Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

11
Apr 2011

How effective is your website?

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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Your website is your virtual storefront… and accessible worldwide. There is no other communication vehicle which provides such a wide range of access to potential customers.

It becomes your brand identity, your voice to the world.

And unlike print material, your website is a dynamic vehicle through which you have the opportunity to provide timely information for all your customers. A good website uses this leverage to engage with customers, extend the reach of a brand and – most importantly – sell more product.

Your website has the luxury of being able to host as much content as is relevant to your brand, your customers and your business objectives and a good website provides visitors with detailed information about your product, your company, your story and how to contact you. And of course, you want them to discover whatever information they are seeking or provide them information on how to reach you to answer their questions….

Over the past few years with the explosion of social media and WordPress, there are now additional ways to update your website with relevant content far more efficiently than just a few years ago.

Creating a website which fully integrates social media, WordPress and RSS Feeds, allowing one post to be multi-purposed, optimized content across a broad spectrum of media and be 100% trackable, unlike print media or television, is the way to go today and we believe this requires the skills of an experienced marketer and a well thought out marketing strategy.

Using the full power of your website integrated with social media allows you to get your message out quickly and efficiently and retain the analytics to track return on investment.

Of course, there are strategies which work more effectively than others and optimizing your website by giving visibility to your best selling products and providing an easy path to purchase those products on your home page is key to converting visitors. A great website asks for the sale by including a compelling Call-to-Action up front.

Our goal with our website design is to helps companies make the most of their websites by creating a thoughtfully designed site map which is goal oriented and ensures that the site is driving and attracting new traffic, converting visitors to buyers, increasing sales and extending the reach of your brand.

We provide full reports on websites for a nominal fee to give clients a snapshot of what they are doing right and what areas they need work on. If you would like to know how your website is doing and in what areas it could use some assistance, drop us an email at steve@stephenroper.com or visit our website to check around for yourself.

15
Mar 2011

Lisa Williams web site…

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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We have now had a year of tracking on the launch of the web site we developed for Lisa Williams, which generally provides us with a good indication of how well we’ve done with a re-design and our search engine optimization.

So, this morning we went in, did some digging around and put together a one year overview of how well we did.

We started with creating a comparison jpeg of the original site we had to work from and the new site we designed.

Then, we checked the overall grading.

When we began, the site was grading at 36/100… so well below average. How well have we done with the grading? This morning the site is grading at 86/100, so an increase over over 225%. This provides us with a good base to incrementally increase the optimization without having to worry about that huge catch-up we had to do over the last year.

Then, we checked visitation stats… Year over year visitation is up 591% !

Over the past twelve months, we have driven tens of thousands of new Visitors to Lisa’s new web site.

The Bounce Rate if Visitors is a mere 19%, which means when people are referred to the site by search engines, they are getting what they expect, and in our experience, 19% is unusually low.

What does this mean? It means that people searching for Lisa Williams, the Victoria Realtor for waterfront and luxury homes are finding her much faster than a year ago and staying on her site for over 3.5 minutes per visit and that means they are finding what they are looking for and probably contacting Lisa.

Lisa is the agent of record for some of Victoria’s most prestigious waterfront luxury homes and you can check out her web site, (which we are obviously proud of)  at www.lisawilliams.ca

1
Dec 2010

Increasing Visitation…

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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For the past five years, we have been actively working on increasing the visibility and success of Partymart.com.

This company has always held a special interest to me since I developed their identity for them in 2004. For a year or so, we went separate ways and in 2006, we reunited and it has been a successful partnership ever since.

Here are a few metrics of just how successful.

In 2007, Partymart received 120,086 visitors annually.

In 2008, with a variety of tactics, that visitation number increased to 387,001 Visitors

In 2009, with much more aggressive tactics and strategy, that increased to 810,771 Visitors

In 2010, by aggressively producing micro-sites and newsletters designed to drive traffic to the site, we will have increased that number to over 1,000,000 Visitors while decreasing our ad spending.

12
Sep 2010

What is SEO?

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization
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SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the search engines (like Google). By “optimizing”, we mean attempting to make it such that searches for specific phrases rank your website higher in the search results than other websites.

There are lots of good reasons to want to rank higher, but for businesses, the primary reason is to generate good leads for your offering. There are millions of people using Google every day looking for a product, service or information. Some of these people might be potential clients looking for your particular offering.

There are two ways for you to show up on the results page when users are doing a search. The first is paid advertising and the second is what is known as “organic” (or “natural”) search. The natural search results are listed free and are dependent on Google’s estimation of how relevant and credible your website is. Natural search results are my favorite kind, because you don’t have to pay money for them, and they often work better than paid advertising. I liken this to the difference between getting mentioned in a magazine article and purchasing an ad in that same magazine.

If you can rank high on the free (organic) search results for Google, it’s like getting tens of thousands of dollars worth of free advertising in the most relevant trade magazines for your industry, every time a new issue comes out.

We’re not sure about you, but that’s pretty interesting to us.