How Google Places Affects Your Gold Coast SEO

Leave a reply
google maps pin

Google Places – get your business seen!

An optimised Google Places listing for your Gold Coast business is a must these days and it should be part of your SEO strategy from day one.

SEO is not a “set and forget” deal; it is an ongoing and ever-changing process that needs adjusting as the search engines change. When Google introduced its “Universal Search” metrics some time ago, the nature of their search results changed; your SEO strategy needs to change with it.

What is Google Places?

Google Places is a tool for local search, allowing people to easily locate and connect with businesses in the local area. You may know it as Google Maps.

Gold Coast businesses can claim a listing by providing proof of a physical business address; then the listing needs to be optimised, so that it features highly in Google search results for relevant search terms.

Impact On Search Results

Have you noticed how Google search results have been changing to gradually include more and more video, images, sub headings, links and maps, rather than the plain old text and link format? This has been creeping in for the past few years but it is more noticeable with the maps because they can really take up a lot of the page.

Much of SEO is about being high up on the first page of Google for a search term. With results taking up more and more space many results that used to figure highly have been pushed down the page; it’s becoming essential to be in the top few results on page one, so that you are instantly visible to visitors “above the fold” ( that’s before they scroll down.)

How Can You Get There?

Your Gold Coast business needs to claim and optimise a Google Places listing to have a chance of dominating results for a keyword phrase.

Optimising comes from making sure that you have listed the details of your business (address, telephone number etc) clearly and consistently; then filling in all the sections relating to your business opening times, parking availability, service area etc; then you need to start gathering reviews and, most importantly, citations.

Citations are the equivalent of back-links for your Google Places listings; the more citations you have the more authority your business is seen to have by Google. You can gather these by getting listed with business directories for example – making sure to keep your name and contact details consistent.

So you see that the parameters of Gold Coast business SEO are always changing; take the time to keep up to date and to make the necessary adjustments to your SEO strategy.

If you need any help with this contact Michael Hanson at Gold Coast Marketing Labs here.

How To Monitor Your Gold Coast SEO & Other Online Marketing

Leave a reply
Monitoring-SEO

Every business should be monitoring their SEO strategy

If monitoring and measurement is not part of your Gold Coast SEO strategy then how do you know if it’s working or not?

The same goes for any part of Internet marketing – whether it’s SEO, Pay Per Click marketing campaigns, online video views or social media marketing; you should be testing and measuring success levels.

Monitoring SEO

SEO marketing is geared towards getting you higher ranks in the search engines for your keyword phrases so in some respects it’s easy to measure. Type your search term into Google and see where you are ranked!

There are plug ins for your web browser that allow you to measure the amount of back-links that are showing, plus page rank and other stats that show where your SEO is going. Just search your browser’s “Add Ons” or “Plug Ins” for SEO tools.

Website Monitoring

Google Analytics provides many free and paid-for website traffic monitoring tools; most people get by with the free services, providing information like the total traffic generated in a specific period, where it is coming from, how visitors came to your site in the first place (from video or social media click-throughs?) as well as page visits, bounce rates, how long they are staying on the site and so on.

SEO stats show how well you’re doing with the machines; website analytics tools show how well your content is going down with humans. Are they interacting with your site? Are they absorbing your message? Are they acting on that message or leaving quickly? All this is important information to know whether you’ve pitched your website correctly.

Web Video Monitoring and Tracking

Monitoring your web video marketing is easier in some places than others; YouTube makes it relatively simple via its YouTube Insight feature, which breaks down your video views over a time period, showing stats like demographics, the most popular videos and where the visitors came from.

Using these stats you can see which of your online videos are working best and hitting the right notes with your subscribers.

YouTube’s Hotspot feature also shows the ups and downs of viewer numbers at various stages throughout a particular video – this is a great stat for dissecting an individual video and finding which parts are boring your visitors and which parts they enjoyed.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media is probably becoming a larger part of your internet marketing strategy so it’s good to be able to measure the success as you go.

If you operate many social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon  it would take ages to keep monitoring them manually so it’s good to use a free tool like Klout, which will monitor data and activity from all the social media platforms you use;  it will measure your reach and impact and give you a score, which you can use as a gauge of how much influence you are having on your audience.

By using these tools for your Gold Coast SEO, website, video and social media monitoring you will have more confidence that your strategy is working – and it will help you shape future marketing campaigns;  if it’s not performing well, then at least you can tinker with it and continue measuring and monitoring over the months ahead.

How To Build Authority For Your Gold Coast Website

Leave a reply
authority-website

Does your Gold Coast website ooze with authority?

Authority is an important word for your online Gold Coast business, whether referring to you, your business in general, your SEO or your customers.

The fact is that without authority the search engines won’t credit you with high rankings, customers won’t find you and prospects won’t buy from you. So – how do we go about raising our credibility and sense of authority via our website?

Fundamentals of Authority

Building authority is not a one-time fix. It needs to be an ongoing effort involving many different approaches; there are no shortcuts but there are smarter ways of doing it than others. Authority needs to be earned and you will build it over time – but your hard efforts will be rewarded.

Link Building

One of the primary targets of any SEO campaign must be link building as this is one of the most basic criteria that Google uses for judging a website’s level of authority. If you have a lot of high quality links pointing to your site from other authorities in the field then instantly your site is seen as carrying weight and importance.

This can be done by directory listings, articles, guest blogging, link baiting and other methods.

Social Media

Building authority with your customers and the search engines can be helped by joining social media sites, setting up fan pages and engaging with your followers – helping them to solve problems and providing valuable tips and advice. This can make you the go-to guy in your area, no matter what your business.

At the very least Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn presences should help – you may also like to look at Google Plus, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Great Content

There’s no substitute for creating and publishing informative, interesting content on your site; and there’s no excuse not to be doing that nowadays, with all the tools at your disposal.

You can use blogs, articles, infographics that other sites can share, FAQ pages or videos that answer customer queries, How-to videos, webinars, presentations, eBooks and press releases all to demonstrate your expertise in your business area.

Using a diverse range of approaches works best and you can see which ones get the best responses from people, but getting creative and providing people with good information will pay handsome rewards down the line.

The added benefit of most of these approaches is that they also aid your SEO efforts too, so the payback is double-edged.

Remember – never stop trying to build your website authority; move with the times and use all means available to prove to the search engines and to your visitors that your site is relevant, up to date and benefits the online community.

If you are a Gold Coast business wanting to revamp your website or if you are just starting out and want to establish your online business, Michael Hanson at Gold Coast Marketing Labs can help. Call him on 0447 610 823.

Human Content Vs. SEO On Your Gold Coast Website

Leave a reply
human_content_versus_SEO

Write content for humans not SEO bots!

When you’re designing your Gold Coast business website, finding the right blend between SEO and compelling content can be a difficult balancing act that many struggle with.

Here we ask the question whether designing regular website content that is good to read and will inform your visitors is also likely to get you good SEO rankings.

Keyword Misconceptions

Many people are caught in the old way of thinking where web copywriters used to aim for keyword density.

It’s not necessary to cram keywords into paragraphs at 5% or 10%. A 500 word article, for example can be based around a primary keyword phrase and a secondary keyword phrase – with the primary phrase being mentioned in the title and in the first and last paragraphs. The secondary phrase may only need to be mentioned once.

As long as the meta tags are correct for the page in question the above method will be sufficient to let the search engines know what your copy is about. Importantly, it will read as natural to your human visitors too.

Natural SEO and Content Building

There seems to be a move from Google, in their Panda algorithm updates this year, to reward organic and natural evolution of websites. This is rather difficult to quantify but Google is definitely trying to penalise any site that is seen as trying to cheat their system.

Google lives and dies by the relevance of its search results – if it fails to deliver relevant results people will stop using it and the advertising revenue model no longer works for them.

So it’s not surprising that Google would try to reward sites that are using a more natural approach to building links and SEO in general, as well as building authority and credibility.

Natural systems are varied and diverse; rarely are they limited or narrow. They thrive on gradual change.

Taking the same approach to link building and creating content on your site will pay dividends. It involves a multi-faceted approach using all the available tools – which are plentiful these days.

As well as blogging, guest blogging, writing articles for your site and other publishers, creating reports and eBooks, a wide variety of compelling and engaging content can be created using online video, podcasts, info-graphics and social media.

Measure the Success

Use as many methods as possible to create diverse content – you can see what works best and change things as your business progresses.

You need to measure how things are going – use website analytics tools to see how you’re doing in the search engines and where adjustments can be made; see how widely your content is being shared across social media platforms and how many people are reading and commenting on your blog posts, for example. Then make adjustments and fine tune your methods.

In summary, a diverse approach to generating content will certainly go down well with your human visitors and, providing you follow a few of the basics of SEO with keywords and meta tags, your Gold Coast business website should please the search engine bots too!

How To Help Your Gold Coast SEO With Reverse Engineering

Leave a reply
reverse-engineering_for_SEO

Reverse engineering can be a great SEO technique

Sometimes going into reverse can help you! Take reverse engineering with websites for example –your local Gold Coast SEO results can be improved by investigating what the leading websites in your field are doing and emulating some of their techniques.

Knowing the Players In The Field

Any business, online or offline, should be well aware of the main players in the field they are doing business in. That’s basic. With online businesses all you really need to do is search Google and see which businesses are occupying the top spots for the keywords that you are interested in competing for.

Visiting the top few websites in the Google results is a good idea. You can get a feel for their on-page SEO – the type of copy they have on their page, their meta tags, their keyword density, their menu pages, the depth of information on the site and what they include in their blog etc.

The 20% and 80%

All of this visible information gives you an idea about 15-20% of the SEO credit they are getting from the search engines.

The other 80% of SEO credit they receive usually comes from off-page SEO techniques – largely the number of back-links. That is harder to establish but there are tools available that can help you pick apart some of the other secrets to their success.

SEO Tools for Reverse Engineering

Free SEO plug-ins to web browsers, such as “SEO Quake”, allow you to analyse any website in terms of its Page Rank (the Google measure of a page’s importance), keyword density and back-links for any site.

Identifying a page’s back-links can be useful as it may identify where you can target for your own back-links, if you are setting up a reciprocal links program or publishing articles on directories or on other site’s blogs.

It clearly helps your online business to know what’s working for the leading sites out there and it should give you added ammunition for targeting back-links, which will be one of the mainstays of your ongoing SEO efforts.

Google Places

For local Gold Coast businesses an optimised Google Places listing is a must.  You will get more credit if you get citations – these are references to your business contact details on other sites and are the equivalents of back-links for your Google Places SEO efforts.

Again, reverse engineering helps a lot and there is a great tool you can use for this on the website www.whitespark.ca. It has a Google Places citation finder that lists the top 7 websites for a particular business segment. It lists all the citations of those websites, thereby identifying all the places you can target to request a citation.

We’ve just mentioned a couple of resources for reverse engineering websites in your Gold Coast SEO campaign. There are many others you can use. It surely makes sense to emulate the proven techniques that are getting other websites ranking with Google, rather than hoping for the best.

If you have found other great SEO analysis tools let us know about them below in the comments section.

5 Keyword Mistakes To Avoid On Your Gold Coast Website

Leave a reply
keyword_mistakes

Keywords mistakes can ruin your SEO efforts

Before you even start writing your copy, you need to identify the keywords your Gold Coast website is targeting; it’s one of the most important parts of any SEO marketing strategy, yet it is the area where most mistakes are made.

Keywords will form the basis of both on-page and off-page SEO; so unless you get that part right, everything that follows may be wide of the mark.

Below we take you through five mistakes for your business to avoid with your keyword research as you start your SEO efforts.

1. Assuming You Know What People Are Searching For

One of the most common errors is website owners assuming that they know what people are searching for and basing their keywords on that. There’s no point being top of the rankings for phrases that receive zero queries!

Everything is quantifiable using any one of the many keyword research tools out there – the most common being the Google Keyword Research tool, which is part of the Adwords suite. Type in any phrase and you can see how many local and worldwide searches there are for that phrase, as well as what the level of competition is for that phrase with other websites.

2. Not Adding Modifiers

    If you sell fitness equipment and your market is mainly in Gold Coast and Brisbane it’s much easier to rank for “fitness equipment Brisbane” or “fitness equipment Gold Coast” than  for “fitness equipment.”

    Also it may pay to go after the keywords of actual brand names of the equipment rather than just the generic terms.

    Apply this example to your own business. You will probably find that most other local businesses in your industry haven’t targeted the right keywords and are not getting the basics of SEO right for their website so this is your opportunity to start out-ranking them in the search results for the keywords that matter and will bring you hot leads.

    3. Not Exploring All Variations

      Look at not only your main keywords but variations on them too – like plural or singular versions; the search engines will deliver different results for these small variations; being aware of that means you can target all the possibilities that people will search for.

      4. Lack of Relevance of Keywords

        Some businesses also waste time and effort by targeting wrong keywords that do not accurately reflect their business and they have no hope of ranking for; or, if they do manage to rank for them, they receive traffic that is not going to convert, because they’ve been brought to your website under “false pretences” and will just leave again quickly.

        If you are a camera retailer on the Gold Coast, then only target keywords of the cameras you can supply! It sounds obvious but keeping your keywords highly relevant to your business makes sure you receive qualified traffic.

        5. Keyword Stuffing

          Another big mistake local web sites can make is over-using the keywords you have identified. Only target one or two different keywords per page and you only need to use it a few times; keyword stuffing may get you penalised by Google.

          Another reason not to stuff keywords in to your copy is that it will sound terrible to your visitors who read it – and they will click away. Making your site readable to humans as well as the search engines is very important.

          That’s five of the most common mistakes with keywords. Avoid these and you’ll be well on your way to building a website that achieves good rankings and receives qualified leads for the most important search terms to your Gold Coast business.

          7 Simple Link Building Tips For Your Gold Coast Business SEO

          Leave a reply
          Organic_SEO

          Organic SEO for your Gold Coast business

          You probably know by now that your Gold Coast business SEO strategy needs to focus heavily on link-building, once the on-page SEO is all in order.

          That much hasn’t changed because links are still seen by the search engines as the surest signs of authority, credibility and relevance; no amount of Google “Panda updates” is likely to change that, though the social factor is becoming important.

          Here we pass on seven great tips for link building your website to the top of Google.

          1. Keep It Organic

          Probably the most important lesson to learn from your link building strategy is to keep it natural. Search engines don’t like being “played” and have penalised many for trying it.

          The best way is to create a strategy of solid and steady growth over time, meaning that rather than adding 100 links every 3 months it’s better to add 35 per month. This means an ongoing effort, but there is no substitute for this – sorry!

          2. Automate Wherever Possible

          One of the best ways to target pure link quantity is to submit your website to directories; there are literally hundreds out there and to do this manually would take an age, so for a small investment you can use automated software to do this; again, think about adding every month rather than all in one go.

          3. Watch Out For Anchor Text

          Try to vary the anchor text (the live blue text you click on in a link), as this will create diversity in the eyes of the search engines. It may not be considered natural to have all links with the same anchor text, so use a combination of your keywords and synonyms, as well as URLs.

          4. Mix Up Your Links

          Go for a variety of different links using all means available – even “no follow” links, which you may read are a waste of time. You can get back-links using the web directories we’ve mentioned above, article directories like eZine Articles, blog commenting, reciprocal links, guest blogging. It’s best to diversify with your link sources as that will appear more natural to search engines.

          5. Your Site is More Than A Home Page

          Your website consists of more than a home page so make sure the links reflect this, so that your whole site gets authority and credibility. Create back-links to your information and service pages as well as to blog posts and articles for a more rounded approach.

          6. Internal Link-building

          If you have a blog include internal links to other pages on your site with varied anchor text, as it shows that your site and blog are connected.

          7. Target the 80% Method

          You can achieve most of the SEO you’ll need to get a good Goggle ranking by doing about 80% of the right things, unless your business is part of a very competitive online market. Beyond the 80%, it may not be worth your time to spend it fine tuning your SEO efforts – you won’t get a good return on your time investment; you may need to accept that 80% is good enough and let the rest go.

          The above guidelines are an excellent start if your Gold Coast business SEO strategy is just being planned out. If you need help with that then Michael will be happy to help. Just send an email to michael@videolabs.com.au.

          Why “Pull Marketing” Beats “Push Marketing” For Your Gold Coast Business

          Leave a reply
          online_pull_marketing

          Online pull marketing is the way of the future

          If you’re a Gold Coast business owner trying to get to grips with recent changes on the web and wondering what online marketing approaches to incorporate, one of the fundamental concepts to understand is the benefits of “pull marketing” over “push marketing.”

          The Difference

          Push or “outbound” marketing is advertising that sends products and services out to an audience via the traditional channels like TV, radio, newspaper ads, cold calls on the phone or billboards.

          Pull or “inbound” marketing draws customers to products and services and uses many of the latest web developments like smarter SEO, online video and social media to facilitate it.

          Visitors come to you because you deserve it – either because you have great product, great content, you have demonstrated great knowledge about your market area, you have provided great service or because you are more credible than any other business – and often it’s a combination of these factors that wins the day.

          The main point is that you earn your customers with pull marketing, rather than buying them.

          The Key Benefits of Pull Marketing

          Pull marketing offers the following benefits over traditional marketing:

          • It’s cheaper – your online marketing may cost you as little as the price of your time, an Internet connection and web hosting. Of course most online businesses also spend money on web design, outsourcing back-linking/article writing, pay-per-click campaigns etc. However, compared to the costs of buying space in newspapers and magazines (that many people skip over), sending out mail that ends up in the bin or buying “air time” on the radio, the cost is minimal.
          • It lasts longer – push marketing generally only lasts for as long as you pay for the space or time; online pull marketing keeps working for you overt and over again until you stop updating your social media site or take your video down from YouTube or close your website. Much of it you can do once and watch as it keeps marketing your business. The effect is also more sustainable because you earn your customers after building credibility and authority; it doesn’t just come down to who has the most money to be able to afford the ads during Superbowl!
          • It positions your business better – creating great content like blogs, ebooks, podcasts, reports, white papers, online videos and articles on social media sites that can be shared, allows you to position your business as a market leader and an authority; you are seen as an educator rather than just a salesman; this means you will gain followers because you are providing something of value and, when they need a service that you can provide, they will come to you first.
          • It’s Interactive – being interactive as social media and blogs are these days, allows you to really get to know your audience and to pre-empt any problems and design future products around their needs. You are not just telling your readers or viewers what to do, you are showing them that you understand their issues and have solutions that will help them.

          Nowadays, people are more in control of the information they receive; rather than being “preached” to by the TV, they choose what to watch online. This is a fundamental change and has seen this change of emphasis with marketing.

          As a Gold Coast business how can you alter your marketing strategy to be more “pull” than “push”? It starts with improving SEO to drive traffic, using online video to help you engage your audience and by connecting with your customer base through social media marketing.

          To make a start with this, drop a comment below or give Michael Hanson a call on 0447 610 823.

          How To Use Auto-Responders For Marketing Your Gold Coast Website

          Leave a reply
          autoresponder

          Few businesses use auto-responders well

          We see auto-responders being used to help promote many Gold Coast websites but it’s amazing how few business are getting the balance right between information and marketing and between informative emails and spam.

          Here we look at some ways you can get effective results from auto-responder campaigns for your business.

          Develop a Database

          The first step is to build a database of contacts. This is best developed by having an opt-in for a free report/video or giveaway related to your business and which will pass on something that can attract potential customers to your website and convince them to leave their email address.

          Once you have their email address they can be entered into your CRM software; when you have enough contacts, you can begin a campaign (after they have received their freebie, of course.)

          Use Emails For a Mini Course

          You need to ensure that your campaigns are not perceived as spam, as this will be a huge “turn off” for potential customers. You can lose them with a badly written first email.

          A great idea is not to sell them anything at first, but to give them information that will be of use.

          Create a short series of 3 or 4 emails which you can send them, say, weekly. This gets your contacts used to receiving emails from you and helps position you as an expert in your niche, which will encourage your readers to spread the word about you, raising your credibility too.

          This content may be used further down the track, for an eBook or another free giveaway for new customers; remember, writing informative, instructional content is never wasted.

          Of course some soft marketing can be included in these emails, with links to your website and encouragement to find out more information on certain pages of your website.

          For Event or Service/Product Promotions

          A series of auto-responders can be effective when you are running a promotion or an event that is getting closer. Anything that is heavily time-dependent allows you to send an initial mail, a follow up reminder and then a last reminder that time is running out.

          Of course, following a set template will probably end up sounding fake; these need to be well written in your own voice or by someone who has some understanding of the psychology of sales, without being too pushy, but able to use the time element to create urgency.

          Newsletters and Article Archives

          Auto-responders are great for keeping your customers up to date with industry-related news or pointing them towards resources in your archive, if you are an older website and have built up a big Blog or Info section on your website.

          Again, this helps to position you as a knowledgeable resource for anything related to your market and will ensure that you are the go-to site for anything they need, connected to your industry.

          Promoting Affiliate Products

          If you are a respected voice in your market and people trust your opinion then why not recommend other people’s products that you use and can vouch for? Often there are affiliate programs that you can sign up to and this can make additional cash, if you promote these products and people buy through your link.

          Up-selling

          When someone buys one of your products there is an opportunity to upsell them with a complimentary product/service or an affiliate’s product.

          The important thing with all of the above is gaining the permission of the recipients to send out the emails so that they are not considered spam. You should make it clear to recipients what they need to do if they want to be taken off the mailing list.

          These ideas for using auto-responders are some of the more effective ones. Perhaps your Gold Coast business is using them in another way – if so let us know in the comments section below.

          5 Ways Your Gold Coast Website Can Stay Friends With Google

          Leave a reply
          Staying-Friends_With_Google

          It’s smart to stay friends with Google

          Maybe you’ve heard people talking about “Google updates” and how they have affected search engine rankings of some Gold Coast websites; you may have caught webmasters or online business owners complaining that they’ve slipped down the ranks for certain keywords and their SEO efforts are all in a mess.

          Here we examine what these updates are and how your Gold Coast SEO efforts can keep your website ahead of the chasing pack, by making some small changes.

          The Google “Panda” Updates

          “Panda updates” – another term you may hear – are a series of Google algorithm changes started in February 2011 and still ongoing, based on the findings from a team of Google website raters; they aim to make the search results from Google more reflective of relevant and important content and remove some of the “trash” that you may have noticed is out there polluting the Web.

          What you will find, if you ask around and research, is that it’s largely the format and non-original content of sites that has been penalised by the Panda updates; so here are 5 things your Gold Coast business website should be doing, if you want to remain in Google’s good books.

          • Make Every Page High Quality

          If Panda finds a page that needs to be penalised it will affect your whole website. Therefore it’s important to pay attention to every single page of your site and make sure you’re doing all the right things on every page. Don’t let the guard down.

          • Concentrate on Original Content

          Original, relevant content adds “beef” to your website in Google’s eyes. If you’re working off a template and not adding much original input, then reconsider your SEO strategy before you get hit in the next update. You can use this tool to check how much duplicate content there is on your site.

          Also ensure that you don’t have any pages that just link to other pages, with no content at all on them.

          • Each Page Should Be Unique

          Try to make every page on your website about a particular topic, not duplicating the content from other pages on your site.

          Write the copy to humans, not just for targeting keywords – it’s OK to use each page to target a keyword phrase but make it a significantly different keyword phrase.

          For example having one page targeting “Gold Coast air conditioner” and another targeting “Gold Coast air conditioners” may well get you penalised.

          • Use Ads Sparingly

          There is evidence that, despite Google’s love of advertising, they are starting to punish excessive use of ads over a site, so avoid this temptation.

          • Avoid Auto-Generated Content

          Don’t trust any content that’s not written by a human – that’s a good rule of thumb. Google doesn’t like it and they have penalised many affiliate sites that have used this approach.

          Most of the above points are common sense. Keeping your web site targeted for humans to read and writing and arranging content that will provide relevant and valuable information is one if the best SEO approaches for any Gold Coast business.

          Remember, it’s not about tricking Google; it’s about delighting your visitors – if you do that you won’t go far wrong with your SEO marketing.