Inside Webcentral & What We’re Suggesting to Clients

Written on 04 May, 2018 by Julia Hammond
Categories Search Engine Optimisation

Ever wondered how a digital marketing agency operates? There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. From team structure and process, to common problems and solutions to match, we’re giving you an insight into the tapestry of Webcentral. Using our SEO service as a primary example, we will expose what goes into driving traffic to our clients’ websites and give you an overview of the improvements most commonly suggested to our clients.

As a digital marketing company, we certainly have our work cut out for us. While upholding the technical aspect – increasing the Google rank of the website (and reporting the progress along the way) – we also want to play a larger role in the development of our client’s business online. This means going above and beyond the usual reporting duties and looking at the bigger picture.

Who’s involved?

Throughout your campaign your main point of contact will be your Account Manager. Their primary role is to work with you, and various internal support teams, to ensure your website is performing online. These teams include:

  • Keyword Team: Our first point of contact after our initial conversation with you. They help identify the most effective and efficient keywords for your industry and product offering to ensure the best possible ROI throughout the first year of your SEO program. We also come back to this team, either mid-campaign or upon commencing a new year or a new strategy, to add new keywords.
  • Technical Team: Responsible for optimising your website during the setup phase. The tech team ensure important facets are in place, such as keyword allocation and on-page SEO. They work through a checklist of about 70 SEO elements manually (not via any kind of automated tool) to optimise your site for the Google algorithm. Handmade SEO! The tech team also brief our content team on where keywords need to be added or enhanced.
  • Content Team: Content is King! This is why we invest heavily in our in-house content writers to ensure your content will achieve the dual role of helping rank a website as well as conveying the appropriate brand message for your business. Once optimised and edited, the Account Manager will send proposed content additions or changes to you for approval before uploading it to your website.

These teams do all the behind-the-scenes work to ensure your campaign is running smoothly. As a client, you may not hear much about these teams, but they are hard at work for your business to ensure you can see (and feel) the results via rankings, traffic, enquiries and sales.

While these tasks bubble away in the background, your Account Manager will provide relevant industry news and advice or recommendations to help keep your business on top of the latest online developments. This advice is often more focused advice on ad-hoc website health issues, user engagement insights and opportunities in other marketing channels. These suggestions can help lift your SEO strategy from good to great!

What we’re suggesting in 2018

The online world is constantly changing evolving, as are your industries and customers. Your Account Manager is there to help your business stay on top of the latest digital developments. This year’s top recommendations are outlined below.

Websites Lacking an SSL Certificate

In July, Google will release an update which means that any sites without an SSL Certificate will show a ‘not secure’ message next to the URL. An SSL Certificate is a security feature that protects sensitive information provided on your site by visitors. Websites with SSL installed can be recognised by the ‘s’ in https:// in front of the URL, as opposed to the old http:// protocol.

Without that clear signal to users that your site is safe, it will have a detrimental effect on user trust.  The prediction is that websites lacking SSL after July will lose traffic as a result of the negative warning message. It’s imperative to talk to your web host about having this feature added to your website before July rolls around.  There are different types of SSL’s, so if unsure about which type you will need, talk to one of our team members for advice.

Site Speed

The time it takes a website to load is actually quite a large ranking factor. There are a lot of things we do during our setup process which will help your site speed, however one thing out of our control is your website’s hosting. Ensuring your website is hosted on a local server will increase the speed at which it loads and work in your favour when it comes to your Google rank. Unless you are using cloud flare hosting, if your website is not being hosted in Australia, we recommend that you move to a local host, like Netregistry or Melbourne IT.

Mobile Experience

Every day, more and more people are using mobile devices rather than their traditional desktops. Through manual testing and assessing the behaviour of your mobile traffic– conversion rates, bounce rate, average session duration and average number of pages viewed – we can identify a bad mobile experience. If a client’s website is not performing well for mobile users, we will put together some tailored ideas for improvement.

Google My Business Optimisation

Every business should have a Google My Business profile. Whether you have an eCommerce store, a shopfront, a brand or are a service provider covering a geographical area, there is always a suitable profile for your business.

These profiles make it easier for people to find your location and contact details when searching your business name and can also result in ranking as a top 3 business on the Google Map listings.

Just like SEO, there are various signals that determine who gets a place in the coveted top 3 map listings. These include:

  • Positive Google reviews from customers.
  • Replying to reviews when you get them.
  • Adding a business description, including key phrases you would like to rank for. Don’t be spammy, but make sure to list your main services or products.

You can also use your Google My Business profile to bump up your Google rank, by ensuring the details are consistent with those listed on your website (ie. phone number, URL, address and opening hours.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips

Improving your rank and getting traffic is only half of the battle. You then need to ensure that your website is doing its job by converting your traffic into enquiries or sales. If we identify that the traffic is there but you are still not getting enquiries, we will be looking at website factors that could be improved. These might include improving the design elements or layout of your website, revising your current call-to-actions on your site or adding new ones where applicable, improving your website copy, improving the functionality of the site, updating the images on your site, or creating purpose-built landing pages for conversion.

Identifying opportunities in other online marketing channels

If you are only marketing your business via one online channel, then you’re likely missing an opportunity. We have highly qualified specialists dedicated to a range of online channels including:

 SEO  GOOGLE ADWORDS Google Shopping
Email Marketing Social Media Content Marketing

Wherever your audience is, we can help advise the best way to get in front of them. In many cases with SMB’s, we will start with one online marketing channel (usually SEO or Google Adwords), but after we have generated an acceptable ROI in this channel (or even before – depending on budget), it’s always a good idea to think about other channels where you’ll be able to find your audience and generate revenue. We can help you find this next-best channel, and then work alongside the channel manager to ensure our marketing efforts are coordinated. If you have multiple marketing channels with dedicated managers, we will generally provide joint updates each month to streamline the time we need from our clients.

If your’re interested in managed digital marketing, don’t be shy! Give us a call on 1300 663 995 or send us an email at [email protected] for a no-strings conversation about what digital marketing can do for your business.

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