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Mobile use has exploded in recent years presenting an interesting dilemma for small and medium-sized business owners in NZ – should you invest in a new website, an app, or both?

After all, you want to engage your customers in a way that is most relevant to them. If they use their phones a lot, then is an app the best way to go? What advantages do websites offer that apps can’t?

More Than a Website – a Mobile-Friendly Website

When considering this question, you shouldn’t simply think of it as a website vs app equation. Instead, you should think about the mobile-friendly version of your website.

Web developers normally make your website mobile-friendly by using a responsive design. This means your website dynamically changes according to the device of the user.

So, let’s narrow the question down further – should you invest in a responsive website that is 100 percent mobile-friendly, or should you go for an app instead?

Advantages of a Mobile-Friendly Website

For most small businesses, the answer is almost always a mobile-friendly website. This is because businesses in most industries will struggle to get real and tangible benefits from having an app. In addition, a mobile-friendly website will deliver significantly higher returns on investment.

Why? Here are the main advantages of having a mobile-friendly website:

• Easier to find – most people go to Google when searching for a product, service, or brand. The results they see when they search are all websites.
• Compatibility – mobile-friendly websites built using a responsive design will be compatible with just about any device. An app, however, can only run on the platform it is designed for.
• Easier to upgrade – with a website, you are in complete control of upgrading it. You can choose when and what to upgrade, and you can push the update live whenever you want. With an app, however, the process is much more complex. Even when you go through it, some users might still use the old version of the app.
• Wider reach – as users can find your website on Google and other search engines, it will have a much wider potential reach than an app.
• Immediacy – users can simply click and view a website which is a much simpler process than searching, downloading, and installing an app.
• More cost-effective – when you take all the costs involved including App store fees, the cost of development, and the cost of maintenance and future upgrades, websites are significantly more cost-effective than apps.

When Do Apps Make Sense?

What about situations where it does make sense to have an app. Generally, your app should meet one or more of the following four requirements to make it a worthwhile investment:

1. Gaming – users like playing games on their phones so apps often work better than websites if you’re creating a game.
2. High use – this means daily use, and often multiple times a day. Examples include social media, fitness tracking, and to-do list apps.
3. Native functionality is required – you may also need an app if you require native phone functionality that web browsers don’t support. An example is access to the phone’s camera.
4. Offline access – it may also make sense to go for an app if users require regular offline access.

As you can see, however, the above requirements are very specific. In most cases, a website is the best way to go, providing it is fully mobile-friendly.

Are websites still relevant, or is the world now starting to move on? Are people now using social media while ignoring websites? What about apps – are they now more important to businesses than websites?

All these questions centre on one consideration – should you spend time and money investing in your website or should you invest in other forms of digital marketing instead?

Lots of new technologies have threatened to overtake websites and, in some industries, they have. Take Facebook, for example, as there are far more people who access Facebook on a smartphone than on a computer. The majority of those people use the Facebook app to login to their accounts.

What about more generally, however? Specifically, what about your business?

Constantly Changing Landscape

It is true that the digital landscape is constantly changing. The increasing use of mobile phones is yet again a good example. This change has led to Google recently adopting a mobile first indexing policy. This means it checks the mobile version of a website before the desktop version when updating its search index.

To date, however, the importance of websites has remained undiminished despite this changing landscape. In fact, in many situations, the importance of websites has increased.

In the above example of Google’s mobile first policy, the strong advice for all website owners is to review, update, and improve how their website looks and operates on smartphones. By doing this, you increase the possibility of getting more traffic to your website.

That hardly sounds like a technology that is on the way out.

What About Apps?

What about mobile apps – could they overtake websites? Again, in some cases, mobile apps are becoming more important. We’ve already mentioned the example of social media but there are others too, including games – game apps are incredibly popular.

For most businesses, however, websites are a far more important marketing tool than an app. This is because people still go to Google when looking for a product or service. They still go to Google or your website directly when looking for directions to your business too, or to get your telephone number. There are not many people who would turn to an app when looking for this information.

In fact, many SMEs are struggling to get a return on investment from there apps. Even if they get people to install the app on their phone, how do they get them to regularly use it? Just look at all the apps on your phone that you haven’t opened in ages to see how difficult a problem this is for app owners.

What About Social Media?

Social media is another argument sometimes offered by those who think websites are on the way out. After all, you can set up a business page on Facebook easily and for free.

Social media is very restrictive, however, plus you must play by the platform’s rules. You can’t, for example, design your Facebook business page however you want.

Also, you are at the mercy of the platform, something which is a highly risky strategy for businesses that only have a presence on social media.

Websites Are Critically Important Today and Will Be in the Future

There is no reliable information that websites are becoming less important to business. On the contrary, people increasingly expect to be able to find out about and interact with your business through a website.

So, websites are not on the way out. They are here, and they are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Is there a guaranteed way to be number one on Google? When you think of this question, it is a logical impossibility. After all, if there was a guaranteed way, everyone would do it which would render the technique useless. After all, everyone can’t be number one.

This doesn’t mean you should give up all hope of getting to the top spot of Google. For a start, you should be able to get to the top spot for your business name – that is relatively straightforward. When most people talk about getting to number one on Google, however, they are referring to being in the top spot for other keywords in addition to their business name.

So, while there are no guarantees, here are six tips which will increase your chances of being number 1 on Google.

Tip 1 – Adhere to Google’s Quality Guidelines

Trying to trick your way to number one spot on Google simply won’t work, particularly in the long term. The only way to get real and lasting results is to use open and honest strategies.

A good place to start is to check if your website and SEO strategies adhere to Google’s Quality Guidelines.

Tip 2 – Target the Right Keywords

The keywords you choose to target are critically important to the success of your SEO strategy. Let’s say you are a mortgage adviser, for example. You are likely to find it almost impossible to rank highly for the keyword “mortgages” because it is too competitive. Therefore, you probably should not spend time or money trying.

The more successful approach is to target other keywords. This includes local search terms such as “mortgage advisor <location>”. It also includes more specific search terms, such as “first-time buyer mortgages <location>”.

While there is still no guarantee with these keywords, you will increase your chances of success.

Tip 3 – Optimise Your Website for Keywords

Once you have decided on the keywords you want to target, you need to optimise your content for those keywords. This usually means the following:

• Creating a separate page for each main keyword
• Including the keyword in the page title
• Including the keyword in the H1 tag
• Including the keyword in the first paragraph of the page and sporadically elsewhere
• Including variations of the keyword in the page’s sub-headings and content
• Including the keyword in the page’s meta description

Tip 4 – Add Lots of Content to Your Website

You should also publish lots of high-quality and unique content to your website. This can help with the next tip, plus it helps Google get a better understanding of your website and your level of authority in the field. Google also likes websites that are active.

Tip 5 – Get Links from High-Quality Sources

Backlinks remain one of the most important factors in SEO. Google treats links from other websites to yours as an indicator of your website’s quality. There are two things you should remember about links:

• You need lots of them – the more the better
• But only if they come from good quality sources

In other words, there is no way of faking links that will deliver sustainable results. This may have been possible in the past, but the only realistic option you have now is to build genuine links from quality websites.

Tip 6 – Use Alternative Strategies

The final tip we have is to forget about getting to the top spot in Google’s organic search results. This is because you have other options:

• Use Google My Business and optimise your listing and website for local searches. This is because Google’s local search results are separate to the organic listings, plus they appear above the organic listings.
• Use Google AdWords, optimising your campaign to get into one of the top ad positions. These positions also appear above organic search results.
• If you sell products, promote them using Google Shopping ads which are more attractive on search results pages than organic listings, plus they typically appear at the top of the page.

If you choose to go the SEO route, however, make sure you put in place a long-term strategy. This is the best way get the results you need.

Most people regard the development of a website as being a cost to the business. In accounting terms, this means it is written off in one hit on your profit and loss, typically in the year you get the website developed. There is another option available to you, however – treating your website as a fixed asset.

When you do this, the website moves from your profit and loss to your balance sheet, removing the one-off hit of the cost of development.

Before going further, we are not accountants at Numero. This means you should always take professional advice when making any decisions relating to the accounts of your business.

In the view of many experts, though, a website can be regarded as a fixed business asset.

What is a Fixed Asset?

A fixed asset is something in your business that you purchase to help you generate income. Office equipment, a vehicle, or a machine are all common examples.

Fixed assets typically have a useable life after which they fail or become obsolete and need to be replaced.

In accounting terms, you don’t record the cost of purchasing a fixed asset in your profit and loss statement. Instead, you put it on your balance sheet. Then, over the usable life of the asset, you record its depreciation, effectively spreading the cost of purchasing the asset over several years rather than one.

Is Your Website a Fixed Asset?

So, can you treat your website as a fixed asset? In most cases, you probably can. The only real exception to this would be a website that is purely a brochure site that contains information about the business and what you do, but contains no calls to action, lead generation tools, or ecommerce functionality.

In reality, however, websites like this are becoming increasingly rare as digital marketing in all industries becomes increasingly important.

So, if you expect your website to help you directly generate income over the coming years, you can regard it as a fixed asset and put the cost of development on your balance sheet.

In other words, if you expect your business to financially benefit from the website over several years, you can spread the cost of developing that website over that same period of time.

What Are the Benefits of Treating Your Website as a Fixed Asset?

Treating your website as a fixed asset strengthens the balance sheet of your business. It also means you don’t have to write off the cost of building the website against one year’s profit.

Of course, this may not be something everyone wants to do. There will some situations, for example, where it makes more sense to include the cost of building the website in your profit and loss. Only you and your accountant can make that decision depending on your circumstances.

The important thing to remember, however, is you have options based on the value of the website to your business over the long-term.

There is a lot of jargon in digital marketing, so to help you understand what it’s all about, here are 22 of the most important jargon terms explained.

1. Algorithm – this is a computer programme used by search engines like Google. It contains the rules those search engines use to rank websites on search results pages.
2. Backlink – a backlink is when a third-party adds a clickable link on its website that links back to yours. When the third-party is a reputable website, Google regards the backlink as being like a vote of confidence in your site. In other words, backlinks help with SEO.
3. Black Hat – this refers to SEO strategies that go against Google’s policies. They are sometimes referred to as spamming.
4. Bounce Rate – this is a metric in Google Analytics. It is the percentage of people who visit your website but only look at one page before leaving.
5. Conversion Rate – this is the percentage of people who convert into a sale or lead after visiting your website. You will often calculate conversion rate per advertising campaign, so you can measure return on investment.
6. CPC – this stands for Cost Per Click. In PPC advertising, this is the average price you pay for each click on your ad.
7. CPM – this stands for Cost Per Mille. Mille is the Latin word for thousand so it means cost per thousand. It is an alternative charging model to PPC. With CPM, you pay for every 1,000 views of your ad.
8. CTA – this stands for Call To Action. It is a phrase on your website or ad that asks people to take the action you want them to. Examples include “Buy Now” or “Get Discount”.
9. CTR – this stands for Click Through Rate. It is the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it.
10. Email Marketing – this marketing strategy involves building a list of email subscribers and then sending periodic emails to them to promote your business, products, sales, or other events.
11. Impression – this is the number of times your ad is viewed during an advertising campaign.
12. Keyword – the phrases that people type into Google when doing a Google search. If you optimise your page and/or ad for the keywords that people use, you will be more likely to get clicks.
13. Landing Page – the page that users click to from your ad. It is a crucial page for turning that user into a sale or lead.
14. Long Tail Keyword – normal keywords are two to four words long. A long tail keyword is a phrase that people type into Google search that is longer than four words.
15. Meta Description – when you look at a Google search results page, the two-line description of each website is the meta description. Optimising this for the relevant keyword can help with SEO.
16. Organic Traffic – this is the traffic you get to your website that doesn’t come from ads. It can include non-paid traffic from Google, traffic from social media, etc.
17. PPC – this stands for Pay Per Click. It is an online advertising model where you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. This means you don’t pay for ad views.
18. Quality Score – Google AdWords works on an auction basis. That auction is based on the quality score of your ad plus your budget. A good quality score will normally mean a better position for your ad.
19. Remarketing – this method of advertising involves displaying ads to people who have previously visited your website while they are browsing other sites on the internet.
20. SEO – this stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It covers actions and strategies that optimise your website for Google and other search engines. The objective is to get your website higher up search results pages.
21. SEM – this stands for Search Engine Marketing. It refers to paid advertising that promotes your website on search results pages. For example, AdWords would be part of an SEM strategy.
22. SERP – this stands for Search Engine Results Page. It is the page Google displays to users after they search. It contains organic search results and can also contain paid results, local business results, videos, Google Shopping ads, and more.

Dealing with SEO in your business can be a minefield. You get everything from companies who bamboozle you with jargon without saying anything substantial through to unsolicited emails from SEO “experts” claiming they will get you to the top position in Google.

Who can you believe when it comes to SEO?

There are two steps to answering this question. The first is to understand what you can realistically expect from an SEO strategy and the second is how you can measure results to ensure you get what was promised.

So, if the SEO company you are talking to is not talking in plain language, walk away. If the SEO company you are talking to is promising something that is not realistic, you should also be cautious. You should walk away too if the SEO company is unwilling to use common methods of measuring results (or is unsure how).

What Can You Realistically Expect from SEO?

Nobody except a very small group of Google employees knows exactly how the Google search algorithm works. In addition, the algorithm changes constantly as Google works to improve user experience.

These facts alone make it impossible to promise specific results from an SEO strategy, but there is more. In particular, there is no way of knowing what your competitors will do. One of your competitors, for example, could start spending three-times your SEO budget at the same time as you start doing SEO. How good will a promise of the top spot in Google be in this situation? Not very good at all.

Therefore, what you should expect from an SEO strategy is a clearly outlined list of actions the SEO company will take to promote your website in a Google-friendly way. This can include actions they will take on your website, content they will produce, outreach efforts they will make, keywords they will target, etc.

When this is done correctly, you should see improvements on a number of key SEO measurements.

Key SEO Measurements

Below are four key measurements you should consider when analysing the success of your SEO strategy. You will need a baseline for all of them before you begin a new SEO strategy, though, so you have something to compare to. When taken together, they will give you a rounded view of the success of your campaign.

Keywords

• The number of keywords where your website ranks on page one
• Whether the position of your website is moving up or down for specific keywords
• New keywords that your website ranks for

Website Traffic

• Users – the number of people who visit your website
• Sessions – the number of visits
• Pageviews – the number of pages viewed

You should also check and compare the traffic you get specifically from search engines – Google Analytics gives you this information. You need to do this because an increase in traffic to your website might come from a source other than Google.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting only one page. This will give you an indication of the quality of traffic you are getting, i.e. is the SEO strategy targeting the right keywords to bring you the right traffic?

Goal Conversions

You should also set up conversion tracking on your website, so you can see the percentage of Google search visitors who convert into sales or leads.

As you can see from the above, SEO does not have to be overly complicated. So long as you have a consultant who is realistic about what can be achieved, and you measure the effectiveness of the strategy properly, your efforts should be a success.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a topic that is often clouded in mystery. Part of the reason for this is the SEO industry itself with its over-reliance on jargon and unclear explanations. This, understandably, leads to business owners wondering if SEO is real or whether it is a myth. So, is SEO really worth the investment?

Let’s start answering this by looking at what Google says. Firstly, it doesn’t tell anyone how its search algorithm works, and it doesn’t give specific advice on SEO. Google does, however, give regular pointers on what it regards as important. Here are some examples:

• Google hates spam. In fact, it has a whole department whose job it is to ensure websites don’t get to the top of search results pages using spamming techniques. Over the years, Google has punished websites that are thin on content, that use link farms (a method of faking interest in your website), or that deceive the user by pretending to Google it has one thing on the page but then presenting something different to the user.
• Recently, Google has been very vocal about the importance it places on mobile-friendly websites. In fact, it now has a public policy of mobile first indexing where it prioritises the mobile version of your website.
• Speed has always been important to Google and it repeatedly emphasizes that the pages on your website should load fast. It even provides a tool which checks the speed of your website and highlights areas for improvement.
• Another thing Google often promotes is website structure and the importance of using recognised industry standards. This helps its algorithm – the computer programme behind Google search – understand what your website is about.
• The most important thing that Google wants you to do with your website, however, is to maximise the user experience. In other words, it wants website owners to concentrate almost exclusively on delivering exactly what visitors want. When you do this, Google will recognise it so will know to rank your website highly.

So, what does all the above tell you? Even though it only represents a small portion of the information that Google makes available, it still demonstrates the necessity of SEO. Therefore, SEO is certainly not a myth.

Is SEO a Must-Have That’s Worth the Investment, Though?

While SEO is not a myth, whether it is a must have and whether it is worth the investment are two completely different questions. Let’s look at the first one initially – is SEO a must-have?

That depends on whether you want to get traffic from Google. After all, there are lots of other sources of traffic to your website. If those sources give you enough visitors, leads, and sales, then maybe you don’t need SEO.

If you want people to find you on Google, if you want to get more traffic from Google, and if you want better-targeted traffic from Google, SEO is a must-have.

Now for the second question – is it worth the investment? This comes down to who you use as your SEO consultant. Most importantly, you need a team who understand how Google works and who have a track record of success.

So long as you have this, you will get positive results that will be long-lasting. That means your website appearing on more search results pages and/or appearing higher up the ranking. When this happens, SEO is worth the investment so is something you should consider doing.

Tracking your SEO efforts is just as important as doing SEO in the first place. After all, you need to make sure you continue making progress by increasing the traffic you get from Google. Similarly, it is essential you identify problems with SEO as soon as possible. You can also do this by tracking.

The most commonly used tool to track your SEO progress is Google Analytics. If you don’t currently have this setup, you should do so as soon as possible as it gives you invaluable information on the performance of your website.

Headline Statistics

The starting point with Google Analytics is to look at the main metrics for your website. To do this, go to Audience > Overview. You should do this on a monthly basis, measuring the difference between each month. It is also worthwhile to compare each month with the same month last year.

The four main metrics are:

• Users – the total number of users who visited your website during the selected time period.
• New users – the total number of users who visited your website during the selected time period who have not visited your website ever before.
• Sessions – the total number of times users visited your website during the selected time period.
• Pageviews – the number of pages users viewed on your website during the selected time period.

So, a user visiting your website three times during a month and accessing four pages per visit will add the following to your stats:

• Users – 1
• Sessions – 3
• Pageviews – 12

These headline figures are important as they will tell whether overall traffic to your website is up or down. This doesn’t specifically tell you about traffic from search engines, however. You will find that information in another section of Google Analytics.

Acquisition Statistics

To find statistics on how people access your website, go to Acquisition > Overview. This will tell you the source of your website traffic, with one of the options being Organic Search, i.e. traffic from Google and other search engines.

Again, you should compare this figure with the previous month and with the same month in the previous year. It is also worthwhile to calculate your monthly average and then compare it to that average as well.

Drilling Down to Page Level

It is also often important to look at individual pages on your website. This could be pages created specifically for SEO purposes, for example. It can also be your main sales pages, i.e. the pages you want people to visit as often as possible.

To find this information, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. This gives you a list of all the pages on your website accessed during the specified time period. The default view orders the pages according to the number of pageviews, with the most popular pages at the top of the list.

To find the traffic level of a specific page, search for it using the search box just above the table.

Other SEO-Useful Metrics to Check

Google Analytics offers other metrics that are useful to SEO, so it is worthwhile regularly checking these too.

• Bounce rate – go to Audience > Overview. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and only look at one page. Generally (although not always), Google prefers websites with low bounce rates.
• Conversions – conversions tell you how many people complete a pre-defined action when visiting your website. Completing a form or purchasing a product are two examples. You will need to set up conversions before you can track this metric.
• Site speed – got to Behaviour > Site Speed > Overview. Remember, Google likes websites that load fast, so the lower your page load times, the better.

It doesn’t take long to check the above in Google Analytics, but it will help your SEO.

The AdWords budgets of large companies – including the market leaders in your industry – are staggering. While you may spend hundreds or thousands a month, they may spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or more.

The simple reason why they do this is that AdWords delivers the results they need. In most cases, this is to generate new sales.

Of course, there is much more to it than this.

Going Deeper

AdWords research and analysis shows that big spenders on AdWords generate better results than those who spend less. As a result, you could probably double or triple your current AdWords budget and the big spenders will still do better than you.

Why? The big spenders on AdWords don’t look at the amount they spend as a cost to their business. Instead, they look at it as an investment which they want to make a return on. With so much money at stake, the big spenders do everything in their power to maximise this return.

So long as the return they achieve improves, and they have capacity in their business to deliver for their customers, they will continue to increase the amount of money they spend.

In other words, market leaders spend more on AdWords because it maximises the returns they achieve from their optimised campaigns.

What Can You Learn from This?

The biggest takeaway when looking at the market leaders and big spenders on AdWords is not what they spend, but how they spend it. In other words, how they optimise their campaigns.

The great thing is you can use exactly the same strategies the big players use to optimise your campaigns.

The Caveat

There is one caveat to this, however – your budget must already be at a sufficient level. If you only spend $100 a month on AdWords, for example, you will not have enough information to properly optimise your campaigns.

If you are serious about benefiting from AdWords, the first step is to increase your budget to a more realistic level

From there, you can start optimising your campaign to improve ROI.

Optimisation Tips

Here are five strategies market leaders and big AdWords spenders use to get maximum return from their campaigns.

• Actively Monitor Campaigns – if you set and forget your AdWords campaigns, you will never be able to compete with the big spenders. To be successful, you must actively monitor, test, improve, and optimise.
• Track Conversions – you also need to track conversions, i.e. linking a sale directly back to a click on an AdWords ad. Ideally, you should know the keyword, ad, and landing page that led to the sale.
• Optimise for Conversions – clicks are worthless if they don’t lead to conversions, so everything you do should be aimed at maximising conversions. Remember, if you run ads to generate leads, you also need to track the number of sales you get from those leads.
• Focus on Landing Pages – the market leaders on AdWords understand the importance of landing pages. Usually, they make them as specific as possible which can mean having separate landing pages per ad, keyword, offer, and more.
• Use AdWords’ Tools – this includes Ad Extensions, negative keywords, Expanded Text Ads, and more.

In summary, market leaders spend more on AdWords because they know how it works and how to get results. You don’t have to copy what they spend, but you should replicate what they do.