When designing or upgrading a website it’s important to embed the core aspects of your ‘brand personality’ into your online presence. Branding isn’t just confined to your logo, but is essentially the ‘character’ of your business represented in a visual way. When we talk about your brand story we want to represent your business heart to prospective customers.

Things have certainly changed over the past decade when it comes to how people engage and interact with each other online. The world of social networking through services such as Facebook and Twitter now plays an important role in purchasing decisions. Product reviews and service testimonials, both good and bad, are at our fingertips. It’s never been easier to seek out, listen to and discuss other people’s opinions on a particular product or service. This means monitoring your own brand and maintaining a positive reputation in the social arena is now more important than ever.

Making a real connection with potential customers can be tough enough in person, so doing it in the online space takes real skill. One of the ongoing lessons of business is that ‘people buy from people’, so humanising your website can have positive benefits on your visitors.

Giving your customers the ability to say ‘yes’ to your offer is one of the most important things you can do with your business website.

Online selling is much the same as traditional sales with one critical exception. The average engagement time of a new website visitor is eight seconds. Think about that for a minute. Eight actual seconds. That’s how long you have to tell your prospect about your business and why they should trust and buy from you. That’s not very long.
 

When it comes to creating a website many businesses fall into the trap of saying too much. The goal of your website is to create leads or sales and to do that we find engaging ways to tell the audience about our products and services. The mistake we are all tempted to make is to flood our site with everything we do and the end result is that we overwhelm our customer.

Your new website is going to work best if you simplify your message and focus on solving your customer’s needs. 

Rather than trying to answer every possible enquiry on your front page use the “80% principle” and ask yourself, “What is the one thing I need my website to do?” This could be generating new leads for your in-house sales team, actually selling your products via an online credit card transaction or simply educating your current customers on your key services.

A website is simply a tool, so work out what is the tool’s primary function and make it do just that. Easy!

Get in touch with our team of web specialists today to find out how we can help you narrow your focus and improve the returns on your existing website.

Many factors go into deciding where your website ranks in the major search engines, but one that most SEO experts can agree on is that proving your ‘authority’ within a topic is crucial to achieving great rankings.

To larger search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, what other people say about you is much more important than what you say about yourself, so having a healthy amount of incoming links pointing to your site gives the search engines a clear picture of authority and relevancy amongst your peers. If your website has a significant amount of these inbound links from other respected sites, then Google and Co. have a good reason to believe that your website is both relevant and an authority on that topic.

A great logo is more than your company name in a nice font. Here are 10 things you should consider when it comes to designing your logo.

The Internet is going to get a whole lot bigger with hundreds of new domain extensions being released. The way we think of a website's domain name may change completely if these take off.

Below is a full list of all of the new Top Level Domains that will be available shortly.

We all get THOSE emails, you know the ones. A company that you have never heard of gets in contact with you out of the blue and tells you that your site is underperforming in search engines and can guarantee you a #1 spot for any keyword.

So what is social media marketing anyway?

It's no secret that technology has helped to force a major cultural shift in society over the past two decades. Things that were once undreamable are basic day-to-day reality for a lot of us. Today, the internet is so ubiquitous in our lives that the way we discover and consume information has forever changed.

A good way to judge this impact is to ask yourself a few simple questions.

"When was the last time I used an actual phone book to look up a local business?”

“When was the last time I used a paper map to find my way somewhere?”

In its formative years, the World Wide Web was primarily a one-way exchange of information. At its core, the internet was a platform founded on connecting people with information. If you needed to find information on a local restaurant for example, you used a search engine and found what you needed. Of course, this is still a large part of the web, but in the past ten years, we have seen the focus shift from connecting people with information, to connecting people to people.

This 'networking' and 'sharing' of information is largely made possible by a new breed of tools called 'social networks' which allow people from all different walks of life to connect with others and share information in a more natural and organic way.

Of course, this cultural shift has opened up huge new opportunities for businesses to market their products and services.

If you build it, they may not come

Building a website is an exciting time for a business. You have a great opportunity to not only showcase your business to the world, but more importantly a new site can be a potential sales channel that works 24/7 for you. One of the most common misconceptions however, is that when you launch a website, customers will come flocking to your site ready to buy.

In reality, this couldn't be much further from the truth. In fact, unless you have some kind of online marketing strategy, it can be many months before anyone even knows your website exists!

Depending on why you built the website in the first place, this can be a problem of varying importance. If your site is purely informational, and exists mainly to give your existing clients additional support and information it may not be such a big deal. But for most websites, the primary purpose is to deliver new leads and sales. No visitors equals no sales and this quickly becomes a big problem, especially when you have overheads to cover.

Surely not another social networking site?

I know what you are thinking. Is this really another thing we need to be on? With so many different online marketing channels available to small business owners in 2013, it can be tough to make the right call on where to direct your time and energy when it comes to social media.

The ecosystem for social media marketing can be pretty overwhelming, so we've compiled a short list of reasons why we think you should start to take notice of Google Plus and why it could be a great match for your business. We're good like that.

Last week Facebook announced a new feature that will be available shortly, Graph Search.

A very handy (and free!) widget you can add to your website is a Share button.

Google is constantly tweaking their ranking formula for the purpose of giving the most accurate and relevant results when using their search engine.  Making sure that you keep on top of Google updates is important!.  Read on for more info...

If you use Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera as your web browser, you may be interested in the plugin/add-on "WebRank SEO Toolbar".

Gone are the days of having a static website that you update or refresh only every couple of years.

Using Google Analytics to track page views and traffic is a great first step to measure user activity on your website. However to really understand how your clients are using your website, Google Analytics Goals are a must.

Many of you may have heard of the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but do you truly understand what it actually is?

Google's image search feature can be used to your benefit in ways not really intended by Google!

Many people use Google Alerts to get the latest news on their favourite band or sports team, however did you know that it can also be used as a powerful tool to help keep you informed about competitors, industry news and trends.

The first thing to think about when writing content for a page on your website is to decide what the purpose of the page is and what actions you want the user to take when visiting the page.

In today's technologically connected world we access so much sensitive information online including emails, social media and bank accounts. So why is it that so many people still have such awful password practice?

Facebook loves keeping us on our toes! You may have heard about the changes to business pages. On March 30 2012 all pages will automatically get upgraded to the new Facebook Timeline, whether you like it or not! Megan Winter from Motor Mouth Advertising explains the details of these changes and how they affect your business.

Most people by now would have noticed a bar code that looks like this around the place:

Continue reading to learn more!

Google was founded in 1997 by two Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin whose initial company mission statement was "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Google's mission statement has not changed to this day, and it's actually quite useful to remember when putting together a strategy for the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website.

Far from being just a nifty way for friends to catch up, social media is redefining the way in which businesses work. Megan Winter from Motor Mouth Advertising shares her tips on harnessing the power of social media to get your business motoring.

Do you know how many people are visiting your website each day? Do you know how they found your website? What keywords they searched for to find you? How long they stayed on your website? How many pages they viewed?

If not, you are missing out on vital information that could help you to fine tune your website into a valuable marketing tool.Google provides a free statistics system called "Google Analytics", which can easily be installed on any website. You can sign up for a Google Analytics account at http://www.google.com.au/analytics

Please contact us if you would like help installing Google Analytics on your website.

When deciding what keywords or phrases to use on your website or in an online ad campaign, it's important to find out how often particular keywords are being searched for and how much competition there is for each keyword. Google actually has a tool which does just this, and best of all it's free!

Your clients are saying great things about you, so why not use that to its full potential. So often we see people create a "Testimonials" page on their website, and just list all of the comments one after the other. This is OK, but there is an even better way...

Ever wonder what people actually do on your website? I don't just mean what pages they go to and what links they click on. I'm talking about where their mouse moves, and how far they scroll down the page.

The Internet has quickly become a place where people share many parts of their lives, such as their photos and videos and their recommendations of music, movies, restaurants and businesses.

There is a very handy (and free!) tool called "Add This"  which you can easily add to your website to assist your website visitors in sharing your site with their friends.  Please contact us if you would like help adding this to your website.

I'm very small. I appear on many websites. I'm usually a logo or a symbol. I may or may not be on your website. What am I? I'm a Favicon!

A Favicon is a small image that appears next to the URL and in the tabs on your browser. It allows for people to easily identify your website when they have multiple tabs open and is a good opportunity to show off your logo/branding.

If you don't already have a Favicon on your website, let us know and we'll help you to set one up.

Have you ever received an email from a company claiming that your domain name is due to expire and you have not been sure if it is legitimate? Or maybe you've received an email from a company claiming that one of your competitors is trying to register a similar domain name to yours?

In some cases these are legitimate emails, but quite often they are hoax emails simply trying to trick you into paying excessive renewal fees or unnecessarily registering new domain names. Here are some simple steps to help determine if an email is a hoax and help you avoid being a victim of these scams.

Business owners are the most easily distracted humans on the planet.  We get excited about one marketing strategy and then jump to the next if it seems more interesting or exciting. Here's a short list of questions you can use to get clear on your marketing activities and to be much more effective and ‘break thru’ to the next financial level.

In a recent article, we explained the benefits of getting back-links to your site. The general idea is that the more links you have pointing to your site, the more popular Google thinks your site is. This in turn increases your Google ranking. A good way to quickly increase your number of back-links is through article marketing.

Google Maps can be an important part of your online marketing strategy. However, a lot of small businesses neglect this part of their Google listing. Remember, it's free and it is one of the easiest ways to get up to the top of Google.

Testimonials can be an extremely useful sales tool for your website (and your other marketing materials too!). However, they can be just as harmful if you’re not careful.  Your testimonials need to be legitimate and sincere, and there are a number of ways to ensure this.

You may have heard by now that having a lot of content on your website is good for improving your website's Google rankings. However, this can often be easier said than done! It can be hard thinking of things to write about.

Have you ever used an email form on the contact page of a website and never received a response? This has happened to me many times, and it certainly makes me think twice about sending emails using those forms again. If I'm going to go to the effort of writing an email, I want a response, and I want it in a timely manner!