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From all of us at Everything Web Perth to all of you … Have a safe and happy christmas and we hope 2016 brings you everything you wish for.

Surprisingly to me, one of the biggest areas of our business is rescuing local business websites from the depths of despair. I am constantly amazed at some of the responses I get from local business owners about how they went about creating their business website.

How about some of these one liners …

A mate did my website for a carton of beer.

My son is quite creative so I let him build my website.

It’s a free website and only took me an hour to build, and the ads on my site aren’t too bad.

I found a “web developer” who only charges $395, I couldn’t believe my luck.

My partner built the website, she is in the office manning the phones all day so it made sense for her to build the site in her spare time.

I built it myself.

Well as you could imagine I was completely shocked that a business owner had that sort of attitude towards the prime mover (or what should be) of their online presence. Hello! People, if you haven’t realised how important a professionally designed and setup business website is to your very existence online by now then I fear your business will not survive for very long in todays technological world.

A professionally built website will work for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It will tirelessly promote your business brand, it will spread your marketing messages, it will attract new interest in your products and services as well as it will collect targeted leads for you. If you haven’t realised that by now, or can’t get your head around the whole online presence concept your business future is going to be pretty grim. No, let me correct that, very grim.

I know just from our own situation here at Everything Web Perth that the process a client goes through to get there website built ensures that our clients get exactly what they expected and more. Paula, our Design Director, goes to pain-staking lengths to learn from you how your business operates, what your goals are for the new website, how one product or service may be more important to you and why, what sort of promotions you have done in the past, how you handle enquiries and orders, all so that not only the image we build up of your new website is what you wanted but also how you want visitors to move through your website and where key areas are so we get maximum impact for your business. And that is just the design side of a new website build.

While Paula is learning about you and your business, I start probing Google to see who are your main clients online, what similarities your opposition have to you, what keywords drive traffic to their website, what websites are connected to your opposition, what products or services are best performing online for your opposition, basically we dive so deep into your opposition websites we know exactly how they tick and armed with that sort of intelligence I come back to you and help you put an online business plan together so your business has the very best chance at success online. All of this happens before we even start building your website.

Knowledge is power, and the team at Everything Web Perth have been helping local and big companies transition their business operations to online successfully for twenty odd years. Be smart in business, draw on this sort of experience and knowledge to give your business the very best chance of success online you possible can.

If you really want to take your business to the next step and beyond then follow the link to contact Everything Web Perth for a no obligation exploratory meeting. You owe it to you and your business.

Well it’s quickly coming around to Christmas and holidays again, so I thought I would send you this checklist to help you prepare for this time of year.

Do you have an ecommerce store? Then you should be thinking about some christmas specials to get more buyers over the festive season. Integrating a sales funnel is a great idea too, so you have the advantage of being able to up sell, down sell, cross sell and basically multiply your sales. You really have to make the best of this time of the year.

Are you a service based business? Have you rostered your team to cover the end of year holidays and updated your website for support contact? Have you thought about an offer you could make to increase business over the holiday season?

Remember your website is an extension of you and your business. It should deliver your own character to the whole vibe on the site. Are you going to wish your web visitors a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year on your site? Are you going to dress up your site for the festivities?

Have you a support team in place for customer enquiries over the holiday season?

Have you planned your opening and closing times over the christmas/new year yet? Don’t forget to inform your customers, clients and suppliers of your availabilities over the end of year.

If you’re going away on holidays have you setup your autoresponder so emails will inform enquiries who is covering for you and when you will return to work?

Are scheduled backups in place to backup your website and data and transfer the backup to offsite location?

Have you mapped out your goals for the new year so you can hit the ground running?

Is your website mobile friendly? More and more web visitors are coming to your site on mobile, if your site is not mobile friendly they will move onto your competitors website who does have a mobile friendly website.

Enjoy the festivities and everyone here at Everything Web Perth wishes you every success online over the christmas and new year period.

If there is anything Everything Web Perth can help you with in your preparations for Christmas and New Year please don’t hesitate to contact us by clicking on the link to visit our website.

Get your Perth business FOUND in LOCAL SEARCH

Tell me, is your local business coming up on first page for local search results for the suburbs you service?

If not, why not?

It’s tough out there, and you need to have your business found by as many channels as possible.

Here’s a recent case study … A local business came to us because they felt their website had bottomed out and all leads from it had dried up. They just wasn’t coming up in search results where they could be noticed or have any opportunity of capturing some leads.

We analysed their website and found some problems in the back-end that were stopping their website from communicating with Google properly. They also had a number of toxic links from bad neighbourhoods linking to their website which were penalising them. After a detailed audit we had the offending toxic links disavowed so they were no longer counted by Google which freed their website up and allowed them to get on with business. We also applied some on-page SEO optimisation to their critical pages to give them a better chance in rankings.

What was the end result?

Their local business website can now be found for48 Google front page results including 23 first positions and in 33 suburbs.

Good morning Gary, Thank you so much for your time and expertise. They are great results.

Regards Kerrie

How would you feel if your Perth local business could be found in 33 local suburb search results?

If you want to get more leads by optimising for local search seo, then contact Everything Web Perth by following this link. OR Call (08) 6191 0779 and talk to Paula.

As a local business owner you are probably thinking to yourself “why would news syndication websites be interested in any news I might have?”  or, “even if I had a news story how could I possibly interest news syndication websites to take up my story?” Well my friends we are at the dawn of a new age, an age where a content hungry society is constantly looking for news, of all types, late breaking news, corporate take-overs, political, international, national, local and even local business is all being sort after.

There is a strict format to writing a press release that if not followed will get your news rejected, and you do need access to a news syndication pipeline, but the opportunity is there for a local business to make a press release that will go world-wide.

Above, is a press release Everything Web Perth just did. Now you might say “why would I want my local news to be syndicated right through the USA, how is that going to help my local business here in Perth?” Looking at it you would say that is a fair assumption and you just don’t bother with Press Releases, however you would in fact be missing out on a huge opportunity. ALL of the syndicated websites your press release is published on have high PR (Page Rank) authoritative backlinks coming back to YOUR local business website. The fact that the backlink is coming from a News site means that Google won’t question the value of this link and in fact increases your authority because of the connection. If you are a new business website just starting out then these high authority backlinks to your website will give you a great foundation and help your seo efforts big time, and if you are an existing website then a press release will give your business a huge shot in the arm and inject some high authority into your current seo.

Just one press release will give you anywhere from 140 – 200 HIGH authority backlinks every time you do a press release. Now that is great value for any seo campaign.

These days if links coming back to you are not from reputable sites, of good standing with high authority or not of any relevance to your industry then those links are not only worthless but would be holding your seo efforts back and actually penalising your business website.

Here is another example of how your local business is represented on the world stage just like the big boys.

If you would like to know more about Press Releases and/or you are interested in doing a press release for your business, then follow this link to Everything Web Perth the web marketing specialists.

Improving your Australian local business listings in local searches can be done by doing the following …

Having your business website cited in local Australian business directories can be of great benefit to your local business as Google compiles all these citations about your local business website and then validates your business as a reputable business, takes note of your service area for local searches and identifies the niche your business is in so it can best match you to keywords and geographical areas when it comes to local search results. So do yourself a favour and either go and register your business into these Australian local business directories or have a professional company do it for you.

Here are 5 really good Australian Citation sites that are well worth you registering your business in as a free listing…

Truelocal (www.truelocal.com.au )

DLook (www.dlook.com.au)

Hotfrog (www.hotfrog.com.au)

Australian Business Listing (http://ift.tt/1MDus8y )

Startlocal (http://ift.tt/1mcsluW )

The more of these types of citation sites the better, and for your reference Everything Web Perth have a list of over 50 citation sites that deliver high value local link power to help rank your Australian business website for local search results if you need assistance in this area.

FAIR WARNING: Make sure all citation sites mentioning your business have the correct NAP info (Name, Address, Phone number) as inconsistent details of old addresses or phone numbers etc.. can hurt your business local search ranking a lot! So make sure all your contact details are correct and the same. If you find old listings with incorrect information, then go and fix them. You may find that these old listings were scraped and added in the early days of the citation sites existence to gain traction and you will have to reclaim your listing to be able to ammend it. Make sure you persevere as you will reap the rewards, and remember that if it all seems too hard then Everything Web Perth can get it done for you.

How can you check what citation sites you might be listed in? Go to a Google search page and in the searchbar type “links:yourwebsite.com.au” in our case we would type “links:everythingwebperth.com.au” and google will tell you all the sites it knows of that are linked to your website.

  When adding your business listing try and complete every field each citation site makes available to you. Some allow more details to be added than others. So if they allow images try and add 5 images into the image upload area. If they allow video, add at least 1, more if they will allow it.

If they offer coupons to encourage their members to visit your business and try your products or services then create a coupon.

Always try and get your logo into the information to help your brand awareness.

If they allow a description area for your business then try and get at least 300 words about your business into that description area.

If they offer an area for you to add related keywords to your business try and put as many as you can think of as long as you don’t repeat them. You can certainly do variations of your keywords. For example: beauty salon, beauty treatments, beauty products

When it comes to business categories and keywords put in as many as they will allow and try to be consistent with these across all your citation entries. Copy your answers from your first citation listing so you can copy and paste for your others.

On your website, ensure you have used the keywords you mentioned in the citation sites somewhere on your website. Don’t over do it, don’t be repetitive.

Make sure you mention service areas (suburbs) in the content on your website, and if you have an important area you really need to rank well in local search then even dedicate a page to the service area and go into more detail of why you are the number one service provider in that area.

Make sure you get a Google Plus Local page and fill in all areas to the max. Especially map out your service area.

Get Schema.org code added to your website which will enlighten Google all about your local business details.

Get these things in order and correct and you are well on your way to dominating your local area for your services and products.

Click the link if you want to learn more about local business SEO.

Last week I had an email land in my inbox promoting a “great” wordpress plugin (which I will not name) that would fix all your Bounce Rate problems that are happening on your website. Everything Web Perth go to great lengths to get hold of these plugins and determine whether they do what they say before we mention them to our subscribers and clients. Put simply, do they add worth to the website’s functions or are they detrimental to your website or visitor conversion?

Before I go into detail let me explain to those who may not know what bounce rate is. Bounce is when a visitor to your website lands on one of your pages and immediately leaves, or as they say bounces off your website. So from a website owners perspective bounce rate is a gauge of how relevant or informative your content is to your web visitor. For simplicity sake a high bounce rate means your website does not have the content the web visitor was looking for or the content was not very useful or engaging, and at the other end of the spectrum, a low bounce rate would indicate your content was a very good match for the web visitor and kept their interest.

  Now back to the purpose of this post, I want to make you all very clear that when Everything Web Perth look at anything website related we are looking at it from the point of view that our website is an internet shop front for our local business. We have to understand that most of the website/marketing things we read on the web and the web tools we see promoted are more geared toward affiliate marketing, where anybody can build a website and promote a product or service, and have links all over their site that when clicked they receive a commission for the lead or sale. And in most cases this type of marketer works on the theory of throwing as much traffic to their promotion as they can so that the more who see the promotion the more chance of snagging a commission. I have to say here that what I just said about affiliate marketing I believe is the majority however there are some very clever marketers who go into the process with much more methodology, historical research and even social psychology behind their approach. The real point I want to make here is that you as a local business owner who is trying to expand your business by having a presence on the web must treat EVERY decision you make for your website and online marketing as you would on your bricks and mortar side of your business. When it comes to the web side of your local business you need to look very closely at the product you are considering purchasing and ask yourself “would the way this works actually help my business or hurt it?”

Let’s return to the wordpress plugin that promises to fix your bounce rate problems. How this works is, when the visitor lands on your site and goes to bounce off the plugin throws them to another page or offer on your site in the hope that this one might suit the visitor more. This is not going to work for a local business trading on the web! It will frustrate the visitor who now wants to leave by continually capturing him and throwing him to something else on your page. I would expect that it would frustrate the visitor so much they either never come back in the future or they give you a very bad review which will hurt you socially online. The REAL problem here if your bounce rate is high is the quality of the traffic you are receiving and it is obvious that your web visitors are not very targeted to your product or services. So what needs to be addressed here is either the content on your site or where you are acquiring the visitors from or how you promote yourself externally of your website. You either need to look at these issues and fix them or call in somebody who can help you in your decision making.

Here is a video from Google that talk about bounce rate …

 The interesting thing in that video is the Google speaker talks about having a bounce rate between 40% and 60% as OK, where Everything Web Perth who focuses on websites for local business owners aim at a “worst case maximum” of 20% bounce rate for our clients and in most cases achieve bounce rates between 3% to 10% which provides our clients with quality targeted leads to their website. Here is a graphic showing real results of our clients bounce rates …

Click the link if you would like to reduce your bounce rate and gain quality targeted leads to your business website.