Category: Wordpress

The easiest time to optimise your website for SEO is during the initial build phase. Getting it right from the start will give you a foundation to build on in the future. This means using a website designer in Auckland who understands SEO, but what are the things you should be aware of to ensure the job gets done properly? Are there things you can do?

The Website Should be Responsive

The starting point is your website should be responsive. This means using a design that automatically adapts – or responds – to a visitor’s device. In other words, ensuring your website looks great on phones and tablets as well as computers and laptops.

Google is very focused on making the internet mobile-friendly, so this should be at the top of your website designer’s SEO checklist.

One other point you should be aware of is that there are other ways of creating a mobile-friendly version of your website. Making the website responsive is the recommended approach, however, as well as being Google’s preferred option.

Think About SEO When Writing Content

Google uses keywords to connect website pages with people searching. Therefore, you should think about keywords when writing the content of your website pages. Specifically, you should include keywords in the content.

Of course, your primary audience is the people visiting your website, so don’t use too many keywords (which looks spammy) and don’t use keywords in a way that makes sentences sound strange.

Optimise Page Titles, Use Heading Tags, and Write Unique Meta Descriptions

The page title is one of the most important SEO elements of your page. Google uses them to understand the content on the page, plus they appear on search results pages. You should have a unique page title for each page, plus you should include the page’s main keyword in the title.

You should also use heading tags on your pages as Google looks for them. These are often referred to as H1, H2, etc headers. Ideally, include the main keyword of the page in the H1 tag.

Each page on your website should also have a unique meta description. You will have seen many meta descriptions as they appear on all Google search results pages. They are the two lines that appear on a search result below the page title. Again, include the main keyword of the page in the meta description.

Page Loading Speed is Crucial

Google has always been obsessed with speed – it still shows you at the top of a search results page how long it took to do the search. This focus on speed applies to your website too. In other words, if you want to optimise your chances of appearing high on search results pages, you should ensure your website designer makes your website as fast as possible.

The Design Should be User-Friendly

User-friendly designs are important for SEO too. This means ensuring your website is free from clutter while also making menus easy to use and content easy to find. The more user-friendly your website is, the more Google will like it.

Remember, designing a website is not just about making it look great – if this is the primary objective of your website designer you should be concerned. Instead, your website should deliver on your business objectives which, in most cases, means helping you get sales and leads. To do this, you need to get SEO right from the start.

Mobile applications provide several benefits to small business owners and their customers. As most web-based traffic moves to mobile and handheld devices, it’s more important than ever that your small business has a functioning app. Submitting applications to app stores can prove difficult if you’re starting from scratch, though. In this article, we’ll provide you with what you need to know to successfully submit an app to the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

Apple App Store

Design for Functionality

Apple prefers apps that provide users with a specific, unique function. An app that purely drives traffic to a website is unlikely to meet Apple’s criteria. In addition, if your app has minimal functionality, it may not get approval either. So, make sure your app provides users with value.

Follow Human Interface Guidelines

Apple provides strict Human Interface Guidelines that help developers build acceptable applications. These guidelines cover a spectrum of different design and architecture rules. Apple does this to provide its users with a harmonious user experience across all available apps.

These guidelines cover app architecture, user interaction, system capabilities, visual design, controls, extensions, and plenty of other crucial components. Not following these guidelines may result in rejection.

Don’t Include Price in the App Description

A simple mistake that a lot of users make when submitting their first app to the App Store is including a price in the description. The Apple App Store sets different prices for different regions, so don’t assume the price remains the same across the board. This is especially true if you plan on submitting your app internationally.

Meet Ethical Standards

Apple provides app developers with content guidelines – certain forms of content are not tolerated. This includes discriminatory and defamatory content, pornographic material, false features, encouragement of the illegal use of weapons, realistic portrayals of violence or death, and more. Make sure you review these guidelines before submitting.

Google Play Store for Android Apps

For those who use Android devices, the Google Play Store provides a separate set of challenges and requirements.

Follow Developer Program Policies

Google provides Developer Program Policies to help you understand the type of applications and methods it accepts. These policies dictate guidelines on restricted content, intellectual property, monetisation, store listing, privacy, and more. Make sure this your first stop when you start developing a new app.

Follow Quality Guidelines

On top of Google’s Developer and Program Policies, there are also Quality Guidelines that your app developers must follow. You can test your app’s core quality before submitting it for approval.

Provide Compatibility Information

Make sure you provide compatibility information to your users. Your app description should include what systems and devices the app is compatible with.

Provide Pricing and Distribution Locations

If your app costs money, you need to set the pricing and the various distribution locations. You will also need to set prices for the different locations. You can restrict your app from various regions if you only want it available in certain countries.

Final Thoughts

As a small business owner, you can save significant time and money when your app meets the requirements of each app store. Redesigning an app after a rejected submission will delay your project and inflate the price of development. Following the guidelines above will help secure app store approval.

No matter what you use your small business website for, the design is always a top priority. Your website’s design provides visitors with their first look at your company, so you need to make as good of an impression as possible. Many business owners focus so much on the operational side of their business, however, that they forget about their websites.

In a time where online commerce is an increasingly dominant portion of consumer sales, it’s more important than ever to focus on the design of your website. Here are five key tips that can help you design a customer-focused website.

Follow Modern Trends

Web design constantly evolves, with modern design trends updating regularly. If you want to gain trust and recognition through your website’s design, it’s important to keep up-to-date with modern trends. One way to achieve this is to use a web designer that can provide a minimalist yet aesthetically pleasing design that will never look outdated.

Integrate Tools

There are thousands of developers that provide useful tools and functions you can add to your current website. These tools provide effective ways to improve your site’s functionality and ease your workload on the backend.

If you run an e-commerce site, for example, an effective online shopping cart that enables effortless transactions will be an invaluable addition to any site design.

Interactive comments and community forums can also supply added functionality to your current platform. These are just a few examples of the thousands of integrated tools you can add to any website.

Easy Site Navigation

Modern consumers are impatient, so it’s important to ensure your site is easy to navigate. In particular, the different sections of your website should be clearly accessible when a page first opens. Creating clear, concise drop-down menus can help your customers find what they’re looking for. Plus, your visitors should find it effortless to navigate to any page.

Optimise for Mobile Browsing

Many new business owners make the mistake of only focusing on traditional web browsing when they build their new websites. This ignores the vast majority of people using the internet as mobile browsing is now the most prominent form of web browsing. In other words, more people use phone and handheld devices than traditional computers.

Therefore, optimising your site to respond and display quickly to mobile users will help improve user experience.

Provide Clarity

While this may seem obvious, it is important to provide information about your business on your website. After all, the internet provides plenty of opportunities for scammers and imitators.

By providing information about you, your services, and your experience, you will build trust with visitors. An About Us page can help, as can full contact details (including telephone numbers), testimonials, qualifications, and certifications.

Finally, Never Underestimate Perception

The way your customers perceive your website will reflect on the way they perceive your business. If you want to make the best initial impression possible, it’s important to compare yourself against your competitors.

Online marketing is extremely competitive – if you don’t keep the design of your website up-to-par, you risk falling behind.

Google AdWords is one of the primary ways online businesses drive traffic to their products and services. That said, if you’re planning on starting a Google AdWords campaign, it’s essential you create the best possible landing pages. The better your landing page, the better your ROI will be.

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at some tips that will help you optimise your landing page for a Google AdWords campaign. The tips are all aimed at reducing cost per click while also increasing conversion rates.

Use Keywords or Key Phrases Clearly

When customers click on Google AdWords landing pages, they typically have an exact product or service that they’re looking for. For this reason, it’s always important to clearly display the keyword or key phrase in the title of the page.

Doing so provides your customer with an assurance they’ve come to the right place. Remember, your prospective customers have searched those keywords for a reason, so make sure they immediately see you may have the answer.

Call to Action

As with any good landing page, it’s important to have a compelling Call to Action (CTA). Your CTA should help the consumer understand why they’re purchasing your goods or services.

For example, if you’re selling a service that helps generate web-traffic, your CTA should say something like “Help Me Improve My Web Traffic”. Despite this, many landing page designers make the mistake of using simple and non-descriptive CTAs, such as “click here”.

Use Specific Ad Groups

If customers can’t find exactly what they’re looking for quickly, they’re likely to push the back button on their browsers. So, if you have multiple product variations, it’s important to use different ad groups and segments. Plus, create different landing pages for different products or offerings too.

Build Trust Through Clarity

Consumers are becoming more aware of potential scams and unethical companies. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to build trust with your prospective customers. If customers find your current offering dodgy, they probably won’t stick around on your landing page for very long.

One of the best ways to build trust in your brand is to provide immediate clarity to those who visit your landing page. For example, let prospective customers know who you are and what your business represents.

You should also ensure your landing page uses modern website design techniques. After all, nothing screams unreliable like an outdated website.

Mobile Optimisation

As mobile browsing overtakes traditional browsing, there’s a high chance a substantial proportion of your web traffic comes via mobile devices. Mobile optimisation, therefore, is an increasingly important part of building a great landing page for a Google AdWords campaign.

Optimising specific landing pages to work with mobile devices will ensure your website loads quickly and maintains a professional appearance. This is key to ensuring you keep the interest of prospective customers.

Landing Pages are Key to Your Success

In a Google AdWords campaign, your landing page is your primary contact point with your prospective customers. So, it is important it’s optimised to convert as many sales as possible. You will achieve this by using the above tips.

SEO is a powerful process that has the potential to make the difference between success and failure for your business.

This may sound dramatic. However, 50% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone end up visiting a store that same day. So, being at the fingertips of these customers is now one of the biggest competitive advantages your local business can have.

This isn’t the only benefit of SEO, though, as there are multiple advantages to small businesses in Auckland.

SEO Delivers Return on Investment Over the Long-Term

When the time is right, paid campaigns should have a place in your short-term marketing strategy. After all, paid advertising generates clicks and potential customers almost immediately.

Organic SEO, on the other hand, should always be a part of your long-term marketing strategy.

This is because organic search brings you engaged visitors over the long term. If you can provide useful content that answers queries, informs, or entertains, you will find that users interact naturally with your website.

As a result, your return on investment from SEO improves over time.

Users are Making More Local Searches

New Zealanders (like citizens in every other country in the world) now clearly demonstrate a preference for mobile devices over desktop devices. As these devices grow in number, so do the number of hours we spend on them per day.

Just look at ownership numbers: there were 3.8 million mobile phones with active internet connections in New Zealand in June 2017, up 11 percent from the same time in 2016.

Where does this fit into SEO? Well, according to Google, one-third of all mobile searches made each day are related to location. As more and more users turn to their smartphones to find out about the world around them with local searches, you need to be there. The best way to get in front of those searchers is through local SEO.

A Solid Local SEO Strategy is Key to Success

Check out this statistic:

• 76% of local searches result in a phone call

Every local business wants customers and potential customers to get in contact with them. This lets you start building a relationship as early as possible. As 76% of local searches result in a phone call, SEO is an important part of that relationship-building process.

A solid, well-structured SEO strategy can put you in front of the Auckland customers that have an immediate need to get in touch with your business.

Remember, Your Competitors Probably Have an SEO Strategy Too

Whichever industry your small business operates in, your competitors are almost certainly involved in Search Engine Optimisation too. This means you need to do the same or you risk losing customers to them.

Plus, you should start as early as possible to give yourself the biggest advantage. This is because building authority and ranking can take time, and you never know when your competitors are going to come into the picture.

If you remember one thing from this post, it should be this: SEO is not just reserved for large businesses. Small business owners like you absolutely can benefit, so you need to get in on the action.

Google AdWords is the foremost advertising service on the web. Countless digital advertisers use the service to display advertisements within the Google ad network to web users around the world.

In fact, the service is so popular that an estimated 97 percent of Google’s annual revenues are generated by its advertising services.

But where does this gigantic service fit into your plan as a small business?

Well, when used properly, estimates show businesses can make $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on the platform.

AdWords is difficult to master, though. It has many nuances and its users can spend years mastering its intricacies and improving the results their ads achieve.

Building an understanding of key concepts is a critical step on the path to using AdWords effectively. Negative keywords is one of those key concepts. While many new AdWords users sometimes struggle to understand negative keywords, it is a concept that is central to making AdWords work for your business.

What are Negative Keywords?

In a nutshell, negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns. That means negative keywords are an important way of ensuring your campaigns are hyper-focused on the keywords that really matter to your customers.

Effectively using negative keywords also ensures you don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.

Here’s an example to illustrate. Let’s say you are a small business in Auckland that offers window cleaning services. You will not want to pay for clicks when people search for “house cleaning services” or “car cleaning services”. So, depending on how you set up your campaign, you may need to add those as negative keywords.

How do Negative Keywords Work?

Defining which search terms you don’t want to appear for is just as important as defining which you do want to appear for. After all, you don’t want to pay for clicks from people who are looking for something different to what you offer.

An intelligent approach to using negative keywords can protect your investment and make sure you spend money to appear for the right terms. It takes a lot of lateral thinking, however, as well as experience. An effective SEO agency in Auckland can help with the process.

Also, Google provides step-by-step guidance on using negative keywords in this support article.

What to Keep in Mind When Using Negative Keywords

It is important to understand there are a couple of circumstances where negative keywords are not effective 100% of the time:

1. Where your ad displays on search results pages that contain close variations of your negative keywords.
2. When users perform searches that are over ten words long. This is because negative keywords are not excluded after the tenth word. There are workarounds for this scenario, however, such as excluding large portions of those searches as negative keywords.

You should also bear in mind that if you use too many negative keywords, this can dramatically reduce the number of potential customers your ad reaches. Striking a balance is critical.

The key to success is constantly monitoring your campaigns, analysing the results, and making changes to negative keywords and the campaign’s other settings to continually optimise. When you do this, return on investment improves.

There is no denying that app design continues to evolve and improve as new technologies become available. Increased memory capacity, CPU performance, and general hardware design mean our devices can do much more today than they did even just a few years ago.

Everything from office productivity apps all the way through to gaming and virtual reality apps are all seeing massive progress. What are the current trends in mobile app design, however?

Of course, predicting design trends is always a risky business. What is clear is that mobile app design is becoming increasingly important as users continue to switch from using desktops to using mobile devices instead.

Virtual Reality

Possibly the most exciting development in mobile app design is VR, or virtual reality, and AR, augmented reality. AR and VR are not new by any means, but advances in hardware technology make it possible to use them in a wider range of applications.

While there are still some who believe VR and AR will remain a niche market, the power of modern mobile devices has led to new investments in the technology, with many predicting AR and VR will become much more widely used than they are now.

Nintendo’s Pokémon Go AR game is a good example. While its popularity has decreased, it was an unprecedented success. In fact, few predicted that an AR game like Pokémon Go would capture the imagination and do so well. In fact, its success is leading others to pursue AR and VR projects.

Focus on User Experience

App designers are becoming increasingly focused on user experience. It is important to make a distinction between user experience (UX) and user interface (UI), however, as they are two very different things, despite common misconceptions.

UI is about the visual appearance of an app while UX is more about usability and how the app makes users feel.

This is important as today’s app users prefer simple and uncluttered apps that are easy to use and have useful functionality. In most cases, it is the content of the app that is of most interest to a user, not fancy graphics or indulgent typography.

Colour and UI

Colour theory is another element of mobile app design that you need to consider. The current trend is for calming pastels and gradients.

As we hear more stories of people taking a break from their smartphone and tablet to get “off-grid”, it is important for app designers, business owners, and tech leaders to discover why so many people now view their phones as having a negative impact on their life. While colours and other visual elements are not the solution, making apps aesthetically appealing will always be important.

Wearable Tech and the Internet of Things

On the surface, it may seem the wearable device trend hit its peak with the Apple Watch. However, it may not be done yet.

In fact, it’s predicted that, by 2019, 200 million wearable devices will be sold. This will impact the app design industry in several ways. For example, many app developers and app owners will need to think about how their apps can be used on smaller screens. In addition, wearable devices will create opportunities for new apps, concepts, business models, and ideas.

The Future

No-one really knows what the future holds for app design, but it is an exciting time, not least because technology is advancing at such a breath-taking pace. Knowing the latest trends will help you stay ahead of the curve.

As you’re reading this blog, you probably want to get more traffic to your website. Somewhere along the way, you may have heard the term “backlinks” and the fact they are important to SEO.

How do backlinks work, however, and what are they?

What Are Backlinks?

So-called (and self-appointed) SEO experts often use a load of fancy terminology and jargon to dazzle you and make them sound better than what they are. More often than not, however, they leave you with more questions than answers.

When you break most elements of SEO down, however, it is actually really simple. This applies to backlinks too. In fact, a backlink is just a normal link, a web address, a hyperlink, an inbound link… whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day, it’s just a link.

The reason people refer to these links as backlinks is because they are found on a website other than yours. When a user clicks on that link they go from the third-party website to yours.

Why Are Backlinks Important?

So, now to answer the most important question: why are backlinks important?

Search engines constantly comb the internet using what are known as spiders to analyse the content, images, and other elements of every web page they find. Search engine spiders also explore and follow the links found on those pages.

So, backlinks help Google find and connect web pages on the internet. Actually, if you have a website that has no backlinks and you don’t manually submit it to Google, the search engine has no way of knowing it exists.

In addition, Google puts all the information it finds about each web page into its index. It then applies ranking factors to that information to give search users such as Google and Bing accurate and relevant results.

Backlinks are one of those ranking factors. In fact, they are one of the most important as Google uses them like a vote for the website.

In other words, web pages with the most good-quality backlinks (votes) are more likely to rank in higher positions.

Putting this Into Practice

Search engines are crucially important to the success of many websites and businesses. In addition, search traffic can be an important source of lead generation and revenue.

If this applies to you, it is important you take steps to earn backlinks to your website.

In other words, constantly getting good quality backlinks is a key part of having a wider SEO strategy. However, it isn’t as easy as just posting a backlink as a comment on a website that gets lots of users. Google and other search engines require much more than this.

For example, backlinks to your website should ideally be on web pages that contain content that is relevant to the content on your page. So, getting a friend who has a highly ranked website for her tree surgeon business to post a backlink to your catering business is unlikely to be as effective as getting backlinks from catering-related website pages.

So, the best strategy is to get backlinks from high-quality and relevant websites. Doing this will help your website rise through the search engine rankings which will help you attract a larger audience.

There are hundreds of best practice guidelines to follow when designing a new website. If you have a good website designer, they will look after most of them. There are some, however, that you will be involved with, including the most important of all. That’s right – you play a crucial role in getting the most important part of the website design process right.

So, this is most important web design tip you’ll ever hear.

Ready?

Here it is: make sure you design your website for your customers.

It sounds simple, but you don’t have to look far on the internet to find websites that are not designed for users/customers. Here are some tell-tale signs:

• Homepages that talk about the size of the company, when the company was founded, or the size of its turnover
• Service and product pages that have very little information
• Unnatural and/or counter-intuitive navigational structures

The above are all examples of website elements created from the perspective of the company. Take the last one, for example. This often happens when website menus are designed according to how the business operates rather than how users search.

Benefits of Designing for Your Customers

• Visitors will spend more time on your website
• Visitors will find the information they need faster and with less hassle
• Visitors will get a better understanding of what you offer as well as your capabilities
• You will convert more of these visitors into customers

How to Design Your Website for Your Customers

1. Start by defining who your main customers are. Think about things like age, gender, interests, and more. It is also important to think about the motivations that bring visitors to your website. This will influence the overall style and design. For example, if you are a financial advisor, the motivation might be security and preparing for the future. If you run a nightclub, on the other hand, your website visitors will be more interested in fun and entertainment.
2. Visitors to your website will have a problem they need an answer for. That problem might be finding a contractor to renovate their home, a mechanic to fix their car, or a plumber to install a new hot water cylinder. Identify the problems your visitors are thinking about when they visit your site.
3. This final stage may involve you directly if, for example, you are providing the content for your website. In addition, you will be involved in guiding the website designer and approving design elements. When doing this, make sure everything appeals to the customer you defined in point one above. Make sure all design elements fit with the visitor motivations you identified too. Your website should also answer or solve the problems you identified in point two above.

An example of the last point is the homepage of your website. As mentioned above, many companies use the homepage to tell visitors how good their company is, i.e. when it was founded, how big it has grown, etc. The vast majority of your website visitors don’t care about this information.

Instead, your website visitors care about the problem they have. There are three things they want to learn:

1. Do you understand their problem?
2. Do you have a solution?
3. Will your solution solve their problem?

The pages you create, the navigational structure of your website, and the information the website contains must provide answers to all the above.

By doing this, you will get the most important element of your website right – designing it for your customers.

Have you heard website designers and others talk about UX? It is one of those jargon terms that people in the website design industry often use without thinking. What is UX, though, and why is it important?

UX stands for user experience. So, UX is the part of the website design process that focuses on user experience.

What is User Experience?

User experience, or UX, involves considering the emotions and attitudes of people using your website. The goal with UX design is to ensure your website is meaningful and relevant to users.

As a result, it covers just about every aspect of your website’s design. This includes navigational structure, the layout of content on the page, the detail of content on the page, the branding and colour scheme, how easy it is to use the website’s functions, and more.

Importantly, it is different to UI design – UI stands for user interface. UI design is more about the visual aesthetics of the website. UX design, on the other hand, involves looking at the UI, among other things, to ensure it delivers a good user experience.

As you can see, UX can be quite a complex topic. It is possible, however, to boil it down to something very simple: does your website help visitors achieve their objective and is the process of doing so painless?

Here are two examples:

1. Building contractor website – does the website explain the building contractor’s capabilities while also building trust and confidence that the contractor will be able to deliver as promised? In addition, is it quick and easy for visitors to find contact information and/or request a quote?
2. Online clothing retailer – do visitors find it easy to find the products they want, are all charges and terms easy to find and understand, and is the checkout process secure, smooth, and easy to complete?

Why Is UX Important in Website Design?

UX is important as it helps ensure your website achieves your objectives. Let’s go back to the two examples above to illustrate this. The building contractor, for example, might have a high-quality, modern, and very professional website, but if it doesn’t give visitors enough information about the company’s experience and capabilities, visitors might leave without making an enquiry. In other words, the website will fail to meet its objectives.

Similarly, an online clothing retailer that has a checkout process that makes visitors concerned about the security of their information may have a higher-than-normal shopping cart abandonment rate, i.e. people who start but don’t finish the checkout process. This is another example of a website that fails to meet its objectives.

Three Tips to Achieve Good UX Design

1. Start by trying to look at your website from the perspective of your customers. This can include, for example, going through the checkout process in exactly the same way your customers do.
2. Ask real visitors what they like and don’t as well as why they did or didn’t do something. Make sure you ask these questions as impartially as possible and don’t get defensive when visitors are critical.
3. Regularly review the analytics of your website to identify issues. For example, do you have a web page that gets a lot of website traffic but doesn’t convert? What changes can you make to that web page to improve the user experience?

As you can see from the last point, UX is an ongoing process. That said, it is important to focus on delivering a good user experience from the start of the website design process.