers to recommend you on social networks, or write positive reviews online. Google considers all the signals it can when ranking sites, so the more you’re doing, the better.

7. Organic vs. Paid Listings

You can attract visitors to your site a variety of ways, but one of the most effective ways is being listed at the top of the “organic” search results on search engines like Google and Yahoo! Unlike paid listings, which are advertisements that display in sponsored areas, organic results are free and based on, among other things, the site’s content and how closely it matches the keywords being searched.

See You At the Top.

Search engine optimisation can have a large impact on the success of your business online. The good news is that with the tips presented in this blog, you have the basic steps you need to get started. Take a little time to tune up your site and watch your customers grow with your search results.

May 12, 2015 admin Google, SEO Comments Off

Mobilegeddon Google is here!

Mobilegeddon Google is upon us! Run for the hills.

Google next big update is going to target non-mobile friendly sites and is expected to roll out April 21, 2015, and roll out for a few days to a week.

This is a big one, and could affect a large portion of your web traffic and seo results.

In the last few years, mobile traffic has increased dramatically. It’s speculated that more than 50% of Google searches are performed on mobile.

Even Google is saying this update is going to have a bigger effect on search rankings than Panda or Penguin, the biggest updates Google has ever launched, as quoted by a member of Google’s Webmaster Trends team, Zineb Ait Bahajji at SMX Munich.

The problem is many sites are not responsive, meaning that they were only built for desktop computers and are hard to navigate on mobile devices.

Google doesn’t want to serve up results that are not mobile user friendly, so they are implementing a new algorithm change to demote sites that aren’t usable on phones and tablets.

Google has officially announced the update and it’s coming on April 21, 2015 so you still have time to prepare your site.

Google has said there is no degree of mobileness, it’s either yes or no.

Test it for yourself by clicking on www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly and if you’re concerned we’ve got a fantastic ‘mobile friendly’ website package available.

If your website isn’t responsive, call Spiros on 0431 926 575 or email us info@designlab.net.au .

If your website is responsive, relax and pour yourself a cup of coffee and grin:-)

April 24, 2015 admin Google, SEO Comments Off