David
After having experience working with all major Content Management Systems (CMS), including WordPress, Wix, Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace and Shopify, I’ll discuss the reasons why I recommend WordPress for small and medium business owners. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, powering approximately 35% of websites. There’s a good reason for its ever-increasing popularity and many of these reasons make WordPress an ideal candidate for business websites. Functionality/Flexibility As WordPress is “open source”, it means there is a development community that is engaged and willing to customise existing, as well as writing new code. With WordPress, you can choose…
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What’s wrong with tracking rankings and traffic? Many an SEO agency or Paid Ads consultant use traffic or rankings as their primary reporting method to clients on the performance of their campaigns. This approach, however, is flawed, as these metrics merely support the primary objective for a business, which, in most cases is to get more leads and sales. Further to this, traffic and rankings are only important, if the keywords that are bringing in this traffic have the correct search intent. What I mean by this is, by looking at the example below, an acupuncturist in Sydney at first glance…
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Advertising in traditional mediums such as Newspapers, Radio & TV were the life blood of advertising for businesses for the past several decades. From the very early advent of Newspapers, they almost instantly carried ads to offset the cost of printing and production. What has happened in the last decade, however, is much of this Ad spend has been re-allocated from print media to online, with the biggest beneficiaries being Google and Facebook/Instagram. As we can see from the image below, the majority of that huge chunk of online spend has been extricated from print media advertising, with a small…
Read MoreWhat is the Google Medic update? In August 2018, Google released a broad core algorithm update that’s been nicknamed the “Medic” update. That’s because Medical and health sites have been heavily impacted, as well as any sites that belong to the category of sites known as YMYL (Your Money Or Your Life) which include parenting, legal or financial advice sites. Why did Google release this update? It appears that Google wants to clamp down on fake news, inaccurate and unqualified content. This is especially true for sites that have a significant impact on your wellbeing. What has been the impact?…
Read MoreOne of the most critical things business can do is to claim their Google My Business listing. These “local listings” enable businesses to be easily found by local customers. They also have the added benefit of enabling your business to be reviewed by customers. In this blog, I’ll cover the often tricky aspect of acquiring and managing Google reviews for businesses. This blog assumes your business has already claimed it’s Google My Business listing. If you haven’t, do it now by going to the Google Business Profile website. Why should you get reviews? Credibility/trust Reviews bring credibility and trust to…
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Are you an Australian doctor, Vet, or medical specialist that is looking to increase your caseload or gain new clients and grow your practise, clinic or overall business? SEO is one of the most important aspects of success for a medical practice, but medical SEO is quite often neglected. It’s not surprising really, as the often murky world of SEO appears to be an art rather than a science. Most doctors and practise managers are too busy running their business to spend the time to and effort to learn and implement best practices for search engine optimisation. Just like any…
Read MoreI’ve often heard people say that social media advertising is a waste of money, as social media users are predominantly catching up on news and seeing what their friends ate for lunch, rather than actively looking to buy goods or services. Although there’s an element of truth to this, there’s still a place for social media advertising. Contrast this with traditional Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising methods such as Google AdWords and Bing Ads, where the searcher is actively looking to buy (depending on the keywords used). As a result, it’s far easier to gauge intent with PPC advertising. In…
Read MoreGoogle Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tools) is by far the most useful and is my favourite SEO tool! It has all the critical data you need to manage your SEO campaigns, without the complexities of analytical tools such as Google Analytics. The following will provide beginner’s guide to Search Console, that covers the basics of setting up, verifying and using Google Search Console, focusing on the most used elements. Add your property Each website has two properties: Either https://website.com and https://www.website.com or httpss://website.com and httpss://www.website.com It’s important to add both versions of your website, to ensure you don’t…
Read MoreWhat is a 404 error? A 404 error is generated by your web server when the requested page is not found on your WordPress website.Every WordPress theme has a 404.php file, but only some themes will have their own custom 404 error page. WordPress will automatically use that page if a page not found error is encountered on your website.The page that is displayed when the requested page can’t be found is largely determined by your theme, but here’s a common example of 404 error wording:If you have used a default WordPress theme for your website, the 404 error can…
Read MoreSome of the criticisms of WordPress, when compared to other purchase based platforms is the lack of in-built functionality on the platform to handle payments. Shopify, for example has store/cart functionality built in, and accepting payments really is a breeze. Woo commerce is arguably the king of processing payments in the WordPress platform powering 28% of all online stores on the web. Woo Commerce is a powerful and customizable platform, but can often be complex to setup, needing custom integrations. There’s also a cost involved in accepting payments with WooCommerce (USD 129 per year). For those WordPress websites that need…
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