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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.

Responsive website design has never been more important. What exactly is it, though, and why is it so important?

In simple terms, responsive website design ensures your website looks great on any size of screen. It is dynamic technology which means your website will automatically detect the size of screen a visitor is using. So, for example, it can tell the difference between a large computer monitor, a mid-size iPad screen, and the screen on a smartphone.

Your website will then “respond” to this screen to rearrange the content so it fits properly on the user’s device. Most responsive websites also have other elements that change depending on the size of the screen, such as the design of the menu.

Is This the Only Option Available to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

Responsive website design is one of two main options you have to make your website mobile-friendly. The other option is to create a mobile version of your website. In other words, developing a separate version of your website that fits and works properly on mobile devices.

As with responsive website design, mobile websites also operate dynamically. This means your website will detect the size of screen your visitor is using and will then show them the most appropriate version of your website, i.e. the desktop version or the mobile version.

Which is the Best Option – Responsive Website Design or a Mobile Website?

Most experts recommend you go for responsive website design. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is there are no standard sizes of device or screen. As a result, visitors to your website could use just about any size of screen. When you create a mobile version of your website, you will make it suitable for as many sizes as possible. It is very hard (if not impossible), however, to create a version for every screen size possibility. This means some users may have a poor user experience.

The other reason why experts recommend responsive websites rather than mobile websites is management. With a mobile website, you will have two standalone websites to manage. So, for example, when adding content, you must add it to both.

With a responsive website design, you only have one website which is much easier to manage.

Why Does Responsive Website Design Matter?

Many people would say responsive website design is important because it helps with your ranking on Google. We’ll come back to this in a moment, however, as there is a much more important reason for ensuring your website is responsive and fully optimised for mobile – your users.

More and more people now use their phones to not only browse the internet, but also perform tasks on the internet they would previously have only done on a computer. So, if your website is not responsive, mobile users will have a poor user experience. This will impact the performance of your website and the results it achieves.

Turning back to Google, it also recognises the growing trend of people using mobiles to access the internet. In addition, Google wants to ensure its users – the people who use its search engine – have as good a user experience as possible. As a result, it prioritises mobile-friendly websites when people use its search engine on a mobile device.

In other words, if you don’t have a responsive website design, you may get fewer visitors than you could, and the visitors you do get will receive a poor user experience if they are using a mobile device.

So, if your website isn’t responsive, the time to act is now.

If you’ve got an idea for an app and are wondering how the design process works, the following outline will give you a better understanding. While all app development projects are unique, the steps below are fairly generic to all types of apps.

Those steps are:

• Information gathering
• Technical and budget feasibility assessment
• UX and UI design followed by wireframe creation
• Development
• Testing
• Upload to the relevant app store

Let’s look at each of the steps in more detail.

Information Gathering

This is where the app development project leader meets with you to get an understanding of the type of app you want to build. The lead designer might also be involved in this conversation.

They will want to find out about the functionality you want in the app as well as how you want the app to look, but they will also be interested in finding out who your target audience is, what your objectives are for the app, and what your future plans are.

Technical and Budget Feasibility Assessment

This stage involves checking if it is possible to deliver the functionality you require from a technical and budgetary point of view. Things like operating system version and mobile phone type will be investigated at this stage also. For example, you may need functionality on your app that is only available on phones with the latest version of the iOS or Android operating system.

UX Design, UI Design, and Wireframe Creation

This stage involves designing the visual appearance of the app as well as the user experience and user interface. The user experience element ensures the flow of the app is correct, so the app is intuitive and easy to use. For example, deciding on the navigational structure of the app.

The user interface design involves creating and designing buttons, content on the page, and navigational tools, among other things. Wireframe creation involves sketching the various screens of the app to give you an understanding of the how the app will look and feel.

Development

Once you approve the wireframes, the development stage can begin. This involves writing the code of the app to build the functionality you need and to create the design. A high-quality app developer will follow the latest industry best practices during this stage. This includes, crucially, documenting the code as it is written.

The app may go through several iterations during this stage of the process to ensure the functionality created matches your expectations.

Testing

Once the main development phase is complete, full-scale testing of the app will begin. This involves testing on as many different phones and operating system versions as possible.

You can’t make an app that is guaranteed to work on all devices, though, so the objective is ensuring it appeals to as many of your potential users as possible.

Upload to the Relevant App Store

After the testing phase, and after you have given your approval, the app can be uploaded to the relevant app store. If it is an iOS app for Apple devices, this means uploading to the App Store. If it is an Android app for Android devices, it means uploading to the Google Play Store.

Once the app is approved by the app store, it will be available for users to download.

Now you understand the process better, it is time to get started with your app development project.

Is your website something you are proud of or does it make you cringe when you think about it? This is a crucial question to consider because whatever you think about your website, visitors probably think the same. At the very least, a website that is not up to the right standard won’t portray the right image of your company.

When analysing your existing website, here are the things you should consider:

• Does the website have a modern design? Modern designs are uncluttered and clean.
• Does the website properly reflect your brand? Has your logo changed, for example, or did the original design not quite get the branding right?
• Is the website easy to use? When considering this question, remember to think about it from the perspective of visitors to the website, i.e. people who are unfamiliar with it. Will they be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily? Does the website do everything visitors expect it to do?
• Does everything on your website work as it should? Even if it worked when you first launched it, upgrades to platforms, plugins, third-party integrations, and other code can cause features to break.
• Is the website optimised for search engines with modern SEO practices and techniques?
• Is the content on the website up-to-date? For example, are there products or services on the site that you no longer offer? Are there products or services missing? Is all the contact information correct?
• Is the website easy to update and manage?
• What does your website look like on mobile devices? Do all the features work when you access it on a mobile? The importance of this cannot be understated given the numbers of people who now browse the internet using their phones. Also, if the mobile version of your website does not work properly, it will not perform as well in Google search as it could.
• Has the code of the website been updated recently, particularly in relation to security patches? If not, your website could be vulnerable to hacking.
• Does the website load fast, including on mobile devices?
• Does the website have all the functionality you want?

If any of the above points give you cause for concern, you should seriously think about getting a new website for your business.

Investing in the Future of Your Business

Getting a new website is an investment that will generate returns for your business. Here are some of the benefits that getting a new website will bring:

• The website will showcase your brand properly and will better represent your business
• You will get more traffic to the website through various channels, including from Google
• Visitors will spend more time on the website
• Your conversion rate will improve, i.e. you will generate more revenue and profit for your business

Several years ago, business owners in some industries could treat websites as an optional extra. This is not the case anymore. Not only do you now need a business website, you also need the website to be modern, fully functional, and in-line with current industry best practice standards. If yours doesn’t meet this standard, it is time to get a new one.

When most business owners and directors think about their website, they think about it in terms of their customers. Usually, this means ensuring the website helps generate interest from new customers, although websites can also play an important role in retaining existing customers too. What about recruitment in your business, though? Is your website attracting the team members your business needs to deliver for your customers and achieve your objectives?

Remember, almost all prospective candidates for vacancies in your business will check your website as part of the application process. Often, this happens before they submit their CV.

So, your website needs to sell your company to candidates considering applying for a job. Does your website concisely and accurately describe what you do, for example? Does it clearly outline the company’s mission as well as your vision and future ambitions?

Presenting the Right Image

One of the goals of your website should be to make job applicants want to work for you. This doesn’t just happen on the career or recruitment pages of the website. Instead, you need to think about the whole site.

Here are some tips to help you achieve this:

• Describe the culture of your company – this is one of the key things that prospective candidates will look for when they visit your website. After all, your website is one of the best windows that candidates have into what your company is really like. So, tell them.
• Ensure the content on the recruitment pages of your website appeals to the candidates your business needs – make sure you highlight things that will appeal to the candidates you want to attract. For example, salary, promotion prospects, flexible working options, training opportunities, etc.
• Publish a mission statement – a mission statement is a summary of the objectives and values of your company.
• Use video to tell your story – videos will give you an edge over other companies competing for the same talent. It could be a corporate video that you can use for other purposes in the business, or you could develop something specific, such as a behind the scenes-type video that includes introductions to key personnel.
• Optimise the application process – if candidates apply for vacancies directly through your website, make sure the application process is as streamlined and intuitive as possible. If you don’t have a facility on your website that lets candidates apply for vacancies, you should consider adding this feature.
• Include testimonials – testimonials give clients confidence in the abilities of your business. You can get similar benefits with employee testimonials. After all, an employee describing the culture of the company from their perspective is often more powerful than your own description.
• Include a strong call-to-action – the final tip is to make sure you directly ask potential job applicants to take the next step using a call-to-action. In most cases, this will be something like an “Apply Now” button. As with other calls-to-action on your website, make sure it gets to the point and is highly visible on the page.

Your website can’t solve all your recruitment headaches but optimising it will make a significant difference.