In today’s fast-paced digital world, your website is more than just an online presence; it’s an extension of your brand identity. Crafting a professional, custom, and creative web design requires the right balance of form and function, compelling visuals, and engaging content—all while ensuring accessibility and seamless user experiences across devices and platforms. As an essential component of web development, understanding the dos and don’ts of modern web design is crucial for creating a site that resonates with your audience and captures their attention.

Let’s explore some indispensable tips and tricks to help guide you through the ever-evolving landscape of web design and development.

Key Takeaways

• Create a cohesive brand identity and implement it consistently throughout your website.
• Simplify and organise the design for maximum user engagement.
• Optimise your website for mobile devices and prioritize responsive design.
• Understand your audience and tailor the user experience to their needs and preferences.
• Ensure your website is search engine optimized (SEO) to increase visibility and drive traffic.
• Keep page load times quick and efficient by optimising images and reducing server requests.
• Use white space strategically to enhance visual clarity and readability.

Incorporate Your Brand Identity in Web Design

An essential aspect of any successful website design is establishing a strong brand identity. Integrating various elements of your brand’s visual identity within the design ensures consistency, recognition, and a solid foundation for your business’s online presence.

Creating a consistent brand guide that highlights your brand’s colours, visuals, and style will aid you in incorporating these elements throughout your website. Your site should feel like a natural extension of your overall brand identity.

1. Visual branding: Avoid cluttering your design by steering clear of arbitrary colours and graphics. Stick to a unified visual theme that embodies your brand’s ethos.
2. Tone and messaging: The content on your website should accurately reflect your brand goals, engaging your audience without overwhelming them with technical jargon or superfluous details. Maintain a consistent tone across your site’s copy.
3. Professional and consistent style: Utilise high-quality, relevant visuals that accurately represent your brand. Avoid generic stock images or content that fails to resonate with your target audience, as this can compromise brand recognition and credibility.

“A strong brand identity within your website design ensures consistency, recognition, and a solid foundation for your business’s online presence.”

Incorporating your brand identity into your website design is a powerful way to strengthen your online presence and set your business apart from the competition. Take the necessary steps to ensure that your site accurately represents your brand and speaks to your target audience’s preferences and requirements.

Maximise User Engagement Through Simplicity and Clarity

To boost user engagement, focusing on the simplicity and clarity of your web design is essential. Users appreciate a site that is easy to navigate and understand, thus increasing the likelihood of conversions and achieving your website conversion strategy goals. This section explores crucial elements to consider in optimising your user journey, such as clear navigation and impactful call-to-actions.

Clear Navigation Leads to a Smoother User Journey

An essential aspect of a user-friendly web design is clear navigation. Ensuring that your main navigation accurately reflects your business’s primary services and objectives helps users find what they are looking for, without confusion. Cluttered and overloaded navigation can bewilder users and lead them to abandon your website. Thus, it’s vital to provide focused content with strategically segmented subcategories.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Leonardo da Vinci

Keep your website content concise and persuasive, highlighting your brand’s solutions to users’ needs. While relevant information is crucial, be mindful not to inundate them with excessive details that could lead to a poor user experience.

Call-to-Action: Guide Users to Your Desired Outcome

Implementing effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs) is crucial in guiding users towards a desired outcome, whether it is making a purchase or contacting your business. A successful website conversion strategy should incorporate easily identifiable, prominent CTAs that compel users to take action.

1. Choose a contrasting colour for your CTAs to make them stand out
2. Keep the text short and action-oriented
3. Ensure the CTA is relevant to the surrounding content

Creating multiple opportunities for users to convert is essential. However, avoid overwhelming them with too many CTAs, which could convolute the user’s path and negatively impact your user journey optimisation efforts.

In conclusion, user-friendly web design is crucial to maximise user engagement. Focusing on simplicity and clarity will result in a smoother user journey, while clear, concise content and effective CTAs will enhance conversions. Implementing these strategies will ultimately lead to a better user experience and improved website conversion rates.

Understand Your Audience for a Tailored User Experience

Understanding your audience is fundamental to tailoring the user experience on your website. Rather than trying to cater to everyone, focus on loyal customer segments most likely to convert, giving their needs and experiences precedence in the design. This approach not only enhances the user experience design but also reinforces brand integrity by providing a service that’s customised to their preferences.

Focus on loyal customer segments most likely to convert.

Audience engagement can be maximised by conducting research on your target market, identifying key demographics and behavioural patterns. This data informs your design decisions, ensuring that the website appeals to and resonates with your audience. You can also leverage web analytics to track user behaviour on your site, continually refining the user experience in line with user feedback and evolving preferences.

It’s essential to consider how users interact with your website and the devices they use to access it. Catering to varied requirements by adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 ensures that your site remains inclusive and accessible to all users, regardless of their individual needs.

Key elements of an accessible website include:

• Legible, resizable text
• Screen reader compatibility
• Descriptive alternative text for images
• Accessible navigation and forms
• Keyboard and assistive technology compatibility

Adapting your website design with these principles in mind guarantees that your audience remains engaged throughout their user journey, enhancing overall satisfaction and encouraging repeat visits.

Prioritise Mobile Usability for Inclusive Design

In today’s digital age, prioritising mobile usability is imperative for creating a truly inclusive web design. With the widespread reliance on smartphones for web access, it is crucial for businesses to adopt responsive web design that accommodates all device types and sizes. For a professional website designer in Paraparaumu or an expert web designer in Kapiti, ensuring the website’s mobile usability should be top of mind.

Responsive Web Design is Non-Negotiable

A responsive website automatically adjusts its layout and design elements according to the user’s device, enhancing both mobile usability and web design inclusivity. This adaptability is particularly vital for the user interface, where interactive elements like clickable buttons, links, and hoverable menus need to be consistently functional across various devices, screens, and resolutions. Responsiveness therefore delivers optimal user experience, regardless of the device being used.

The Importance of Mobile-Friendly Site Elements

To ensure a seamless browsing experience on all devices, incorporating mobile-friendly elements in the web design is essential. This may include the use of:

• Trimmed buttons, which are larger and more accessible on smaller screens
• A compact hamburger menu, which helps declutter the navigation bar on mobile devices
• Responsive font sizes, which automatically adjust for optimal readability

Failure to embrace mobile-friendly web design may deter users from engaging with the website due to poor mobile experience, potentially costing businesses valuable conversions and clientele.

“Responsive web design is an approach that suggests the design and development should respond to the user’s behaviour and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation.”

Optimisation Across All Devices Enhances Accessibility

With the plethora of devices used today, from smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktop computers, device optimisation has become increasingly important for ensuring enhanced accessibility. It’s not enough to focus solely on mobile web design; a truly inclusive website must accommodate all devices and provide a consistent user experience throughout.

By adopting a comprehensive approach to responsive web design, businesses can cater to the diverse needs of their audience, retaining users across all devices. This guarantees an inclusive experience, increasing accessibility and subsequently contributing to the overall success of the website design and user engagement.

Ensure Your Website is Optimised for Search Engines

Incorporating search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics within your affordable web design bolsters your website’s visibility in search results. An effective SEO strategy is crucial for modern web design to ensure a user-friendly experience, increased engagement, and improved brand recognition.

Ignoring or neglecting the importance of SEO can hinder your website’s accessibility, negatively impacting the user experience and diminishing the efforts put into crafting a visually appealing design. Here are some key considerations when optimising your website for search engines:

1. Use purposeful keywords throughout the content to enhance relevancy and boost search engine rankings.
2. Utilise an internal linking strategy to aid users in navigating the website and to distribute valuable “link juice” across the site.
3. Invest in creating engaging, informative, and original content that captivates your target audience.

SEO is essential to ensure your website ranks highly in search results, driving organic traffic and increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Moreover, it is prudent to perform regular SEO audits to gauge the effectiveness of your strategy, identifying areas of improvement to enhance the website’s search presence and make it more streamline.

In conclusion, a well-designed and visually appealing website alone is not sufficient. It is vital to ensure your website is optimised for search engines to achieve maximum visibility, user engagement, and ultimately, success.

Keep Load Times Speedy and Efficient

Providing your website’s users with an efficient and engaging experience is crucial in a digital world where attention spans are often short-lived. One factor that directly impacts user retention is your website load times. In this section, we will discuss how to optimise images, reduce server requests, and employ best practices to ensure a speedy and efficient browsing experience for your users.

Optimise Images and Reduce Server Requests

High-resolution images can negatively impact your website’s load times, leading to frustrated users who are likely to leave the site. In order to maintain both quality visuals and an efficient browsing experience, it’s essential to optimise images using techniques such as resizing and compression.

1. Resizing: Ensure that the dimensions of your images match the intended display size to avoid unnecessary lag from loading larger images.
2. Compression: Image compression tools are useful for reducing file size without compromising visual quality.

Beyond optimising images, you should also focus on server request reduction to enhance website load times. One way to address this is by enabling browser caching. When a user visits your site, browser caching stores static files, such as images and stylesheets, to minimise server requests during subsequent visits. This significantly speeds up the page loading process and minimises stress on your server.

“The quicker your website loads, the higher the likelihood your users will stay and engage with your content. This is even more crucial when considering the rapidly growing number of mobile users.”

Another aspect of server request reduction is minimising the number of external files and plugins that your site requires to load. Combining CSS and JavaScript files, or using inline CSS and JavaScript instead, can help reduce the server requests and enhance the site’s performance.

In conclusion, keeping website load times speedy and efficient is an essential aspect of providing your users with an optimum browsing experience. By focusing on proper image optimisation and server request reduction techniques, you create a user-friendly environment that encourages users to stay, interact and ultimately convert on your website.

Use White Space to Your Advantage

White space, often overlooked, holds significant importance in modern web design whitespace. It effectively enhances visual clarity and content readability by creating a distinguished separation between different elements on the page. A well-implemented strategy of using white space contributes to an easier-to-navigate website, ultimately improving user experience and encouraging audience engagement.

For optimal results, it’s crucial to consistently apply white space around text, images, and between various page items, establishing a balanced content presentation. This deliberate placement of white space helps to avoid user confusion and promotes better comprehension of the information being presented on the website.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Renowned companies such as Apple have exemplified the effective use of white space in their web design. Apple’s minimalist design approach primarily focuses on directing user attention towards its products and calls to action, while simultaneously delivering an aesthetically pleasing interface.

1. Assess the current state of your website and identify areas where white space can improve readability and visual clarity.
2. Ensure the consistent application of white space across all pages for a cohesive user experience.
3. Be mindful of not overcrowding your design with excessive text or images, as this can negate the benefits of white space.

In conclusion, not only does white space contribute to an effortlessly navigable and visually appealing website, but it also plays a vital role in creating a clear visual hierarchy and improving content readability. By incorporating this design element effectively, you can ensure a more engaging and enjoyable user experience for your audience.

Conclusion

In summary, contemporary web design necessitates a comprehensive approach that integrates brand identity, simplicity, user-centred experience, mobile-readiness, SEO, swift loading times, and the effective use of white space. By striking a balance between these essential elements, your website can successfully drive user engagement and achieve your business objectives.

Investing in a custom web design ensures that your online presence truly reflects your brand’s unique style and personality. Effortlessly guide users through your site by implementing clear navigation and focusing on user needs, making it easy for them to find the information and services they’re looking for.

Additionally, prioritising mobile-friendly web design not only helps retain your existing customers but also attracts new users, thanks to the growing reliance on smartphones and other mobile devices for internet access. And by optimising your site for search engines, you’ll boost your online visibility and make it easier for potential customers to discover your offerings.

By considering these critical factors, you’ll establish an engaging, functional, and impactful website that delivers results. For expert guidance and to embark on creating a distinctive online presence for your brand, reach out to us at 0800 150 803.

Source Links

• https://www.bluecompass.com/blog/top-web-design-dos-and-donts-for-website-success
• https://design4users.com/dos-and-donts-website-design/
• https://uxplanet.org/dos-and-don-ts-of-web-design-8c9d6a5de7c6

In the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), grasping the concept of keyword intent is fundamental to improving your Google rankings. Keyword intent refers to the underlying purpose of a user’s search, and by recognising this, you can craft a highly effective keyword strategy that targets the right audience at the right time. In this article, we’ll explore the four primary types of search intent and how using tools like SEMrush can help you create content that closely aligns with user expectations, driving relevant traffic to your site.

Key Takeaways

• Keyword intent is crucial for enhancing SEO and increasing Google rankings
• Four primary types of search intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional
• Identifying and categorising keyword intent helps create more targeted and relevant content
• Analysis of search engine results pages (SERPs) provides insights into user intent
• Utilising intent analysis tools like Semrush optimises content creation and keyword strategy

The Essence of Keyword Intent in SEO

At the core of SEO lies the importance of understanding the user’s purpose for searching, commonly referred to as keyword intent. Recognising the type of information users seek allows for the development of content strategies that are more likely to satisfy user needs and preferences. This alignment between user intent and content relevance is fundamental for achieving higher rankings on Google and ensuring that the provided information or services are timely and pertinent.

Keyword intent can be examined from two primary perspectives:

• User search purpose
• Targeted content

Both perspectives are crucial in crafting a successful SEO strategy that meets user expectations and helps attain better search engine optimisation results.

To those who understand keyword intent, the gate to successful SEO is wide open. It unlocks the potential for creating meaningful, relevant, and purposeful content that resonates with users and elevates your Google rankings – Oli Corby, Founder of VIEWFULE

The essential components within keyword intent that should be addressed in an SEO approach are given in the table below:

Recognising keyword intent enhances your ability to communicate with your audience in a more meaningful and effective manner. Moreover, it enables you to identify potential gaps in the content you offer, allowing you to address them and optimise your website for better SEO results.

In conclusion, understanding the essence of keyword intent is a powerful tool for building a successful SEO strategy. It is the key to offering valuable content to users, catering to their needs and preferences while simultaneously driving higher rankings and enhancing overall website performance.

Types of Keyword Intent: Unveiling User Motivation

Understanding user motivation is vital for targeted SEO and effective content planning. There are four primary types of keyword intent that unravel the motivation behind user searches: informational intent, navigational intent, transactional intent, and commercial intent. Each type requires a specific approach to address the user’s needs and improve search engine rankings.

Informational Intent: Providing Answers

Informational intent covers user searches aimed at finding answers or learning about a topic. To target informational intent keywords, content must be rich in information and provide assistance through diverse formats such as how-to guides, tutorials, or informative articles. This approach ensures that you’re addressing questions and catering to users seeking educational content.

Navigational Intent: Directing Users

Navigational intent is expressed when users search for a specific website or webpage. To meet this type of intent, it is essential to ensure that brand names or targeted pages feature prominently in the content, providing clear paths to the requested information or locations. A well-constructed website structure and easily accessible internal links facilitate user direction and specific website search.

Transactional Intent: Encouraging Purchases

Transactional intent signifies a user’s readiness to make a purchase or perform a specific action on a site. Content catering to transactional intent should focus on product or service pages, ensuring they are straightforward and informative. This approach facilitates purchasing decisions and leads to conversions through refined keyword targeting and streamlined user experience.

Commercial Intent: Facilitating Decision Making

Commercial intent is directed towards users comparing brands, products, or services before making a purchase. Crafting content like comparison articles or reviews that highlight different options and features can effectively target these users. In addition, delving into brand comparison, customer purchasing decisions, and product reviews can further support potential buyers in their decision-making process.

In conclusion, identifying and addressing the different types of keyword intent plays a crucial role in delivering relevant and targeted SEO content. By catering to user motivation, website owners can provide valuable information and assistance, ultimately leading to higher search engine rankings and more satisfied users.

Analysing SERPs to Decode Keyword Intent

Analysing Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is a crucial step in decoding keyword intent and formulating an effective SEO strategy. When examining SERPs, it is essential to identify key elements that can reveal the users’ intent behind each keyword or phrase.

Noteworthy SERP elements that can help determine the type of intent include:

• Shopping ads: These ads are typically indicative of transactional intent.
• Reviews: They are often associated with commercial intent as they provide users with insights into products or services.
• Instant answers: These elements usually signify informational intent, as they aim to provide quick and concise answers to users’ questions.
• Site links: Site links are more frequently seen in navigational intent, as they help users find a specific website or webpage.

Observing these SERP elements can shed light on the intent behind users’ searches and aid in tailoring content creation accordingly. As these elements can differ for every keyword or phrase, it is essential to assess them individually.

For instance, if you notice your targeted keyword displays a significant number of shopping ads in the SERP, it is a strong indicator that users searching for that keyword have a transactional intent. On the other hand, if there are more instant answers or articles, it’s more likely to cater informational searches.

Understanding the various intent types within SERPs and aligning your content accordingly can substantially enhance your website’s relevance to users, as well as your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

When examining SERPs to decode keyword intent, also pay close attention to the top-ranking pages and their content. This gives you an idea of the type of content Google considers relevant for the intent behind each keyword. Armed with these insights, you can create content that is both valuable to users and likely to be favoured by search engines for the targeted keywords.

In summary, performing a SERPs analysis is an essential aspect of decoding keyword intent and developing a successful SEO strategy. Recognising user intent and tailoring content to meet the different types of intent not only enhances the user experience but also increases your website’s chances of achieving higher search engine rankings.

Creating Intent-Based Content to Attract Quality Traffic

To attract and retain quality traffic through informational keywords, it is essential to create engaging and rich educational content that comprehensively addresses user questions. By focusing on intent-based content driven by keyword optimisation, websites can improve their chances of attracting quality traffic, increasing their visibility on SERPs, and driving more conversions.

Informational Keywords: Crafting Engaging Educational Material

Developing engaging material that caters to informational intent requires deep understanding of the target audience and their informational needs. Incorporating relevant subtopics, formatting the content appropriately, and providing up-to-date information are key strategies for satisfying informational keyword intent and enhancing SERP visibility.

Quality traffic is driven by intent-based content that caters to the informational needs of the users.

When designing content targeting informational keywords, follow these simple steps:

1. Research the target audience – having a clear understanding of the target audience is crucial in delivering content that reflects their needs and preferences.
2. Choose relevant subtopics – identify relevant subtopics to explore in greater depth within your content, allowing users to gain comprehensive knowledge.
3. Format the content effectively – use headings, bullets, tables, and images to improve readability and make the content more engaging.
4. Update information frequently – ensuring the information provided is current and accurate boosts credibility and trust with the audience.

Consider the following table that outlines the advantages of crafting engaging educational material for informational keywords:

In conclusion, intent-based content plays a crucial role in attracting quality traffic, leading to enhanced search engine rankings and improved visibility. Through strategic keyword optimisation and a focus on crafting engaging material, websites have the potential to reach the right audience and provide valuable information to users, ultimately driving higher traffic and better user engagement.

Refining Your Keyword Strategy With Intent Analysis Tools

Utilising intent analysis tools like Semrush can streamline the process of refining your keyword strategy and enable a more targeted approach to content creation. These tools assist in identifying the intent behind keywords and phrases, assessing competitors’ intent ratios, discovering keywords with the correct intent, and incorporating long-tail phrases. By leveraging such analytical instruments, you can optimise your SEO efforts and significantly improve your website’s search ranking.

“With the right intent analysis tools, your content strategy can become more targeted and effective, resulting in better user engagement and higher search engine rankings.”

To help illustrate the benefits of using intent analysis tools, let’s explore some key features:

1. Keyword identification and categorisation
2. Competitor intent ratio analysis
3. Discovering the right long-tail phrases

Keyword Identification and Categorisation

Intent analysis tools, such as Semrush, aid in keyword research by identifying keywords relevant to your industry or niche. They also categorise these keywords by intent type, making it easier for you to align your content with the correct user motivation.

Competitor Intent Ratio Analysis

By examining the intent ratios of your competitors, you can gain insightful data to further refine your keyword strategy. A higher intent ratio indicates which keywords or phrases are more effective in targeting the desired audience.

Discovering the Right Long-Tail Phrases

Long-tail keywords can be a valuable addition to your SEO strategy, as they often attract more targeted traffic. Intent analysis tools can help you identify longer, more specific phrases with matching intent types, ensuring better alignment with user expectations.

In conclusion, the use of intent analysis tools can greatly improve the effectiveness of your keyword strategy refinement. With the ability to identify keywords by intent type, analyse competitor intent ratios, and discover long-tail phrases matching user search motivations, you have the ingredients for a potent SEO strategy. By focusing on the right keywords and creating intent-driven content, you can achieve better search engine rankings and draw quality traffic to your website.

Conclusion

Understanding the concept of keyword intent is essential for achieving SEO success and improving your Google rankings. By developing a strategic content plan that takes into account different search intents, you can align your content with user expectations and increase its relevance and authority in the eyes of both search engines and users.

As you incorporate these approaches into your content planning, you may notice better SERP positions over time, driving more traffic and potentially leading to more conversions. Whether you’re targeting informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional intent, being able to decode the user’s motivation behind their search queries will set you on the path towards SEO success.

Remember to utilise intent analysis tools, like Semrush, to refine your keyword strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the intent behind keywords and phrases. These tools allow for a more targeted approach to content creation and ensure that your efforts align with the needs and preferences of your audience.

As you continue on your SEO journey, keep in mind the importance of strategic content planning aimed at satisfying keyword intent. With a consistent focus on understanding and addressing user motivation, you can contribute to your website’s upward trajectory in Google rankings and overall online presence. To help realise your digital ambitions, reach out to us for your FREE Consultation today!

Source Links

• https://www.searchenginejournal.com/semrush-search-intent-strategy/428162/
• https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/07/06/how-to-rank-higher-on-google
• https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-intent/

Unlock Your Website’s Potential with AI for SEO Today!

Are you ready to elevate your digital marketing game? It’s time to embrace the power of AI for SEO and transform your online presence. By leveraging AI in search engine optimisation, you can unlock the full potential of your website and stay ahead in the competitive online landscape. Implementing AI-driven strategies will not only improve your search engine rankings but also customise user experiences, increasing your overall web visibility. The future is now, and the AI revolution offers a wealth of opportunities waiting to be explored. So, why not optimise your website with AI and secure your place at the forefront of this exciting digital frontier?

Key Takeaways

• AI for SEO empowers businesses to enhance their digital marketing efforts
• Leveraging AI in search engine optimisation unlocks your website’s full potential
• Embracing AI-driven strategies leads to improved search engine rankings, customised user experiences, and increased web visibility
• Optimising websites with AI ensures a competitive advantage in the dynamic online landscape
• The AI revolution provides a wealth of opportunities waiting to be explored

Understanding AI and Its Impact on SEO

Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, is a rapidly evolving field of computer science that focuses on the development of machines capable of simulating human cognitive functions, such as learning and problem-solving. In recent years, AI has gained immense popularity in various industries, and its applications in the realm of search engine optimisation (SEO) are no exception. This section aims to demystify AI and its impact on improving SEO with artificial intelligence.

AI significantly impacts SEO practices by enhancing data analysis, automating repetitive tasks, refining content strategies, and ultimately leading to more targeted and effective search engine optimisation. To fully grasp the power of AI in SEO, let us explore its various applications:

1. Data analysis
2. Automation and efficiency
3. Understanding search intent and behavioural patterns
4. Refining content strategies

“AI has the potential to transform the way we approach search engine optimisation, enabling us to make data-driven decisions and streamline our processes.”

Data analysis lies at the heart of effective SEO strategies. AI excels in collecting, mining, and organising large data sets to reveal valuable insights into user behaviour, search trends, and content performance. By leveraging artificial intelligence for search engine optimisation, businesses can gain a better understanding of their audience and optimise their website accordingly.

In addition to data analysis, AI also plays a crucial role in automating repetitive tasks, such as keyword research, technical SEO audits, and link building, thereby freeing up time and resources for businesses to focus on other critical aspects of their online presence.

Furthermore, AI’s ability to understand search intent and behavioural patterns allows for a more nuanced and adaptive SEO approach. For example, AI-powered tools like Google’s RankBrain use machine learning to identify and interpret the true intent behind search queries, enabling businesses to craft content that appeals to both users and search engines.

Lastly, refining content strategies is another key application of AI in SEO. AI-driven content creation tools can generate high-quality, optimised content that resonates with users and improves a website’s search engine performance.

Overall, incorporating AI in SEO practices and harnessing its potential can lead to significant improvements in search rankings and online visibility, providing businesses with a competitive edge in today’s digital landscape.

Integrating AI into Your SEO Strategy

As more businesses turn to digital marketing for growth, harnessing the power of AI for SEO has become paramount. By integrating AI into your SEO strategy, you’ll be better equipped to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape. In this section, we’ll explore the key aspects of incorporating AI into your SEO efforts, with a focus on the valuable input from AI experts in Paraparaumu.

First and foremost, it’s essential to consult AI professionals who can help tailor your AI-driven SEO strategy. These experts can assist in identifying opportunities where AI can amplify your website’s performance, optimise content, and ensure you stay abreast of the latest SEO trends and practices.

The Role of AI Experts in Paraparaumu

By engaging with AI experts in Paraparaumu, you’ll benefit from their deep understanding of regional search trends and user behaviours. Their local expertise will enable you to tap into niche markets, ensuring your content is perfectly tailored to your target audience. This blend of local knowledge and AI innovation can lead to significant advancements in your SEO efforts.

AI professionals in Paraparaumu can help you navigate the complex world of SEO AI, identifying opportunities to optimise your website and enhance overall performance.

When integrating AI into your SEO strategy, consider the following aspects:

• Identify key areas where AI can improve your website’s performance and generate better search engine rankings.
• Work closely with AI experts in Paraparaumu to ensure your SEO AI implementation aligns with local search trends and user behaviours.
• Utilise advanced AI tools and techniques to optimise content and keywords, ensuring maximum visibility and relevance to your target audience.

It is also crucial to measure the success of your AI-driven SEO strategy. This can be achieved through regular tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, bounce rates, and user engagement levels. By closely monitoring these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure continued growth and success.

In conclusion, integrating AI into your SEO strategy has the potential to unlock significant benefits for your website. By partnering with AI experts in Paraparaumu and tapping into their local knowledge, you can create a powerful and bespoke strategy that delivers tangible results. It’s time to take your digital marketing to the next level with AI for SEO.

SEO Automation: Embracing Machine Learning in SEO

In the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, incorporating machine learning in SEO has become a powerful way to stay ahead of the competition. Let’s delve into how machine learning can enhance SEO algorithms, revolutionise keyword research, and optimise websites for peak performance.

How Machine Learning Enhances SEO Algorithms

Machine learning – a subset of artificial intelligence – can analyse vast amounts of data to develop predictive models, personalise content, and identify upcoming SEO opportunities. As search engines like Google increasingly rely on AI-driven algorithms, understanding and utilising machine learning in SEO becomes paramount.

“Machine learning is a core transformational technology underpinning search engine ranking algorithms.”

SEO automation powered by machine learning has streamlined processes and improved efficiencies across the board. Real-world examples of its impact include automating content optimisation, metadata generation, and even internal link building.

Leveraging AI for Sophisticated Keyword Research

Keyword research is at the core of a successful SEO strategy, and AI has brought significant advancements to this crucial aspect. Modern, AI-driven tools can go beyond traditional keyword planning by suggesting contextually rich and semantically relevant keywords. As a result, content creators can craft articles that resonate with both search engines and users, ensuring higher rankings on SERPs.

1. AI-based tools provide insights into search intent and user behaviour.
2. They generate long-tail keywords that increase organic visibility.
3. Dynamic keyword research adapts to evolving trends and serves up-to-date suggestions.

By leveraging AI for sophisticated keyword research, you can streamline your content strategy and achieve better results in search engine rankings.

Optimising Websites with AI

Artificial intelligence can optimise websites on various fronts, including site structure, user experience, and real-time content personalisation. The following are some notable ways AI is shaping website optimisation:

Optimising websites with AI tools translates to tangible benefits, such as reduced bounce rates and increased conversion metrics. With machine learning in SEO becoming more vital by the day, embracing this technology is essential to maintain a competitive edge in the digital landscape.

The Future Is Now: AI-Driven SEO Tools

The rapid advancement of technology has brought a plethora of AI-driven SEO tools into the market, capable of revolutionising your search engine optimisation efforts. These tools offer state-of-the-art solutions to common SEO challenges and come loaded with features designed to enhance your digital marketing strategies.

With AI-driven SEO tools, you not only stay updated with the latest technology but also improve your efficiency and competitiveness. Let’s explore some remarkable tools that can help elevate your SEO practice:

1. Technical SEO Audits: Ensure your website meets search engine standards and resolve existing issues with AI-powered technical SEO audit tools like DeepCrawl and Botify.
2. Machine learning-based Keyword Research: Upgrade your approach to keyword research with AI-powered solutions such as MarketMuse and Frase, which offer contextually relevant and semantic keywords to enhance content relevancy and search visibility.
3. Smart Content Generation: AI-driven copywriting tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 enable the creation of high-quality content tailored to your audience’s needs, increasing user engagement and improving your SEO rankings.
4. Automatic Image Optimisation: Cloudinary and ShortPixel are AI-driven tools that utilise machine learning to optimise your images, improving your website’s page load times and user experience.

Stay ahead of the curve by incorporating these cutting-edge AI-driven SEO tools into your digital marketing strategies. Here’s a snapshot of the significant advantages they offer:

It’s time to capitalise on the benefits of AI technology by embracing machine learning in SEO and utilising the innovative SEO AI tools available at your disposal. Not only do they streamline your workflow but also elevate your search engine optimisation game, giving you a competitive edge in the ever-changing digital landscape.

“The only way to stand apart from the crowd in a constantly evolving digital landscape is to equip ourselves with the right tools.” – Michael King, SEO expert

In conclusion, adopt AI-driven SEO tools to stay current with the latest technological advancements and gain a competitive edge in the market. Don’t just keep an eye out for emerging technologies; actively incorporate them into your strategies to maximise your website’s potential and achieve better results.

SEO in Kapiti: Localising AI Strategies for Your Region

The world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is evolving rapidly, with AI playing a significant role in unlocking valuable insights and shaping effective strategies. However, it’s crucial to ensure that your SEO strategies take into account the local aspect of your target market. In this section, we explore the benefits of utilising AI-based strategies tailored for specific regions like Kapiti.

Utilising AI Specialists in Kapiti

Local AI specialists in Kapiti possess a deep understanding of the region’s unique search behavior, user preferences, and cultural nuances. By leveraging AI technologies, such professionals can develop tailored SEO strategies for your business that resonate with local customers. This targeted approach not only boosts online visibility and customer engagement but also drives growth and maximises your return on investment.

The key advantages of using AI for SEO include:

• Enhanced data analysis and insights for better decision-making
• Real-time content customisation to suit user preferences
• Improved keyword research and on-page optimisation features

Employing AI insights in your SEO strategy can lead to heightened local business opportunities and a deeper understanding of consumer behavior.

To put this into perspective, consider the benefits of localising SEO strategies by focusing on AI-driven insights and tactics:

1. Understanding the search intent of users within a specific region, allowing for more targeted content and keyword selection
2. Utilising regional search trends to identify popular topics and potential content angles
3. Implementing AI-powered web design and user experience enhancements that cater to local customer preferences

By capitalising on the expertise of AI specialists in Kapiti and adapting your SEO methods to a granular level, your business can reap remarkable benefits, from increased online exposure to enhanced customer engagement and loyalty. Stay ahead of your competitors by partnering with local AI experts and harnessing the full potential of AI-driven SEO tactics in Kapiti.

Measuring Success with AI-Based SEO Strategies

As you begin to integrate AI-based SEO strategies into your digital marketing efforts, it’s essential to understand how to measure their effectiveness accurately. By focusing on relevant metrics and KPIs, you can gain a comprehensive picture of your website’s performance and make data-driven decisions to optimise your SEO further. In this section, we will delve into the key performance indicators that showcase the success of AI-driven SEO tools and strategies.

While traditional SEO metrics such as rankings, organic traffic, and backlinks remain essential elements to consider, AI has introduced new metrics that focus on user engagement and content relevance. Observing these metrics allows you to gain deeper insights into data and fine-tune your SEO strategies.

1. User Engagement Metrics: User engagement is a critical component of SEO success, as it demonstrates user satisfaction and is an indirect ranking factor. Key metrics to monitor include:

• Time on site
• Bounce rate
• Pages per session
• Conversion rate
• Content Relevance Metrics: AI-driven SEO tools can help you understand how relevant and useful your content is to your target audience, leading to higher search engine rankings. Consider these essential content relevance indicators:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Long-tail keyword ranking
• Semantic relevance
• Social engagement

Beyond these metrics, it’s important to note that AI-centric tools can provide in-depth analysis of your SEO performance, enabling you to identify trends, opportunities, and areas needing improvement. By leveraging these insights, you can continually refine your SEO to achieve better results.

AI-based SEO strategies are transforming the landscape of digital marketing, making it crucial for businesses to adapt and innovate to remain competitive. The key to success lies in measuring and understanding the effectiveness of these AI-driven techniques, allowing you to unlock your website’s full potential.

In conclusion, monitoring the correct metrics while utilising AI-driven SEO tools enables you to make well-informed decisions, further optimising your website’s search engine rankings and overall visibility. Stay ahead of the competition by keeping a close eye on user engagement and content relevance, and embrace the far-reaching capabilities of artificial intelligence in search engine optimisation.

Time to Embrace AI for SEO and Optimise Your Website

As we’ve explored in this article, leveraging AI in search engine optimisation is key to unlocking your website’s full potential. The many advantages of AI for SEO range from enhanced keyword research and automation, to localisation and personalisation, all of which contribute significantly to optimising websites with AI.

With the help of AI-driven strategies, you can stay ahead of the competition and ensure your website’s visibility in a constantly evolving digital landscape. Whether it’s through utilising sophisticated keyword research or implementing AI-optimised content, you can redefine your SEO practices and achieve remarkable results, catered to both search engine algorithms and the users themselves.

Don’t hesitate to integrate AI solutions into your SEO strategy and experience the transformative potential this technology offers. By embracing AI in SEO, you’re taking a step towards a more innovative and effective approach in improving your website’s rankings, user experience, and overall presence online. Your users are waiting – it’s time to make the most of the AI-enabled future of search engine optimisation so reach to your local AI experts in Kapiti and we’ll help to realise your digital ambitions.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, it’s more important than ever to capture the attention of your website visitors and keep them engaged. One of the most effective ways to do this is through Google Web Stories. These immersive and visually stunning stories are an innovative way to tell your brand’s story and keep your audience engaged with your website. 

Visually immersive story-telling that’s fully mobile optimised.

With the rise of Instagram and Snapchat stories, it’s clear that users prefer visual content over long-form text. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using Google Web Stories, how they can help boost your website engagement and provide you with some helpful tips to get started. If you want to take your website engagement to the next level, keep reading to find out why you need to start using Google Web Stories now!


Here are our Top 5 reasons you should consider boosting your website engagement with Google Web Stories:

1. What are Google Web Stories?

2. The benefits of using Google Web Stories

3. Leveraging the power of mobile-first storytelling

4. Best practices for optimising your Web Stories for maximum engagement

5. Tracking and measuring the success of your Web Stories

What are Google Web Stories?

In today’s fast-paced digital world, website engagement is crucial for the success of any online business. With attention spans shrinking and information overload becoming the norm, capturing and retaining user attention has become more challenging than ever. That’s where Google Web Stories come in.

Google Web Stories, also known as AMP Stories, are a visually appealing and immersive way to deliver content to users. Similar to the popular Stories format on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Google Web Stories offer a unique and interactive experience for website visitors.

Google Web Stories are similar to the popular stories format on Instagram

These bite-sized visual narratives combine captivating images, short videos, animations, and text to create a compelling storytelling experience. Users can swipe through the Stories, engaging with the content in a seamless and intuitive manner. With Web Stories, you can capture your audience’s attention and deliver your message effectively in a format that is familiar and engaging.

But why should you start using Google Web Stories now? The answer lies in the power of visual storytelling. Research has shown that people are more likely to remember information when it is presented in a visual format. Web Stories provide an opportunity to convey your brand message in a memorable and impactful way.

Boost your Search Engine Rank with Google Web Stores

Moreover, Google has integrated Web Stories into its search engine results pages (SERPs), giving them increased visibility and reach. This means that your Web Stories can appear in Google search results, attracting organic traffic and potential customers to your website.

Additionally, Web Stories are designed to be mobile-friendly, catering to the growing number of users accessing the internet on their smartphones. With a responsive design and fast-loading capabilities, Web Stories ensure a seamless user experience for mobile users, further enhancing engagement and reducing bounce rates.

The benefits of using Google Web Stories

Using Google Web Stories for your website can bring many benefits that can significantly boost your website engagement. Here are some key advantages of incorporating Google Web Stories into your digital strategy:

1. Enhanced User Experience: Google Web Stories provide a visually immersive and interactive experience for your website visitors. With their visually appealing and bite-sized format, Web Stories captivate users’ attention and keep them engaged. Users can swipe through the stories, tap to reveal more information, and even interact with embedded links, creating a dynamic and enjoyable browsing experience.

2. Increased Visibility on Google: Google has integrated Web Stories into its search results, news feed, and Discover feature, making them highly visible to users. By leveraging Web Stories, you can tap into Google’s vast user base and increase the chances of your content being discovered. This increased visibility can drive more organic traffic to your website and help you reach a wider audience.

3. Mobile-Friendly Format: Web Stories are specifically designed for mobile devices, catering to the increasing number of users accessing the internet through their smartphones. With their vertical orientation and full-screen display, Web Stories provide a seamless and optimised experience for mobile users, ensuring that your content looks and performs its best on smartphones and tablets.

4. Improved Engagement and Lower Bounce Rate: Web Stories have proven to be highly engaging, encouraging users to spend more time on your website. The visual nature of Web Stories, combined with their interactive elements, entices users to explore the content further, leading to increased dwell time. Longer dwell times positively impact your website’s metrics, such as bounce rate and session duration, which can be valuable for SEO and overall user engagement.

5. Easy Creation and Sharing: Google Web Stories can be created using various tools and platforms, making it accessible to content creators of all skill levels. Moreover, Web Stories are highly shareable, allowing users to easily share your stories across different social media platforms, amplifying their reach and potentially attracting new visitors to your website.

Incorporating Google Web Stories into your website strategy can provide a fresh and engaging way to connect with your audience, increase visibility, and ultimately boost your website engagement.

Leveraging the power of mobile-first storytelling

In today’s digital landscape, mobile devices have become the primary means through which people consume content. With the attention span of users shrinking, it is crucial for businesses to captivate their audience quickly and effectively. This is where the power of mobile-first storytelling comes into play, and Google Web Stories can be a game-changer for your website engagement.

Google Web Stories are immersive, full-screen experiences that allow you to present your content in a visually appealing and interactive format. They are designed to be easily consumable on mobile devices, with a swipe-up feature that enables users to navigate through the story seamlessly. By leveraging the power of storytelling, you can create a compelling narrative that engages your audience and keeps them hooked.

Keep your audience hooked with an immersive story on their mobile device

With Google Web Stories, you can showcase your products or services in a visually stunning way, incorporating images, videos, and text to tell a captivating story. Whether you want to highlight a new product launch, share a behind-the-scenes look at your business, or provide valuable tips and insights, Web Stories offer endless possibilities for creative storytelling.

One of the key advantages of Web Stories is their discoverability. By publishing your stories on your website, they can be indexed by Google and appear in relevant search results. This means that you have the potential to reach a wider audience and drive more traffic to your website. Additionally, Web Stories can be shared across various platforms, including social media, further increasing your brand visibility and engagement.

Ranked by Google almost immediately and drives web traffic

By embracing the power of mobile-first storytelling through Google Web Stories, you can create a more dynamic and engaging user experience. With their visually appealing format, seamless navigation, and discoverability, Web Stories have the potential to boost your website engagement and leave a lasting impression on your audience. So, don’t wait any longer – start using Google Web Stories now and unlock the full potential of storytelling in the digital realm.

Best practices for optimising your Web Stories for maximum engagement

When it comes to optimising your Web Stories for maximum engagement, there are several best practices you should keep in mind. These practices will not only help increase your website engagement but also ensure that your Web Stories captivate and resonate with your audience.

Firstly, focus on creating visually stunning and compelling visuals for your Web Stories. Use high-resolution images, videos, and graphics that are relevant to your content. Incorporate eye-catching animations, transitions, and effects to make your stories visually appealing and dynamic.

High resolution content and eye-catching animations are the secret

Next, keep your Web Stories concise and to the point. Remember, Web Stories are meant to be bite-sized pieces of content that can be consumed quickly. Stick to a single idea or theme per story, and use short, snappy captions or text overlays to convey your message effectively.

Additionally, make sure to optimise your Web Stories for mobile viewing. Most users access Web Stories on their smartphones, so it’s crucial to ensure that your stories are mobile-friendly and load quickly. Compress your images and videos, and optimise your story’s layout for smaller screens to provide a seamless and enjoyable viewing experience.

Resize images to 720p and compress them for smaller file sizes and faster loading

Furthermore, leverage interactive elements within your Web Stories to boost engagement. Incorporate polls, quizzes, and swipe-up features to encourage user interaction and participation. This not only makes your stories more engaging but also allows you to gather valuable insights from your audience.

Lastly, promote your Web Stories across various channels. Share them on your website, social media platforms, and email newsletters to reach a wider audience. Encourage your followers to share your stories as well, increasing their visibility and potential reach.

By following these best practices, you can optimise your Web Stories for maximum engagement and effectively drive traffic to your website. Embrace this immersive storytelling format and watch as your website engagement skyrockets!

Tracking and measuring the success of your Web Stories

 
Tracking and measuring the success of your Web Stories is crucial to understand their impact and optimise your engagement strategy. Thankfully, Google provides robust analytics tools that can help you gain valuable insights into the performance of your Web Stories.

One of the primary tools at your disposal is Google Analytics. By integrating Google Analytics with your website and Web Stories, you can track various metrics such as the number of views, clicks, and conversions generated by your stories. This data can give you a comprehensive overview of how well your Web Stories are resonating with your target audience.

Google Analytics is vital to measure the success of your Google Web Stories

Additionally, Google Search Console is another valuable tool for tracking the performance of your Web Stories. It provides important data on impressions, clicks, and rankings of your stories in Google search results.

By monitoring these metrics, you can identify which stories are driving the most traffic to your website and optimize your content accordingly. Moreover, don’t overlook the importance of user feedback. Encourage your audience to leave comments, share their thoughts, and provide feedback on your Web Stories. This qualitative data can provide valuable insights into how your stories are being perceived and help you make necessary improvements.

Asking your audience to interact, leave comments and share is essential

Regularly reviewing and analysing the data from these tracking tools will enable you to identify trends, understand user behaviour, and refine your Web Stories to maximise engagement. By continuously measuring the success of your Web Stories, you can adapt your storytelling approach, optimize your content, and ensure that you’re consistently delivering captivating and impactful experiences to your audience.

Your next steps.

At VIEWFULE, we believe that if you’re looking to boost your website engagement and captivate your audience in a visually appealing and interactive way, Google Web Stories is the perfect tool for you. By leveraging the power of these immersive, short-form content experiences, you can create a unique and engaging storytelling experience for your audience. When you combine them with the power of Analytics and monitor user engagement, you gain a three dimensional perspective on what’s working and what isn’t so you can build back stronger. So reach our for your FREE consultation and we’ll talk through Google Web Stories so they can boost website traffic and engagement so you start maximising your Brands potential today.

Have you ever noticed that some website addresses start with ‘http://’ while others start with ‘https://’?

Perhaps you saw that extra ‘s’ when you were browsing an online shop, logged in to your internet banking or perhaps when booking a doctors appointment.

But where did that extra ‘s’ come from, and what exactly does it mean?

An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection.

In plain language, that extra ‘s’ means your connection to that website is secure. Any data you enter is safely shared with that website.

The technology that powers that little ‘s’ is called SSL, which stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’. Read on to learn how SSL works, how it forms a part of your cybersecurity strategy and how you can buy an SSL Certificate to keep your website safe.

Want to learn more about SSL and why it’s so important? Check out our Top 5 tips below:

1. What is an SSL Certificate?

2. How can I tell if my website is protected by an SSL Certificate?

3. Why should I buy an SSL Certificate?

4. What are the different types of SSL Certificates?

5. Where do I buy an SSL Certificate for my website?

As a consumer, you always want to see ‘https://’ when visiting websites that involve sharing your sensitive information. This could be your credit card details or address information perhaps. Likewise; as a business owner, you will want to make sure you have an SSL Certificate to help keep your website safe and secure.

1. What is an SSL Certificate?

An SSL certificate works by creating an encrypted connection between you and the website to establish trust.

One of the most important elements of online business is creating a trusted environment where website visitors and customers alike feel confident in making purchases. 

An SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate creates a foundation of trust by verifying the identity of a website and securing a connection between the web page and the web browser. If you operate an e-Commerce website and are asking your customers to input sensitive information such as their credit card number, or collect other identifiable information, an SSL certificate ensures that information transmitted to and from your website is encrypted. 

SSL Certificates form the cornerstone of modern cyber security strategies because they greatly help to reduce hacks on a businesses website.

Gartner predicts an increase of 45% in cyber-attacks by the end of 2025.

In order to assure website visitors that their connection is safe and secure, web browsers such as Google Chrome, provide visual cues which are often called EV indicators.

These indicators can be anything from a green padlock to a branded URL bar, regardless of the method – they can all be seen easily which should make you feel more confident you’re shopping in a safe place.

You can tell that a website has an SSL certificate installed when HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) appears in front of the URL (i.e https://viewfule.com/news). On the other hand, if a website does not encrypt its data you will see a warning sign and the words ‘not secure’.

So, what does an SSL certificate look like?

If you click on the small padlock that appears next to any website with HTTPS in front of the URL, you’ll be able to view the information about its SSL certificate.


You’ll see the name of the certificate holder, the issuer and the validity period. All SSL certificates expire eventually and require renewal.

An SSL certificate contains many details about the issuer of the certificate, a copy of the issuer’s public key and a digital signature of the certificate issuer. Here is what our SSL certificate looks like:

2. How can I tell if my website is protected by an SSL Certificate?

Head over to Qualys SSL Labs and perform a free SSL Server Test on your website. It will take a few minutes to complete, but once it’s done, it’ll provide you with a wealth of information on the security status of your website.

It will grade your website from A+ to F and as you can see from the test performed on our website above – it checks a lot more that just your website. They interrogate the quality of the SSL certificate and the secure protocols your web server supports too, amongst others.

The Qualys SSL Labs test is one of the best cybersecurity tools in the world – and it’s 100% free.

This is a comprehensive website security assessment which is why it’s one of the best in the world. Trust what it says. Rarely do 100% free tools come along that are worth their weight in gold, but this one truly is.

Not all website security is created equal, far from it in fact, and SSL certificates are no exception. There are strong ones and weak ones, this free checker by Qualys is superb at rooting out the weak ones that are likely to cost you in the long-term so we encourage you to act upon it’s advice. Speaking of weak certificates, we strongly recommend against using the free ‘Let’s Encrypt’ SSL Certificates, they do practically nothing to improve your website’s security posture and certainly won’t help you financially recover in the case of a hack.

The last thing you want is to believe your website is secure, to then end up being hacked because a weak SSL certificate was chosen that wasn’t suitable for your use case – ask yourself this question, is it worth the risk? We’re only talking a few extra dollars here.

If your website has a grade lower than B, please do reach out to us so we can help restore the security of your website. It’s a fast and affordable service we offer clients world-wide.

3. Why should I buy an SSL Certificate?

If you own a basic website, you should have an SSL certificate but it’s not essential. In the spirit of full disclosure, your website will work perfectly fine without one. But if you are mindful of cybersecurity and the ever present threat of hacks, you really ought to invest in one.

However, if you are running an e-Commerce website or anything that involves asking users to login with a username and password, or are collecting sensitive information such as credit card numbers, address details or financial accounts – you absolutely need an SSL certificate to ensure the transmission of the data is safe and secure. Ask yourself this question, how would you feel if the situation were reversed?

Improve your cybersecurity posture with an SSL certificate – this means less chance of a hack.

The total number of attacks, per company, increased from 206 to 270 year over year in 2021. Which is an increase of over 30% – an SSL Certificate helps to increase your website security so you don’t fall victim to an attack. As these threats are very real and increasing, adding additional layers of security is a wise move.

Many website owners choose to have an SSL certificate even if they are not collecting sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) because they don’t want to be perceived as not keeping up with the times. So many websites embrace SSL these days – over 1.8 million SSL certificates have been issued as of 2021 – and so your decision goes a long way to reassure nervous buyers you are a trustworthy company and keeping up with modern trends.

Another major perk of SSL certificates are the warranties. Some come bundled with a form of insurance should the worst happen and an SSL failure was deemed the culprit. You might be able to claim anywhere from $500k right up to $3million to help your company financially recover. For some businesses, this reason alone is worth investing in one.

Boost your search engine rankings with a premium SSL Certificate.

Lastly, Google’s algorithm rewards websites that have them. SSL certificates are directly linked to Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, so this value-add should not be overlooked. Especially if you are actively investing in your Web SEO. Your website will be given a boost in the search engine results pages (SERPs) if you have strong SSL certificate.

4. What are the different types of SSL Certificates?

There are three different types of SSL certificate. They are:

• Domain Validated (DV)
• Organization Validation (OV)
• Extended Validation (EV)

 The one that’s best suited for you will depend on your website and how much security you need:

• DV SSL is best suited to personal websites or small projects and is the least expensive of the three. A DV SSL Certificate requires that the website owner verify that the domain is registered to the domain owner, this is achieved through the WHOIS database and makes them fast to issue. These are the most popular SSL Certificates with over 80% of the market share.
• OV SSL is best suited to every day businesses or non-profits, and requires a higher level of verification to attain. As a result of these additional checks, an OV SSL Certificate is considered more secure than a DV SSL Certificate. The certificate issuer verifies the address and location of the owner prior to issue. These are popular certificates and occupy just over 17% of the market share.
• EV SSL is best for e-Commerce businesses and organisations that exchange financial data (such as Banks and Lenders) as it offers the highest level of protection. In addition, these certificates offer the highest monetary warranties to any website affected by a failure of the SSL. The downside to all this protection however is the cost, they can be 10x more expensive than a DV SSL Certificate which is why they only hold around 2% of the market share. 

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point there are variations of the types of SSL certificates outlined above. Their purpose is to make like easier if you own lots of domains or sub-domains as you only need to buy one SSL certificate and they’re all protected in one go. The variations are known as:

• Single Domain SSL Certificate (only covers a single domain name and sub-domain).
• Wildcard SSL Certificate (covers a single domain but an unlimited number of sub-domains, often include warranties).
• Multi-Domain SSL Certificate (covers all top-level domains you own for your business, such as a ‘.nz’ and ‘.co.nz’ etc, include good warranties).
• Multi-Domain Wildcard SSL Certificate covers all top-level domains as above and includes unlimited number of sub-domains, include excellent warranties)

To summarise all the information above, if you’re looking for the strongest SSL Certificate on the market for a business that operates many different domain names – consider a Multi-Domain EV Wildcard SSL Certificate.

Likewise, if you’re a small business owner who only needs one to protect their basic one page website and only own one domain name – consider a Single Domain DV SSL Certificate.

Obviously every business is different and ought to be assessed carefully for their cybersecurity needs, but this is a good rule of thumb to follow. 

5. Where do I buy an SSL Certificate for my website?

We highly recommend The SSL Store which is now part of the DigiCert family – a founding name in SSL Certificates.

The SSL Store has over 15 years of SSL & Cybersecurity experience with access to over 110+ products through their online store. They have helped over 200,000 companies around the globe protect their businesses, employees, and customers. 

With credentials that strong, this is why we proudly partner with them and actively encourage our clients to purchase an SSL certificate with them directly.

Within 5 minutes, you will have found and purchased the right SSL certificate for your website. They make the whole process really easy and include instructions how to add them too. Now, that’s one less thing to worry about!

Your next steps.

At VIEWFULE, we intimately understand the world of online security is ever changing. Threats come from all corners of the globe these days and sometimes it can make you feel like you’re not in control. But, SSL certificates are one thing that help empower you and take back control. Your website will be much more secure with one than without. But if the worst does happen and you are hacked, even with an SSL certificate, they can come with warranties ranging from $500k – $3million to help you financially recover and get back on your feet. So if having this reassurance is of interest to you, Reach out for your FREE consultation and we’ll talk through SSL certificates for your business to keep you and your customers online shopping experience safe.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is arguably the most important way to drive targeted traffic to your website. This is because SEO leads to improved ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Every business wants to be on Page 1 of Google, but with only limited places – they can’t all be there.

Read on to learn some effective SEO strategies that can help earn you a coveted spot on Page 1 of Google and start reaping the rewards! 

SEO delivers targeted traffic to your website that you need to succeed online.

Did you know that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine? That’s a lot of people trying to find something. Perhaps they’re trying to find you. Wouldn’t it be incredible if you got on to Page 1 and were quickly found?

We think so and the numbers speak for themselves – The #1 result is 10x more likely to get a click compared to the 10th. SEO will help to achieve this for your business.

Google Ads, along with other PPC marketing channels such as Facebook advertising, stop delivering the web traffic as soon as the ads stop running. Search engine optimisation solves this problem by providing a steady stream of traffic to your website 24 hours a day, 7 days per week – without all the ongoing cost.

SEO delivers ‘organic traffic’ to your website, it’s promotion that never sleeps.

Promotion that never sleeps and never rests is a dream come true for any business. This is the reason why so many people are desperate to have their websites search engine optimised.

The web traffic just keeps on flowing and it often improves with time as more content is added to your website, Google builds trust with you, and more site visitors come.

This article is Part 1 of a 5 part series written to teach you the art of Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. We’ll cover the basics, right up to the more lucrative and rarer methods that get results.

Read every article and they will help you to improve your relevancy, target the right audience, and improve your search engine rankings. Get ready as we deep dive the latest techniques in 2023!

Starting with:

1. Define your SEO Strategy

2. How to perform Competitor Analysis

3. How to Identify Keywords

4. Keywords Do’s & Don’ts

5. How do I Apply Keywords?

1. Define your SEO Strategy

First, let’s explain what an SEO strategy actually is. We’ll then provide you with some real-world examples so you know exactly how to create your own.

An SEO strategy will help you to achieve your digital marketing goals, this is a fact, so it’s vitally important you have one before you start anything. This is why it’s first on this article.

So, without further ado, what exactly is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy is defined as the process of organising a websites content – by topic – to improve the chances of appearing in search results.

Essentially, it’s the process you follow in order to maximise the opportunity to gain organic traffic from search engines, such as Google. This matters because organic traffic is precisely what we are aiming to achieve – your website needs a lot of it to succeed online.

An SEO Strategy will spell out exactly what you need to do – and when.

Being prepared with an ‘oven-ready’ SEO strategy, before you actually start doing or paying for anything, is really important. This is because it helps you stay on track when creating content which means it avoids you wasting time and money.

Instead of just creating what you think people are searching for, your SEO strategy will ensure you only create content that people are actually searching for. 

To save you time, here are some real-world examples of what an SEO strategy actually looks like. They are 100% free to download templates so why not take a look?

They have all been populated with examples of what companies, just like yours, use to define effective SEO strategies. Depending on your industry and goals, naturally SEO strategies can vary, but the core structure and topics often remain the same. 

Setting up a Blog and defining a posting schedule are often part of an SEO Strategy.

So, what topics should you cover in your SEO strategy? In no particular order, let’s start with these proven topics… get ready, there’s a few!

• Define your Goals (What do you actually want to achieve?)
• Describe your Customer Persona
• Perform Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Research & Implementation Plan
• Align Content with Search Intent
• Differentiate Titles to Boost SERP
• Conversion Tunnel Optimisation with SEO
• Monitor & Report on your Website Analytics
• On-Page Technical Analysis
• Content Strategy (including Video SEO)
• Off-Page Link Building Strategy
• Mobile Search Strategy
• Local SEO Strategy
• Core Web Vitals

Now you’re armed with real-world examples and topics to start thinking about, you can begin to write your own SEO strategy. Next, we’re going to dive straight in topic three on that list – Competitive Analysis.

2. How to perform Competitor Analysis

SEO competitor analysis, or competitive analysis, involves researching your online competitors thoroughly in order to understand their target keywords, content strategy and backlink profile (amongst others).

The reason you do this is to incorporate many of the things that are working for them into your own SEO strategy.

This approach is smart because it completely avoids guessing which keywords to target, content to create, or links to build. Instead, by researching your top 5 competitors, you are able to analyse what’s working well for them – and build upon that success.

An SEO competitor analysis can help you answer the burning questions such as:

• Who actually are my SEO competitors? (Spoiler, it’s unlikely to be who you think)
• What keywords should I target?
• What does the competitive landscape look like?
• What topics should I cover?
• Where can I find valuable backlinks?
  
  

Behind every successful business, are hours of research.

Researching your competitors and answering similar questions is not a new concept. Long before you founded your own company, we bet you walked in to other competing businesses first or at the very least worked for one or two previously.

Reviewed their product offering, investigated their margins, reached out to some suppliers or perhaps even gained some inspiration from their branding too. No one, from the ‘Ma and Pop’ business down the street to the most successful businesses in the world – haven’t thoroughly researched their competitors first and you should be no different.

This is also true in the digital space and precisely why taking a long hard look at your online competitors is vital to fulfilling your SEO strategy. It is for this reason it features on Part 1 of this 5 Part series.

So, how do you research an online business? You use online software!

Two popular platforms right now are Seodity and SEMRush.

These are powerful SEO tools and even with only a 1-month subscription, they will help you to create an effective search engine optimisation strategy. All you need is a domain name to get you started, they handle the rest.

Consider these two companies carefully; we’d recommend choosing the one which better aligns with your goals so do compare the product offering as they do differ a bit.

Whichever one you choose – before you know it, you’ll have gained a vast amount of knowledge on your online competitors and be fully prepared what to do with it that knowledge.

3. How to Identify Keywords

Keywords are vitally important to any SEO strategy – even in 2023. Choose the wrong keywords and your website will not rank well in search engines, it’s as simple as that. 

This means all the effort, and expense, would have been for nothing. So, what exactly are keywords?

Keywords are defined as the words or phrases you enter into a search engine, the goal being to find something – a product, service or maybe to answer a question.

Perhaps you are in need of a local florist, the keywords you might use to search for one might be ‘a florist near me’ or perhaps ‘wedding florists in kapiti’.

A keyword does not have to be just one word, it can be many. These are called ‘long-tail keywords’ and are used for one reason – to be very specific what you’re searching for.

Identifying long tail keywords and shorter keywords is vital for your website.

But they need to have search volume too, in other words, people other than you need to be actively searching for them as well – a lot. Ideally, you should aim to choose two or three keywords for each page on your website, different for each page and relevant to the content on it.

Why do keywords matter so much, especially with online marketing?

They matter because placing the right keywords on the right pages of your website can improve your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And, by doing so, increase your organic traffic.

Once again, this is precisely what you want to achieve with search engine optimisation. Web traffic is the life blood to your website and you need lots of it to gain market share.

Keywords differ in three main areas. These are:

• Search volume: How many people are searching for a particular keyword.
• Competitiveness: The Domain Authority (DA) and Page Rank (PR) of the sites currently ranking for a particular keyword.
• Intent: What the user is looking to find when entering a keyword into a search engine.

By performing keyword research effectively, it helps you determine the best keywords to add to your webpages. They even help shape the content on those pages too so this can help with inspiration should you need it.

Seodity and SEMRush both provide you access to sophisticated keyword research tools. But, so does Google Keyword Planner for free… granted, it does have a steeper learning curve.

Whichever tool you use, they can all reveal the search volumes, competitiveness and the intent of your chosen keywords. So, now you have some keywords in mind, let’s cover the Do’s and Don’ts!

4. Keywords Do’s & Don’ts

Keywords need to be distributed around your entire web page. Not all grouped up in one place or added too many times on a webpage.  

Too many keywords on one page is a practice known as ‘Keyword Stuffing’ and if you fall foul of it, your website will tumble down the search rankings. We’re talking cliff edge here.

Most SEO experts recommend that your keywords should appear in no more than 2% of your text. For example, if your post or page has 1,000 words, using your primary keyword less than 20 times should be safe.

However, this guideline is largely speculative as Google does not release official advice on what the optimal keyword density is so it’s best to play things safe and be conservative.

Once you have written the text and you’d like to check it for keyword stuffing. You can use this keyword density checker for free as a quick means of verifiying.

If in doubt, play it safe. Reduce your keyword density.

Another important thing to note, is to ensure the keywords are added in context.

Using our florist example from earlier, the following paragraph would be considered keyword safe as it includes the keyword ‘local florist’ in context and not too many times given the character length:

‘We are your local florist based in Paraparaumu delivering Birthday and Wedding flowers to your door, 365 days a year, 7 days a week. Bloomin Good Flowers are the trusted local florists on the Kapiti Coast for over 35 years’.  

One last thing to mention is that keywords change.

What is being searched for this month might not be next month, people’s search habits change regularly and nothing stays the same for very long.

So, it’s really important that you remember to keep up-to-date on your keyword research to keep the web traffic flowing.

We recommend, for most businesses, checking at least every 3-6 months. Some less competitive industries and regions may get away with performing it annually, but keeping on top of them either way is important to your success online – so don’t neglect it.

We offer some of our clients ‘real-time’ rank monitoring of their keywords, so reach out to us if you’d like to be aware of any changes on a daily or weekly report. This way, you’ll be first to know if the wheels are falling off!
 

5. How do I Apply Keywords?

Once you have chosen your keywords, you’ll need to add them to your website.

This is the part that can get a bit technical so feel free to reach out to us at this stage if you don’t have a website developer on speed dial!

There are 7 places you will want to add them to, ideally, but this will depend on the objective of the webpage as some might not be suitable.

They are:

• Title Tag 
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Page Content (incl. all the Headers from H1 to H6)
• Link Text
• Images ALT & Title Text
• Embedded File Names (any attached files on the page)

So, how do you apply keywords?

If you are using WordPress, this task is surprisingly easy to achieve and can be accomplished by following this helpful video prepared by a Youtuber.

To start, you will need to download a plugin called Yoast SEO from the WordPress plugin directory and follow the in-app instructions.

Yoast SEO is completely free and provides you with the ability to add your keywords. Are there better options? Sure. But this is plugin is a great place to start and you’ll learn a lot from it with it’s shallow learning curve.

If you’re curious, there is a Premium plugin option for Yoast SEO which we would highly recommend if you can stretch to it. Infact, we used the Premium option in the image above. It will save you time and help you to gain more insight on applying keywords to your webpages – that’s a major win!

For other CMS platforms or Web Frameworks, please get in touch. Laravel, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, Drupal etc all require a unique approach to implement SEO effectively so it’s important it be done correctly.

Your next steps.

At VIEWFULE, we intimately understand the importance of SEO in 2023. As the internet becomes more competitive and millions more web pages are added each month, your place in the search results will change. It’s as predictable as the sun rising each morning. But to keep the right web traffic flowing to your website, you need to define your SEO Strategy, keep a watchful eye on your competitors, choose and apply the right keywords and actively monitor your rank in the search engine results. This powerful approach will not only maintain your place in the search results, but gain places too. Stay tuned for the 2nd part of this 5 part series so your Brand can benefit from the power of SEO and dominate in Google in 2023!

In 2021, Google made a big change to how it ranks websites in the search results. What they did was take a closer look at something called Core Web Vitals. They then refined and improved them further in 2022.

Although Core Web Vitals sounds like something from a Shortland Street episode, it’s a major change in how Google ranks your website. So, read on to learn exactly what they are so your website can rank higher in the Google search results in 2023!

Core Web Vitals make poorly coded, slow websites pay a heavy price in search results.

To help you get started, we have put together a guide that helps answer the burning questions:

1. What are Core Web Vitals?

2. What do Core Web Vitals mean for my Digital Marketing Strategy?

3. How do Core Web Vitals work?

4. How do I improve my Core Web Vitals score?

1. What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are made up of three metrics that analyse a visitors experience on your website. Loading time, page interactivity, and visual stability.

In other words, it looks at how fast your website loads, whether text and images dance all over the place and how quickly you can start using the website when it first appears on your screen.

Before we continue, we would recommend adding the Lighthouse Chrome Extension and generate a report by loading the extension in your Google Chrome web browser.

This report will give you a quick overview of how your website’s Core Web Vitals are looking, see below for an example of our website on a Desktop setting. You can switch it to score the Mobile experience too and it’s important that scores for both are as close to 100 and in the green as much as possible.

Alternatively, if your website is using Google Search Console you can see the results without the chrome extension. Look in the Enhancements section on the left-hand menu and you’ll find Core Web Vitals.

You can see the details it provides using the traffic light colours. Red of course means bad! The details section is really helpful and guides you straight to the issues, no guessing game here just identifying and fixing – if it’s all green, you are good to go.

2. What do Core Web Vitals mean for my Digital Marketing Strategy?

Google have identified that these three metrics are a vital part of a website experience. Simply put, Google does not want to send people to poorly coded, slow websites any more.

Their intention is clearly to improve the internet experience for everyone and they firmly believe that Core Web Vitals is the way to go. To be honest with you, we agree with them on this one.

Core Web Vitals became a key ranking factor in June of 2021. Since then, websites all around the world have taken a hit on their rankings.

Unless you want your website to fall way down on the search engine result pages (SERPs) – and stay there – you need to improve your Core Web Vitals. If you do, riches are to be made.

Netzwelt improved their Core Web Vitals and saw advertising revenues increase by 18% and page views by 27%. Likewise, when a website meets the Core Web Vitals thresholds, research showed that visitors were 24% less likely to abandon the page load. Results like these are game changers for most businesses.

Content generation is not King maker anymore

Given just how much Google are rewarding websites that achieve the Core Web Vital thresholds, our recommendation would be to focus less on heavy content-driven marketing strategies now.

Lots of unoriginal content that lack quality or context is bad for ranking anyway. But with the rise of Core Web Vitals, that approach is even more dated and likely to cost you in the long term.

Instead, focus on delivering a fast, smooth and responsive browsing experience with the content you already have.

A Core Web Vitals centric approach is much more likely to rank you ahead of your competitors who are still stuck in 2015.

This is not to say stop creating content, far from it, but if the content is being pumped out in huge volumes with the sole intention to influence ranking – it will all be for nothing without good scores on your Core Web Vitals.

3. How do Core Web Vitals work?

So what are the key metrics of Core Web Vitals? They include, the LCP, FID and CLS. We’ll explain exactly what these metrics are below:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The LCP metric looks at the overall loading time across your whole website. This means, the amount of time passed in seconds from the moment you land on the website until the largest image or section has loaded.

Naturally, this takes longer than your FID but you’ll want to get the overall loading time of your website down to 2.5 seconds or below.

After researching many websites over the years, we have come across some that take up to an extraordinary 30 seconds to fully load. In the age of ultra-fast fibre internet, that’s a lifetime and Google knows this too. Which is why they will start to make websites like that pay a heavy price by lowering their rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

First Input Delay (FID)

Do you remember a recent experience when you landed on a website and no matter how many times you press a button nothing happened? It was frustrating, right? This is why Google has made this a key part of the Core Web Vitals.

First impressions count, and this is no different in the digital space. When you land on a website, you want to be able to take action almost immediately.

FID measures the time in milliseconds that it takes from clicking on a link on the website (Button, Menu etc) to being able to take action on the webpage. The lower the number, the better the experience it will be for your site visitors and Google will reward you for this.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Don’t you just hate it when you’re reading an article on a web page and all of sudden, the text moves around? Or worse yet, when you’re banging your mouse furiously to close a pop up and you accidentally click it because it moved suddenly? Not a fun experience was it.

The CLS metric gives you an idea of how often, and how badly, this scenario is impacting the user experience. If text and/or images are suddenly dancing all around the page whilst someone is browsing it, then your Core Web Vitals score will be negatively impacted. The content which is doing this is considered an ‘unstable element’.

How much they move around the screen can be noted in percentages. i.e a popup moved down on my mobile phone screen by 25%. The CLS score however is calculated in fractions, granted this may seem complicated at first but it’s much easier to work out when you start in percentages and then just convert them into fractions. We’ll show you!

So how is the CLS Score calculated?

The CLS score is calculated from the impact and distance fractions of how much an unstable element has shifted on your screen (or viewport).

So, using an example, an unstable element moves 75% of the total viewport, so its impact fraction is 0.75. As the unstable element has moved by 25% of the viewport height, this results in a distance fraction of 0.25. So the layout shift score would be 0.75 * 0.25 = 0.1875.

From this example, the score would mean the webpage falls within the ‘needs improvement’ grade.

4. How do I improve my Core Web Vitals score?

Now that you have a better understanding of what Core Web Vitals actually are, why they should matter to you and hopefully had a look at your website’s overall score. You’ll want to know what you can do to improve them.

You are now at the stage when you’ll want to start discussing these things with your website developer. The solutions to many of these issues are quite technical, sure some are a quick fix but others might take time depending on the platform you use.

However, to make sure you’re prepared with the right information, we have covered a few things below which you can share with them to get started. If you don’t have a website developer on speed dial, remember that we would be happy to help so reach out to us for your FREE consultation.

How to stop things dancing around your webpages

There is nothing more frustrating than text dancing around a webpage whilst you’re trying to read it. To help you address this here are a few things your web developer should consider:

Add the exact height and width for all the images used on the website to the code. This will ensure the web browser knows exactly how much space is available to load the image and will prevent it from continuously determining it each time the page loads.

Use containers, these are basically designated boxes for Ads on your webpages to load in. We have seen so many times, particularly on news websites, where an article gets pushed down after we started reading it to make room for the display ads. It’s a common mistake to overlook these, containers really help to improve the structure of a webpage so nothing loads where it shouldn’t and then gets moved around afterwards.

Why is website loading time important?

The number one reason visitors will leave your website is if it loads too slowly. Think about it, would you be willing to wait upwards of 30 seconds for a website to load these days?

We wouldn’t and from our experience, most people wouldn’t either.

The worst part though is the impact this will cause to your Brand’s reputation in the long-term if the status quo remains.

Nearly 60% of visitors will abandon a website if they experience more than 3 seconds of load time, and the majority will not return either. With a knock-on effect they may share this negative experience with others and deter them from engaging with your brand too.

This is why slow loading times, especially the initial loading phase when your site visitors are most likely just staring at a blank white page – is particularly damaging for a business. In other words, getting that initial loading time down is intimately tied to succeeding online.

Famously Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, spent millions of dollars to get Amazon’s initial loading time to below 1 second because he knew it would cost Amazon billions of dollars more in lost revenue if he didn’t.

People just don’t have the time these days to wait so the chances they will jump ship to your competitors is higher than ever. Is it worth risking over something as simple as a few seconds? We don’t believe so and recommend doing everything you can to get that time down, just like Jeff did.

Make your website load faster

Reduce the time it takes for a visitor landing on your website to load all the images and text. So, here are a few things that either you or your web developer can achieve:

Images are more often than not the largest contributor to slow website loading times. You can resolve this in two ways.

First, by reducing their physical dimensions.

Images chosen for websites are rarely sized exactly to what is shown or needed, they are usually far too large and this is often caused by them being uploaded straight from a digital camera. As the megapixels have increased and cameras improved over the years, they now generate images with far more detail and clarity than you actually need.

No one needs a ‘6000 x 4000’ sized image on a website. At best, you’ll need a ‘1920 x 1080’ but often even smaller than that is perfectly fine. You can achieve all of this for free by using Image Resizer. Upload them, choose a smaller size, then download them – it’s as simple as that.

Resizing & Compressing images will improve your Core Web Vitals.

The second, is by compressing the images.

You can do this for free by using TinyPNG. Whether the image is a JPG or PNG they will compress it using a sophisticated algorithm that removes unnecessary code but retains the quality, in other words you can’t see any change to the image but the file size is now greatly reduced.

By resizing and compressing your images you can shrink images by up to 90% – that’s a big reduction which will reward you in a faster website loading time.

Next you need to consider implementing a Content Delivery Network or ‘CDN’. We have written an article about CDN’s already which we definitely recommend you read at this point. But just know, they work really well and will make your website load faster without even touching the code.

Time to get techie

Lastly, on to the more technical things. Ask your web developer to optimise your JavaScript execution, ideally either defer or delay any non-critical JavaScripts from loading first. It will greatly reduce the initial loading times.

Next we would recommend asking them to minify the CSS and HTML on the website. This removes any spaces from the files and shrinks the sizes down – it’s surprisingly effective.

Fortunately, it’s much easier to achieve all of these technical improvements if you’re on WordPress as a plugin named WPRocket can do it all for you whilst implementing sophisticated caching technology too which speeds things up even more. It’s a plugin that is definitely worth considering. But if you’re not using WordPress or just don’t want the hassle, we can help you either way so reach out to us.

Your next steps.

At VIEWFULE, we not only care about achieving top Google rankings for our clients but maintaining them too. Getting on Page 1 is tough, especially if you are in a highly competitive industry. So the last thing you want is to tumble down the rankings just because Google updated their algorithm one day.

Core Web Vitals are here to stay, they are undeniably in the interest of the customer experience as no one enjoys browsing on poorly coded, slow websites. So keep ahead of the game by winning at Core Web Vitals today, so you keep winning tomorrow. Remember to reach out for your FREE consultation and we can talk through implementing all of these improvements, and more, on your website.

My new website is live.. now what?

Congratulations! Your new website is complete… There are many moving parts to a build, from coding to design and lastly to the content itself.

However, if you want to attract and retain customers, which let’s be honest… we ALL want. Then you cannot have a “set it and forget it” mentality. Marketing your business is not only about creating a presence on the web, it’s about maintaining it too.

It is therefore vital that you implement a ‘Website Update Schedule’ for your business.

Here are 4 reasons why a WUS is a wise decision:

1. Your business deserves to always shine in the best light.

Broken links, 404 pages, half-baked landing pages, slow loading times… your visitors will go elsewhere if they don’t find what they’re looking for… and FAST. The last thing you want is potential customers to become frustrated. It never ends well, and worse yet they’ll probably tell their family and friends not to come too.

Building trust is vital to operating a successful online presence. But at the end of the day, who’s going to want to enter their credit card or contact information when your website looks neglected? Ask yourself… would YOU trust this business?

Your website is the face of your organisation online, so invest the time and energy into keeping it current.

Actively monitor for bugs whilst simultaneously adding fresh content like blogs, articles, events and reviews. This way you kill two birds with one stone. We would recommend you do this at least once per week in order to keep your visitors engaged and to reap the long-term benefits of SEO.

2. Keep your website safe and secure for everyone.

You are not only responsible for protecting your own data, but you are also responsible for protecting your visitors’ data too. Security requirements are always changing, and nobody is safe – even big brands are targets for cyber-attacks and data breaches. To make this all the more challenging, if you are accepting visitors from countries within the European Union or US states such as California you are legally obliged to implement enhanced data security practices.

Towards the end of 2016, Uber announced the personal information of 57 million of their customers information and over 600,000 drivers had been hacked. To make matters worse, the company tried to hide the breach rather than report it.

In November 2018, Marriott International the hotel group came forward with information that cyber criminals had stolen the data of approximately 500 million of their customers.

Since hackers get smarter all the time, you need a program you can trust to keep your online assets safe.

Being proactive and protecting your website now is so much easier than dealing with the devastation, disruption and huge costs of a hacked site, lost data and destroyed Google rankings. And make no mistake, all of those negatives strike at once so it can be a scary time.

3. Secure backups, made regularly, will literally save your business.

A backup is a saved copy of your website, whether it’s from a day ago or a month ago. Backups are stored in files or in the cloud and can be restored if needed. There are two types of backup, full and incremental. They both have their benefits, but the full backup is the one you need to ensure is operating automatically and regularly.

If you don’t have a backup readily available and your website is hacked and wiped, you’d need to start over from scratch. You wouldn’t want all your hard work to disappear, would you?

4. Software updates are rarely automatic, but essential.

Software is ever-changing, whether it’s plugins and themes that need updating or security programs.

Your site isn’t going to run smoothly and will also be vulnerable to hackers if you don’t stay on top of software updates. The more often you update, the less likely you are to have problems.

Keeping your software updated also ensures your site loads quickly when visitors arrive; speed does have a direct impact on SEO.

Don’t miss vital leads or sales by neglecting content, security, backup and regular software updates.

Remember, spend a little money now and it will save you a fortune in case the worst happens tomorrow!

So, to recap. Ensure your ‘Website Update Schedule’ includes:

• Continuous state-of-the-art monitoring and “next-generation application firewall” protection against spam, malware and other malicious attempts. 7G firewalls are particularly effective.
• Ongoing automatic backups of your site in case it ever needs to be restored. Daily backups are expected these days as a minimum, in some cases hourly is recommended. Ensure the backups are stored away from the webserver itself and in a cloud location for further resiliency.
• Check every page of your website for broken images and links so it runs smooth and fast. As you intend for your visitors to experience it. Have your Web Developers’ phone number handy if you spot something amiss (in many cases quick fixes are free of charge anyway so why wouldn’t you).
• If you’re website is running on WordPress, make sure the ‘core’ is updated regularly (the latest is version 5.8 as of posting) and ensure your plugins are updated too for optimal performance and security. Make sure your webserver is running PHP version 7.4 or above. Many of our clients are now running on PHP version 8 for the enhanced security and performance benefits it brings.

A purely online based business with no ‘brick and mortar’ presence needs traffic in order to make sales and succeed. Essentially, traffic is the life blood of an online business. Without a reliable and highly targeted flow of traffic the business will surely fail it’s simply a matter of time. Therefore, acquiring and driving that traffic to your website should form a central piece of your marketing strategy. This has never been more important than in 2021 as there are more than 2 billion indexed websites out there… you need to make it clear why the visitor should choose you and FAST!

It is possible to buy traffic to your website, however there are many reasons why this is not a wise decision. We will cover this on another article but for now we’re going to delve deeper into 5 PROVEN METHODS that absolutely will drive more effective and targeted traffic to your website.

1. Write fresh and unique content REGULARLY.

Your entire website should be full of relevant, unique and well written content from front to back. When visitors find interesting content on your website, they will learn to trust your business. By doing so, they will spend more time on your website, favourite it/ bookmark it and eventually buy your products or services. It’s a virtual certainty.

By posting lots of valuable information on your website, regularly, you will be viewed as a subject matter expert (SME) in your field. We recommend that most of our clients post at least one interesting and unique blog/article per week and share it across all their social media.

2. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO – is KING.

Making your website visible in search engines, known as being ‘indexed’, is essential. You need to ensure your home page and ALL YOUR SUB-PAGES are indexed too. Google currently holds a 90% market share of all search engines globally, therefore it would be very wise indeed that you spend most of your time promoting your website in Google.

Being on the first page of the search engines results page (SERP) will make you very popular. Traffic will increase, this is a fact. Investigate and test niche keywords and phrases and place these in your titles and in the rest of the content on your website to increase their density. But be careful not to ‘overdo it’, if you are believed to be keyword spamming this will negatively affect your website (don’t use the same keyword more than 12 times per page).

Usually, visitors search using keywords or phrases and as a result this increases the chances of your website being found for those specific keywords. Take your time on this, test test test and do more testing. You will find the sweet spot in time.

3. Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising WORKS.

However, it costs. That being said, Google often provides sign up bonuses for its system ’Google Ads’ which can add up to $100. So, keep an eye out for these promos. Depending on your industry, you will want to start out with a budget of anywhere between $500-$2000. You can write your own ads or pay others to do this for you, although YouTube can be really helpful and teach you a new skill. Nail the ads, the targeting options, and the time of day they run and you could be making sales within hours.

4. Join Forums related to your industry – ENGAGE with them.

Joining Forums, talking with other likeminded individuals and sharing your knowledge can be very powerful for gaining more traffic. Once again, this takes us back to that topic of the SME I mentioned earlier. Engaging with fellow members and making it clear how knowledgeable you are within your field will result in others wanting to learn more about you.

Find appropriate forums on the internet (Google search your industry, country and the word ‘forum’ as a start) and participate in industry specific targeted forums. The topics you interact with should align with the topics on your website. We would not recommend that you directly write your Website URL on the topics or within responses. This may breach forum rules (remember to check them) but do capatilise on your username and avatar being related to your business and remember to link your website in your signature as this is usually permitted.

5. Videos increase engagement by up to 300% – CREATE them.

Create videos, as often as you can. Discuss in them your business, you and the products or services you offer. Respond to questions and emails from customers this way too by recording a Q&A session. They say a picture speaks 1000 words…. Well, a video speaks 300% higher than that! Make sure you share them on YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion etc too and tag them accordingly. Today, many businesses use video marketing to drive traffic to their website and the simple reason for this is… IT WORKS! Ensure you post your Website URL on the video description as this will make it easy to link visitors straight to your website.

At VIEWFULE, driving traffic to our clients’ websites is a passion. Irrespective of your industry, we would love to work with you and for you to drive your traffic sky high. So, remember to reach out for your FREE initial consultation today.