Hypergrowth

25/10/2021

Stop trying to use the homepage to rank everything.

One of the most common mistakes I see when analysing websites onsite SEO, is people trying to use their website’s home page to rank for every keyword that’s relevant to their business. Although the homepage does naturally have more power than any other page on the website it’s just not realist...

25/10/2021

AU Domains. Are they coming? Should I buy them? Should I move my site to them?

There has been a lot of hype around the internet about the possible new expansion of Australian top-level Domains (TLD’s) to include “.au” instead of the current main TLD of .com.au. Today we look at this possible new TLD type and answer a few questions that I’m sure most business owners will be asking.

Are the .au domains coming?

Although it really could go either way I believe from the amount of discussions I have already seen that it’s very likely this change goes ahead for a couple of reasons which are as follows:

It’s getting harder to find the .com.au’s that you want especially if you want to have keywords in the domain so adding a new TLD gives registrars the opportunity to sell a few hundred thousand extra domain names so they will be campaigning very hard to have the change approved in order to cash in.
Australian’s Love shortening things, especially the names of things. The .com in the domain really doesn’t serve a purpose anymore so moving to a shorter version does make sense.


Should I buy a .au domain?

Most definitely, the last thing you want is your competitor buying up your domain name and competing against you for your own brand. Brand identity is extremely important for your sites SEO, so even if you don’t plan on using the domain you should purchase it even if it just sits on the shelf and you never use it. The cost of the new domains is likely to be around the $20 per year so for that price I don’t think you can afford not to pick up at least your brand name and possibly a few exact match keywords if they are available.

To help with this there has been talk of a 6 month window where the people that already own the domain get the first chance to buy the new TLD before it becomes publicly available but this does raise a few concerns. For example, who gets preference if the com.au and the .net.au are owned by different people? Most likely it will be a first in best dressed situation in which case it would be recommended to act quickly.

Should I move my whole site to .au?

It’s a little too early to say on this point as it really depends on two things;

How Google chooses to value the new TLD. There have been hundreds of new TLD’s created over the years but very few have gotten much traction in the search results; but this time may be a little different as it seems this change is to replace the current TLD and not just give webmasters more options.

How the public reacts to the new TLD. If the public embraces the change to .au then in time they will start to automatically type your site address without the .com. This will also happen when people write emails they will forget the .com even if it’s supposed to be there. Redirects would cover you so you don’t lose traffic or email but it’s always best to rely on as few redirects as possible so this would represent a time to shift as well.

If you do decide to move your site over it’s very important to put in place the right redirects so your site doesn’t disappear from search results for a few months. If you are thinking about this move I highly recommend getting a local SEO involved to oversee the change. Web developers are great at making the changes but often they don’t anticipate how the changes affect Google as it’s not their area of expertise.

Summary

In summary, for now we play the waiting game but my recommendation would be to lock in the .au domains as soon as they become available so you don’t miss out but hold off on building anything on them until we know a bit more about how the market receives them.

25/10/2021

On page SEO complete guide For Web Developers

As we have mentioned before, stop trying to use the homepage to rank everything” we need to have a separate page for each keyword or group of similar themed keywords.

Today we will take this a step further and look a lot deeper into how we should build each page to give it every advantage to help rank.

URL’s
The single most important on page factor is the URL that you choose for the page, most people ignore this step and leave this up to their site platform to create which often results in unoptimized pages that never appear in the search results. Let’s use a few examples to explain the best way to structure the URL.

Let’s say we have a carpet cleaning website with the following two services;

Carpet cleaning
Rug cleaning
We would first look at the geographical area in which they would like to rank. The example company only works in Brisbane.

Based on this information we would create the following URL’s

com.au/carpet-cleaning-brisbane
com.au/rug-cleaning-brisbane
If the company happened to be providing the service Australia wide we would remove the geographical reference from url.

com.au/carpet-cleaning
com.au/rug-cleaning
In this example for the company targeting Australia wide we would likely create separate pages to specifically target each major city. However to keep the example simple we won’t cover this for the moment.

It’s also worth noting that there is no need to repeat the same keywords if they are already present in the domain name, as we don’t want to over stuff keywords. For example if the company website was carpetcleaningco.com.au this would change the url’s to the following;

com.au/brisbane
com.au/rug-brisbane


Meta Data

Meta data is also quite often overlooked which results in Google deciding for you what the title and description should be for your page. This may not seem like a big deal but this meta data will control how your site appears to people searching and will dramatically affect your listing’s click through rate. Let’s look at a couple of examples of companies that have taken the time to optimise this data and compare to a few that haven’t.

We have up to 70 characters available in the meta title so for a major page I always like to get the biggest keyword as the first part of the page title similar to the first example “Carpet cleaning Brisbane”. After the biggest keyword we can either use the brand of the site or a smaller keyword or both depending on how close we are to the character limits.

The main description allows a lot more space generally up to 160 characters, so we have a little more flexibility. The best practise for this section is to try and use as many of the company’s unique selling benefits and calls to action as you can. This is the opportunity to really sell the page to perspective clickers and getting this section right will really help boost your click through rate.



Written Content

The next step in the process is to write some quality unique content for the page. For a main service page, I would recommend an absolute minimum of 300 words of content on the page. This should under no circumstances be copied from either another page on the site or another site on the web. It should be completely unique.

One important point to keep in mind; if everything goes to plan this content will be read thousands of times by the people searching your target keyword. Taking this into consideration it will really help if you tailor the content to convert that audience. It will also help you avoid keyword stuffing as your audience doesn’t want to read the same keywords 20 times over and neither does Google.


Images

Each and every page should have at least one image. Similar to your content, for best results the image should be unique and relevant to the service you’re trying to rank for.

Optimising images depends heavily on the geographical area the page is targeting. So let’s use our carpet cleaning example to demonstrate.

An image targeting carpet cleaning Brisbane, we might take an image of a carpet being cleaned. Before we upload the image to the site there is a number of steps we need to take.

We would resize the image to the size that best fits where it will go on the website, which will also reduce the file size to help with load speed.

We would name the image something relevant to the page like “residential carpet cleaning Brisbane”.
We would use exif data to geotarget the businesses address in Brisbane. (this basically puts longitude and latitude in the files data which tells Google exactly where the image is relevant to.
Then after we upload the image to the site we would create alt text to be a description of what’s happening in the image. In this example we would likely use something like “carpets being cleaned in Brisbane property”

If the page is not targeting a specific geographical area we would follow the same process except we wouldn’t use the word Brisbane in our examples and we wouldn’t change the exif data of the page with the coordinates.


Schema Mark-up

Schema mark-up is a more advanced onsite SEO and is to be honest a very poorly understood part of the onsite SEO process. To give you a simplified explanation it’s basically small snippets of code that help Google understand content. For example, if a page mentions an address it can be quite difficult for Google to tell the difference between normal words and an address. By adding a few extra lines of code we can highlight to Google what it is seeing is in fact an address.

Schema stretches well beyond addresses and can highlight all kinds of data from product ratings to letting Google know about your companies other social properties. We recommend using as much schema as you can because the more Google understands your content pages the more it knows how to rank it.

Schema will require coding ability or the use of plugins, so we recommend you contact our team to help for this step.

Summary

If you create a page for each major keyword and get these 5 factors right then in a lot of industries this will be enough for them to take the top spots on Google. Even in more competitive industries it’s going to set the foundations that make your page competitive and will make it much easier when an SEO does come in to work on offsite factors to finish the job. If you would like help to make sure you’re on the right track, please don’t hesitate to give our team a call on (07) 3180 2383

We provide education, consulting and research to local businesses to help them decide on the best ways to advertise using native news, articles and outside the box content brand marketing strategies.

25/10/2021

Multi-Local SEO for Multi-Local Businesses.

If you're a Local Business, you've likely heard of Local SEO and maybe even tried it. But most have not heard of Multi-Local SEO.
Multi-Local SEO is a new method that levels the playing field with no more catch the leader or constant battles to dominate the 1, 2, 3 podium on Google.

This is fast becoming the most common solution for generating local enquiries in multiple locations for most local businesses.
Why is this method becoming so popular?

Well if you are a multi-local business it typically means you service customers across multiple local areas within a major city or even across several states.

The problem is, your Google business listing is registered to one single location and generates the most enquiries within the same 5km to 10km radius location.

So if you're paying for Local SEO it doesn't matter how much you invest or optimise, you will always be limited by the fact most people prefer calling someone who is more local.

Big problem if you are a Multi-Local business with only a Single local business listing on Google.

Also not fair if you are willing to travel further to service customers, but your home address registered with Google is not in the areas you want to service customers. The entire system is just not fair or logical for a service based business.

Multi-Local SEO is an outside the box solution, setup in a way that legitimises how you can create a Multi-Local marketing solution.

The result is potentially dozens or even hundreds of additional calls from multiple locations you want to service.

Now you can choose and take control of where you want more local calls using Multi-Local SEO.

Leave a comment below and will email you an information pack to learn more about this strategy.

25/10/2021

After analysing thousands of sites over the last 10 years there are many things we see every day that people do wrong, not do at all due to time constraints or a lack of knowledge. With just a little more time invested in the right activities they could easily and significantly improve their organic Ecommerce rankings.

Download the guide “5 things you can do to smash Ecommerce SEO in 2021-22″ by Kick Media, to learn all 5 steps to boost sales revenue from organic traffic. Find this guide on our SEO Page here. https://kickmedia.com.au/seo/ #5-thing-you

These 5 steps are actionable for most savvy Ecommerce marketers and don’t require much technical knowledge at all, but they are all guaranteed to move the needle with little extra effort if you make them part of your process.

This is a great starting point for valuable SEO task you can implement yourself, however is only the tip of the spear in terms of SEO optimisations we can help you with.

To get a full audit for your brand or your clients reach out to Kick Media.

They will run the following the audit:

Content URL mapping analysis.
Product category keyword analysis.
Onsite SEO crawl of major ranking factors
Content correlation analysis
Back link analysis
Keyword competition analysis
Keyword opportunity analysis
SEO Viability Analysis
Competition vs Cost
Cost vs Return potential
keyword cluster search volumes