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What Goes Into Creating A Great Blog

If you want your blogs to work for you in 2019, there are a few things you're going to have to get right. Communicating with your target audience and your customers has never been so valuable and showcasing what your business does and how you go about supporting the people you work with every day is marketing gold, and blogging is the way it's done.

What I have noticed over time and in creating our own blogs is the real value we offer our readers and when you start to think about that, you get a real sense of the enormity of what actually goes into your work every day. Now, let's cut to the chase here, the main reason we're all blogging is to generate traffic to our website design. In the beginning, we don't have thousands of followers, but that's ok. Carry on creating great content, and your audience numbers will grow, trust me. The crucial goal here is to add value, proper value that helps the people reading your blog to solve the real issues they're facing, so just focus on that in the beginning. Let's break it down further and talk about how to start blogging.

Strategy

Putting together a blog content strategy is extremely important. Considering the amount of time and effort that goes into writing blog posts, you want to make sure it works for you. To work for you, it has to reach your target audience, and it has to help the people taking the time to read it genuinely. An excellent place to start is looking at your competition. Take the time to go through all their material, study their methods, their writing style, the kinds of pictures they use and the keywords they go after. Your aim then is to go to one step further by doing it better, much better. By working to a written blog content strategy, you are on the path to success, you have an advantage, and that will pay dividends over time.

A strategy is going to save you hours because you are only going to be working on content you know is going to pay dividends, writing about topics your readers want to know more about and answering the kinds of questions people want answers to. So, with your strategy, you should have these three questions in mind;

what kind of content are people genuinely looking for?

what is the purpose of creating this content?

How does this content help in achieving the goals we've set for ourselves?

Setting your goals

The goals you set will come from the following questions you have to ask yourself. I'm creating my blog because I want

To push traffic to the website

To generate leads, increase prospects and sales

To educate site visitors on the services the business offers

To showcase the work, we do for our customers

To further build on the brand

Once you have identified your reason for going ahead and creating your blog, you now have to take the time to think about what kind of content you want to talk about. A few right questions you may wish to consider;

Where does my target audience spend their time, what social media platforms do they like to use, are there forums or online groups they belong to

Can you identify common issues, problems across particular industries

Which posts are more widely read and followed?

By identifying what your target audience is searching for, you'll be in a much better position to provide the answers for which they seek. If you can provide solutions via your blog and website, then the traffic will come, and in turn, your search rankings will soar. while your initial thought was to start perhaps creating blogs around whatever came to mind, taking the time to develop a written blog content strategy will save you a lot of wasted time, and you'll taste success a lot sooner.

Competition

Before rushing straight off to create your first blog, you should look at what your competition has done in this space. You want to make sure that what you are going to create is going to hit the mark. Having a quick look around you'll be able to see what keywords are being targeted in your niche. A tool we use for this kind of job is SEMrush, it's a mine of information on not only what your competition is doing but on how your content is performing in general.

This is important as you need to know you're going after the right keywords in the first place. We know that web design and web design Auckland both get over 3000 hits a month on Google search, so we make sure we get those specific keywords into our content. SEMrush lets us see how our content is performing for those keywords and how we compare to the competition, making it an invaluable tool to have.

Writing Content

Long content works the best, you ideally want your blogs to be 1,800 words long. It's well documented that long content gets good results. Writing decent size blogs that go delve into the detail on how to solve problems will gain followers and followers that will appreciate your efforts and so will share your content with others. Remember what we said earlier, it's essential to have a strategy. So start thinking about what you are going to write about. Plan, research and begin developing content marketing ideas. Having ideas for future blogs allows you plenty of time to do the research, ready for you to make a start on the allotted day. A content calendar is going to be very helpful at this point. There are plenty of options out there. We've tried a number over the years but settled on the Hubspot platform. Not only does it give us a bird's eye view of our content but allows us to distribute our content via email marketing and social media. Making our lives a whole lot easier.

that's not to say you have to spend a fortune to get a content calendar in place, you could use Google calendar or Trello, both are great free options. Moving along, you've got your keywords in place, and you've filled out your calendar, so now all you have to do is sit down and write that blog. To create a well-crafted piece of content, you will need to; Make sure your article is easy to read, uses well-defined headers, subheaders and small paragraphs. Bullet points and quotes make it exciting and enjoyable to read. High-quality images are a must. There are several free photo library sites on the net these days, a perfect one and one I like to use from time to time is Unsplash. Or simply take your own. Just about everybody has a smartphone these days, and the camera quality is impressive. So there no excuses for not having high-quality images on your posts. Wordpress is the platform of choice for most serious and professional bloggers. We moved over to Wordpress a few years back, when we started to build our clients websites on the system. It's straightforward to use, and the SEO tools within Wordpress make it easy to rank your blogs. We also like the fact that it's effortless to incorporate video files. Video is huge right now, and all social media platforms are screaming out for it. We've found that the blogs that incorporate video do a lot better than those with just still images. We can tell from Google analytics that they have a lower bounce rate and get far more shares. People are visual, so it's time to get a handle on the visual side of your content marketing. Start incorporating video, it's the best advice I can give you.

SEO

Your blogs are the perfect tool for your search engine optimisation needs. By getting the right keywords into your well researched and freshly written content, it's going to get you that well deserved Google traffic. Let's not forget, your competition is doing what you are doing too. They've also done their due diligence and have spent time creating content. Now, yours has to be better, and by better I mean better researched, better written and using great pictures and videos to help tell your story.

If you are not currently ranking well, take a good long look at the content on your website and your current blog pages. Could they use an update, could you possibly do better now, I'm thinking that you could. With your keyword strategy in place and your content working for you, you'll notice your organic rankings will be moving up through Google search. Get into the habit of writing two to three blogs a week, and your rankings will transform. We've' seen it here. We have over 19 keywords on the first page of Google, all driving traffic to our web design. To get to this stage, we've identified what our prospects are looking for and where they are spending their time to learn more about the services we offer. Remember though your content has to add value, you want to solve your reader's problems. By creating compelling and helpful content you're going to keep readers and followers, and they are going to return, time and time again. Your competitors are going to try and do the same, so make sure your work is original, you want to make your work different. If your blog is authentic, people will read it. Being passionate about what you do, will allow the words to flow. It takes time, but it will come.

Equipment

You’re not going to need a lot of gear to write your blogs, but you are going to need some equipment to help you capture videos and photos to help you tell your story. I’ve put a list together below outlining the gear we use on a daily basis. Camera Bag: https://amzn.to/2VtNzkL DJI Osmo Pocket: https://amzn.to/2L87FNt Drone: https://amzn.to/2PAAhhc Osmo Mobile: https://amzn.to/2PwpCUG Gimbal for DSLR Cameras: https://amzn.to/2WfGm5f Main Vlog Camera: https://amzn.to/2L9s0SD Main Camera: https://amzn.to/2VxWd1C Aputure Portable Lights: https://amzn.to/2V0vJqi Slider: https://amzn.to/2UKmJAq Tripod: https://amzn.to/2W7y9Qg Rode Video Mic: https://amzn.to/2GBViUx

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Making Sense of Digital Marketing

You want better search engine rankings, right? And more enquiries? We can get you there. How? It’s called Digital Marketing.

What is Digital Marketing? And how does it work

Digital Marketing is a sustained effort that will help connect your company with the people who’re seeking the services you offer. It combines any number of online strategies that lead us towards the end game: more enquiries and more sales. Digital Marketing can include:

SEO

Google Ads

Social Media

Email Marketing

But the real juice in Digital Marketing is still content. It’s been that way for years and won’t change any time soon. Content – written words, photographs and video – is the beating heart of everything in Digital Marketing: it fuels your Social Media, Email Marketing, PPC advertising... And content is absolutely fundamental to SEO.

Why is content still king?

Because it’s content that tells people what you’re about. And it’s content that tells Google what you’re about. Without talking about what you do, how do you expect to Google to understand what you’re about– and then rank you accordingly?

Our job as business owners and digital marketers is to answer as many relevant questions as we can, online.

Google loves a website that publishes fresh, relevant and original content.

It’s not enough to have a page for each product or service you offer. You need to publish case studies, industry commentary or special promotions on the regular. This will reinforce to Google that you can answer the questions that people are typing into Google’s search box.

Eureka!

And that’s really it in a nutshell: it’s about answering the questions that people are asking Google. Real people and their typical search patterns are what drives Google. Their main motivation is to be able to give people accurate solutions as fast as possible.

We know that people are less inclined to ask Google broad questions, and more likely to ask specific questions. For example, people don’t ask Google about apples. The ask when are royal gala apples in season.

Our job as business owners and digital marketers is to answer as many relevant questions as we can, online. And the vehicle for delivering this is a Digital Marketing Plan. In this way, we are able to connect qualified leads with your product or service. And ensure that these people are truly engaged with you before they enter your sales funnel.

Meeting your business needs

Digital Marketing Plans from Hart Design can be customised to meet your budget and your needs. Social Media is a great tool for B2C businesses, but not so important for B2B. And not everyone wants to use Google Ads or Email Marketing. Let's build a plan that works for you.

Our plans also provide you with a proactive website caretaker. We handle security updates and general maintenance that is essential for minimising the risk of malicious attacks on your website.

So, you want better rankings and more enquiries?

We can get you there with a Digital Marketing Plan. Follow the link to learn more about the nuts and bolts of our plans, or contact us to get the conversation started.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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The Value of Web Design for SMEs

In this article, we explore the value of website design for New Zealand’s small to medium businesses.

If you are one of the many manufacturers, service providers or retailers that fall into the SME category, you may relate to this story.

In our experience, website design and – by extension, digital marketing – is often poorly represented by the smaller enterprise. We are here to reach out and say that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Land of the long work hours

As well as being the land of the long white cloud, New Zealand is the land of the small business. The government ministry for business, MBIE, defines an SME as a company that has less than 20 employees. According to MBIE, SMEs provide 40% of New Zealand’s economic output.

We’re one. Are you? When it comes to kiwi enterprise we’re kind of a big deal!

Working long hours is par for the course for small-medium business owners and many of their dedicated staff. From our perspective as web designers in Auckland, it’s a crying shame when all of this hard work goes unheralded in the digital landscape.

We’re firm believers that if you operate a company with a great story to tell, then shout it from the rooftops with stunning website design. Your website should match your business ethos. You believe in your company and what it brings to your industry. We believe in telling your story online with creative flair, craft and precision.

You don’t have to be a large corporate to achieve this.

What value should you place on a website?

The Value of Design

Like it or not, first impressions matter. Visitors to your website will form an impression of your company based on what they see. And oftentimes what they see first will be your website.

Better make it a good first impression.

At Hart Design we value design skill and attention to detail highly. It is important to us that we build contemporary websites that accurately depict our client’s own attitude to business, their spirit and their culture.

The Value of SEO

If you’re thinking that your website must attract people first, before it can make an impression, you’re right! And we hear ya. That’s why we build in key SEO fundamentals into every website that we build:

Mobile-friendly layout

Clear navigation

Secured by SSL Certificate

Hosted on a high-performance webserver

You get these SEO fundamentals as standard when you build your website with Hart Design. And for those willing to invest a little extra, there is more to be done in the SEO space. Talk to us about how we can help improve your search engine rankings.

Consider The Cost of Doing It Badly

Take a look at your current website with a critical eye. If your website does anything less than represent who you are, your quality of service or product, then you’re missing out.

Want to know how your website stacks up in terms of SEO? And how to take it forward? Talk to Hart Design to learn how we can get your website to where it needs to be.

So how much does web design cost?

If you’ve read this far you’re probably asking the question everyone wants answering: How much?

If you share our thoughts on the value of website design, you won’t view web design through the prism of cost. You will view it through the prism of value. You’ll appreciate your website as an asset, not an expense.

While we’re NOT the $999 website merchants that flood the market, the answer may be less than you think.

Because we're an SME too, we understand where you're coming from. We're ideally placed to craft a stunning website that perfectly reflects who you are as a company.

It costs you nothing to ask, so talk to us today and find out more about the true value of a well-designed website for your small-to-medium business.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Smarketing: Align Your Marketing & Sales

The goal is here is to get your marketing and sales departments working together, it's been well documented that if you can get these two teams to play nicely you're going to generate double your revenue.

The question is, how are you going to get these two teams singing from the same hymn book? Let's start with the right terminology first. This new way of working is called smarketing, and it refers to the communication between your sales and marketing teams.

Both teams have to speak the same lingo

As is most commonly the case, these two teams usually speak very different languages and I think it's fair to say they almost never really get along. A bit like the English and the French, when the French pretends not to know a single word of English when you're trying to order lunch in a Paris cafe. Here are a few terms that both teams need to agree on from the get-go.

For instance, in what column do you place someone that has signed up to your email marketing campaigns? What category do you put somebody in that has visited your web design more than once? How about somebody that has downloaded one of your eBooks? Jot down all the terms that both teams are currently using and align them all so now they mean something to all involved in both your sales and marketing endeavours.

Who's the boss?

Somebody has to be in charge. At some point in the buyer's journey, a prospect steps away from marketing and into the sales funnel. This transition has to be at a specific point in the journey, a point that both parties agree upon. A good example of this here at Hart Design is when a visitor downloads one of our eBooks. At that point, marketing takes on the responsibly to take them on a journey, to answer their questions, to educate and move them through the buyers journey. All going well, the prospect will be passed onto sales.

What is an ideal client?

You hear it all the time, "sales, never close the deals we send them? Or “most of the leads marketing send us aren't a good fit". It's important that both teams understand what the ideal client actually is. Marketing needs to be creating a marketing strategy and inbound marketing content directed at their ideal buyer personas. This is going to go a long way in sending the right leads to your sales reps. Using qualified lead generation in your sales process is going to give sales a higher chance of closing the deal.

Communication is King.

Having both your marketing and sales teams catch up every week may sound daunting, but in the long run, this is going to pay dividends and serve the common goal. It's important for both teams to know that goals are being met, or not as the case may be. Weekly would be the way to go, you don't want to catch up quarterly only to find there is a huge misalignment and three months unproductive time has gone by.

A dashboard keeps everything transparent. By having all your open communication visible and on hand between both teams keeps everybody honest. Create one hub where everybody gets a birds-eye view of what is going on at any given moment, again, this keeps everything on track. You're then able to make adjustments quickly, and that's huge, given we live in an instant gratification world. You want to know that your new smarketing team is working well together. It's important that all information between the two parties is updated on a regular basis.

So, where does this leave you now?

Well, you have two teams that are actually talking to each other now, on a regular basis too I hope. Service level agreements are in place, goals are being met by both teams. The right content marketing is being generated to attract your ideal prospects and sales have a funnel of prospects that are primed for conversion.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Proof that Email Marketing Still Has its Place

Is email marketing still relevant? Let me save you a few minutes of reading: yes it is. For those who need convincing, do read on as we explore the ROI of email marketing using a recent real-world example.

While we don’t advocate email marketing for everyone, we believe it is still a powerful tool for some. That’s no different to our thoughts on other digital marketing strategies, such as Facebook or Google Ads: it’s right for some, not for others.

Email Marketing is Right for Jetshare

Jetshare is ready to conquer the outdoor recreation market in Auckland. As a start-up business with many pieces of his marketing puzzle in place, business owner Aarron Hanson is now entrenched in a networking and brand awareness phase.

Our latest contribution was to design an email marketing campaign to promote Jetshare’s most recent hooks: an online booking system and a 0% finance offer.

Background

Jetshare offers Aucklanders the most fun they’ll have all season with a unique jetski timeshare business. With Jetshare, you get all the fun of owning a jet ski without the hassle of storage, maintenance and breakdown repairs.

Jetshare came to Hart Design with an established brand and an e-commerce website. With a number of sales under his belt, Aarron wanted to reinvest in his online marketing. Our first task for Aarron was to put a little polish on the website.

Recognising the importance of mobile-friendly website design, Aarron’s main goal was to improve the website’s mobile display. The value of this work cannot be overstated given the data recorded in Jetshare’s Google Analytics account. We can see that 60% of Jetshare’s website traffic is viewing the website on a mobile device.

Other web design tasks included general page layout improvements, adding a photo gallery and a little creative work to push the finance deal available to Jetshare subscribers.

Going Beyond Web Design

More recently our team has bedded in a feature-rich booking system provided by European software SimplyBook.me.

The system allows Aarron to easily keep track of who has booked his jet skis and when. And for his clients, they can check how many bookings they have remaining and manage future bookings all with a few easy clicks.

Email notifications and calendar syncing are part of the package.

Getting Back to the Present: Email Marketing

So the website is now looking more attractive, the booking system is in place and an enticing offer is ready to promote. It’s time to give Jetshare another push to those leads that Aarron has built up since launching.

Hart Design recommended our email marketing system as a fantastic tool to push these messages to Jetshare followers.

Why? Because it’s visually punchy, mobile friendly and most importantly it’s trackable.

The reports generated in the system allows you to identify who’s keen and who’s not. This means Aarron can strike while the iron is hot with those leads who are progressing further down the sales funnel.

The Proof is in the Payoff

Spring has sprung and summer is on the horizon: the perfect time to ramp up Jetshare’s marketing efforts. The email marketing campaign was scheduled to send on Sunday morning and by the end of the weekend, Aaron had secured a sale to the value $2.5k.

Greenlane resident Jared has purchased a 14 Day Half Share and has already booked up seven day’s fun on the Hauraki Gulf this January.

Through our email marketing system, Aarron could see that Jared has opened the email campaign a number of times and clicked on a link to learn more about the offering. And there are more hot leads just like Jared identified in the system for Aarron to pursue over the coming days.

In case anyone needs reminding that contemporary digital design should be mobile-first, then here’s this nugget of statistical gold: Jared was one of the 60+ per cent who was looking at this email campaign on a mobile device.

Email Marketing ROI

This campaign was the first email marketing effort for Jetshare. As such there were, of course, some set up costs as our design team built the HTML template and designed the initial campaign.

Even with that outlay factored in, the ROI on this campaign is still in excess of 380% with that one sale to Jetshare’snewest summer thrill seeker.

Looking ahead, Aarron can be self-sufficient in sending email marketing campaigns and therefore trim the cost right back to bare bones. To send this email campaign to 122 leads was less than $30.

For those who haven’t done the math, the ROI for Jetshare’s next email marketing campaign – should Aarron secure one more sale of their mid-range 14 Day Half Share – would be in excess of 8000%!

I’ll tell you one thing for free: Aarron is not asking “Is email marketing still relevant?”

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Get Your SEO House In Order

You’ve read many SEO blogs telling you that “content is king”. It’s a well-worn cliché because it’s true. Rather than rehash old content, in this post, we’ll delve into a real-world example that shows how we took a website from nowhere to number 1.

We'll demonstrate how content affects SEO.  Hopefully by the end, why content is king will be perfectly clear.

Content: The SEO Strategy That Defies The Laws Of Physics

SEO is an ongoing effort. For anyone who’s hoping they can “set and forget” their website and set the SEO world on fire, this may shatter your illusions.

While it's absolutely important to get your on-page SEO fundamentals right, it doesn’t end there. For real SEO cut-through, you need to generate regular posts that support your core products and services in order to give weight to your most important subject matter.

To explain that “laws of physics” reference: it’s this weight that helps raise your website to the top of search engine rankings.

Your SEO House

Let’s imagine that SEO is like building a house. Picture this:

Your website provides the foundation of your SEO house

Your Product and Service pages are the pillars – the main structures that tell the world what you’re about

Then you have your blog posts. This is the fine-grain detail that connects to and strengthens your pillars

The roof represents your customers. But that’s a story for another post!

Internet marketing giant Hubspot has termed this strategy “pillar and post”.

Posts could be:

A spotlight on a particular feature of your product

A deep-dive into one core benefit of your service

A case study that shows your product and service in action for a client

Like building a house, building your SEO with content does take time. But it works.

The Real World SEO Example

We promised to demonstrate how it works in the real world. Enter Carr Group: a New Zealand company playing and winning in the global market. Carr Group has forged a strong reputation for its wholesale supply of market-leading products and materials across a range of industry sectors.

Carr Group first approached Hart Design to reinvigorate their brand and their website.

The website provides a strong SEO foundation. It features sound pillar pages that present their products to the market. These pages have had our standard SEO treatment applied.

And with that foundation established, our attention has turned to those fine-grained posts.

Talk About It

If you don’t talk about it, how does anyone know you do it? That’s human visitors and Googlebot we’re talking about.

Among many other things, Carr Group supply premium print media consumables to Australasian digital printers. One of their offerings is a PVC mesh product that is used for digitally printed advertising around construction site fencing and scaffolding.

While the website did showcase their PVC Mesh product, nowhere did it mention that the product is available in a fire-resistant option. This is an important feature that has come under the spotlight recently following a number of construction site fires in Sydney’s CBD.

And because they didn’t mention it, unsurprisingly they didn’t rank anywhere for searches related to “fire retardant pvcmesh”.

For Carr Group this was a perfect test case to see how content could affect their SEO.

For Hart Design, it was a perfect test case where we could showcase our talent for SEO content writing.

“We’re salespeople, not marketers,” they said

No problem, that’s where we step in. Carr Group supplied us with a brief press release that their sales guys had written. It mentioned that PVC mesh had been in the spotlight recently with regards to its fire retardancy, and detailed their solution to the problem.

This 200-word press release and a quick chat with Tim from Carr Group is all we needed. From there we were able to whip this up into a unique 900-word, keyword-rich post all about the subject.

From Nowhere to No. 1

We’ve been able to prove the point: a solid foundation alone – i.e. the “set it and forget it” method – is not enough.

The proof is in the numbers. Following the launch of this new post, you can now find carrgroup.co.nz on page one of Google search results for all targeted keywords for this subject.

More excitingly, the pillar page has also shot up the page rankings for the broader term of “print media wholesale”. You’ll now find their website ranked number 1 on page 1 for this search phrase. Prior to this post going live, the pillar page was languishing on page 4 for the same keyword.

More Weight

The task now is to continue the momentum.

We’ve plugged an SEO hole with this one exposè of Carr Print Media’s fire retardant properties. The exciting thing is that there are so many more product features, benefits to promote and client success stories to talk about.

Have you got your SEO house in order? We can help with that.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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How Digital Marketing Works for Diamond Air

Diamond Air install heat pumps and home ventilation systems for homeowners across the Bay of Plenty. They use one of our Digital Marketing plans as their main marketing tool.

The numbers show that 86% of leads generated from their enquiry form have come from a web search.

We also know that lifestyle is important for business owner Rory Dixon, and that he’s operating year-round at his targeted capacity. Rory is revelling in that golden work-life balance where he can choose to turn away less-than-ideal work if he so chooses.

So we can say with confidence that Digital Marketing is working for Diamond Air.

Let’s Take A Look At The Work We’re Doing

As a small business, Diamond Air is at the smaller end of our Digital Marketing scale yet we manage to pump out a meaningful body of work each month.

Our efforts that directly influence their Google rankings and ultimately their bottom line.

Over the past two years, organic traffic – that is, people coming via web searches, and excluding Google Ad clicks – makes up 68% of all traffic visiting diamondair.co.nz.

For Diamond Air, it’s a collaborative effort comprised of:

Regularly changing special offers

Offers are promoted on their website and Facebook page

Google Ad campaign

General website updates and maintenance

Regular blog posts that showcase the work that Diamond Air is doing

The SEO Juice Is In The Regular Content Updates

Take a look at Diamond Air’s Showcase page to see how a little bit of content goes a long way. Without doing this work, their rankings would not be so rosy. Truth.

Google loves regular, unique content. It helps Googlebot to understand what you’re about. The better you explain yourself, the better equipped Googlebot is to rank you higher.

It really is that simple.

Minimal Input, Maximum Output

With Diamond Air’s smaller Digital Marketing plan, we’re reliant on Rory to provide us with a few details each month. Their input is minimal but critical. Rory will tell us:

Which heat pump units are to be promoted and for how much

A very short brief and a few snaps of heat pump installations or repairs they’ve carried out recently

With this our team will:

Generate visuals to be used on the website and in social media

Take Rory’s notes and rewrite them into keyword rich articles to be loaded as search engine optimised Showcase articles

We also:

Maintain a small Google Ads campaign

Provide a sounding board for general SEO and marketing ideas

Action any other website updates as required

Have provided graphic design and print services to promote their Home Ventilation offering

A Little Goes A Long Way

The takeaway from this Digital Marketing story is that a little action goes a long way. Doing something is certainly better than doing nothing.

The secret in the sauce is that the action happens regularly, and keeps on happening. We do a little bit each month, and it adds up to online marketing success.

By maintaining this regular and recurring digital marketing programme, Diamond Air has seen their website traffic for June 2018 almost double that of the same month in the previous year. The increase in traffic across the past 12 months is also hovering around the +80% mark.

We know that to do nothing is to gain nothing. So be like Diamond Air and start your Digital Marketing journey small. Our service can grow as you do. Are you ready to get started?

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Putting the Plan Back Into Plants

The Plant People have stories to tell. Our Digital Marketing Plans are designed to extract stories from businesses and share them with the world. Because, as we know, it is by talking about the work that connects you with new business.

Offering much more than just plants, their business spans 10 divisions, covering everything from earthmoving to landscaping, from contract mowing to golf course maintenance and from large-scale contract growing to indoor plant hire.

The Plant People contract to some of New Zealand’s biggest players in the development game. Over more than 30 years The Plant People have built up a vast portfolio of interesting, creative landscaping and construction projects.

Trouble is, outside of their four walls and dedicated client following, no-one knows about these wonderful examples of what The Plant People are capable of.

Hart Design has a plan to rectify this and ensure that from now on, more people will know about The Plant People and what they can do.

Having launched a new website by Hart Design in July, we’ve signed The Plant People on to our Pro Digital Marketing Plan. This allows us to generate one feature-rich showcase of their work every month. We do everything from on-location photography to SEO content writing and online marketing.

We’ve mapped out the first six months of their plan in advance. All we require from The Plant People is a time and a place for us to shoot stills and even drone footage. We’ll need a little background info for the accompanying story.

And with that, our team is busy as bees producing highly optimised content for their website.

Our SEO content writers have a talent for taking a few drops of information and whipping it up into an engaging article. The work is published on their website and spread across social media channels and email marketing.

Telling Your Story Is SEO Gold Dust

Month #1 of The Plant People’s Plan was to showcase the playground construction project they undertook for Fletcher Living’s Totara heights residential subdivision.

With the article published and optimised for SEO, you will find their website on page 1* for “playground construction”. Prior to showcasing this work, The Plant People website wasn’t visible for this search term at all.

(Rankings checked on September 6, 2018).

We’ll Print It, Too

As an extension to the Plan, we’re also creating A3 Z-fold flyers for each article. Hart Design has the capabilities to provide graphic design and digital printing service in-house.

In doing so, over time, The Plant People will compile a library of printed material that showcases their capabilities. So when their sales team has a meeting with a new prospect, they can cherry-pick the relevant flyers to leave with them.

Now that’s a whole lot of mileage out of one story.

Fertile SEO Ground

For us, as digital marketers, The Plant People is a fertile bed for growing stories. We know that by harnessing these stories we can vastly improve their search engine visibility.

As the articles build up over time, we’ll eventually cover the length and breadth of The Plant People’s service offerings. And by doing so, put them in the frame for when people are searching for their next commercial landscaping partner.

Do you have stories to tell? We’d love to help you improve your search engine visibility, too.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Great Ways To Use Social Media To Market Your Business

Social media: websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to take part in social networking.

Social media marketing is a form of marketing on the web that uses various social media platforms, helping you to get your content out to the world. SMM includes the sharing of your content, pictures and videos for marketing purposes.

If you own a small business and are not harnessing the marketing advantages of social media, now is the time to start. You might think there are more important things in your business to focus on, yet social media should definitely be a top priority. No matter what business you’re in, chances are your customers are online.

According to a report in 2017 published by Social Media Examiner, the top benefits of SMM were to increase traffic to your website and secondly to gain exposure. If the idea of using social media is a little bit overwhelming and you don’t know where to start – don’t worry! We’re going to be talking about highly effective ways to use social media to market your own business.

Get Visual

Did you know that photos on Facebook get more engagement? Even adding images to your LinkedIn posts will give you a higher engagement rate. Furthermore, it’s not a coincidence that three of the newer social networks, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat are based solely on images. If you’re only posting written updates, well that’s a start! But if you want to really engage with your followers, it’s time you start leveraging the visual aspect of social media.

Graphics, GIFs, memes and videos – if it looks good and it's relevant to your brand or business, get sharing. Don’t just share for the sake of sharing though. Pay attention to ensure it’s relevant, otherwise the visual will just seem out of place and will confuse your followers. If someone who has never heard of your brand visits your social page, will they know what you do based on the visuals you share? This is a great question to ask yourself each time you post.

Headlines Matter

Your content is great, but are you story titles grabbing attention in social media circles? If not you either need to:

Conjure up more engaging titles that help your posts get more clicks

Create new titles specifically for sharing on social media

You need to be posting your content more than once. Create multiple titles, and perform A/B testing. Use a tool like CoSchedule to help you research effective titles for the same type of content per social network.

Customise Content for the Social Media Platform

Every social media avenue has a different purpose, so make sure you’re tapping into their individual features. This includes paying attention to the header, picture and content of whatever it is you’re sharing. Every other marketer and business on social media is looking to promote their content over yours, so the more optimised your post is for the social media platform you’re using, the more effective your post is going to be.

For example, if you’re posting to Instagram, your priority will be finding a stand-out image. Your caption is also important, but the image will be what first grabs a user’s attention. Or if you’re posting to Twitter, having a humorous or cleverly written post will be your main priority. Adding a picture is also effective, but it’s the words you want to focus on.

Ask your Followers Questions

While social media is a great way to promote your services or products, it is also important you don’t just spam followers with content that is all about ‘you’. Try and make some of the content about ‘them’ and drive your followers to communicate with you. All you need to do is ask your followers questions or ask them to provide feedback. Social media was made for people, not for businesses. So think about how you can tap into the human connection aspect of social media when marketing your business. Asking questions is great for when you want to grab the attention of your followers as it fosters a closer connection between them and your brand.

Find the Right Time to Share

While this may be stating the obvious, so many marketers often overlook the simple things such as sharing at the right time. If you want maximum engagement with what you’re sharing, then your post needs to be reaching as many social media users as possible. How do you do that? By posting when your followers are most active. By using the analytics which is built into most social media platforms (you can also use third-party social media tools such as Hubspot), you can see things like the time and day when your followers are most likely to engage with your content, and what content they are most likely to engage with.

From this data, you can create a posting schedule to make sure you are posting at the right time each day. It’s important to remember that different social media platforms have different peak times for posting. When you first try to figure out the best time to post, it may take a bit of trial and error, but you’ll eventually find the right time to post for optimal engagement.

Post Multiple Times

Numerous data studies suggest you will be more effective in promoting the same content multiple times on social media. Use multiple images and multiple headlines for your content. This way you're talking to your followers without them knowing you’re reposting the same content. Your followers don’t see most of your posts on any given day. By posting multiple times a day you are making sure your followers at least have a chance to see and read your content.

Go Deep, Not Broad

When looking at social media, companies need to aim deep and not broad. You're better off being a master of one or two platforms than stumble along in a great many. Social platforms give you the opportunity to show your expertise and provide an avenue for two way discussion, such as through blogs, video and podcasting.

Advertise

If you’re yet to try advertising on social media, there’s no time like the present. When you advertise on social media, you are promoting your content and business to a micro-targeted audience of your choice. From age to location and interests, you can find your ideal client and advertise right to them. This will guarantee you visibility from a relevant audience, which is more likely to provide you with a new fan, rather than targeting someone who isn’t interested in what you sell or offer at all.

Join the conversation

Have you joined the conversation yet? Searching relevant hashtags or joining communities on social media is a highly effective way to market your business. While you can’t jump into the conversation with “buy from me!”, What you can do is raise awareness of your brand. When joining conversations, you’re mostly there to add insight and value. It’s about the community, not about you. Of course, you can share and promote yourself every once in a while, but primarily you should be sharing content that interests the people in the communities so that when you do have something to promote, they will be more likely to engage and be interested in what you have to say.

What’s Next

Social media has to be the most powerful tool in your marketing bag for getting your content in front of people; In saying that, most social media marketers don't get it right and fall short of maximising its potential. Utilise one or a number of these ways to promote your content, and you’ll notice a huge rise in your traffic numbers.

Social media is often based on trial and error, but once you find the right combination, the rewards far outweigh the time you spent trying to make it work!

Reach out to our creative web design Auckland team today, request a consultation and learn how we can help your company improve its local SMM.

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Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Inbound Marketing - The Way To Success

I can't think of a single area in a business today that can't be outsourced, and that includes your web design projects. Stop and think about how much you depend on outsourced work right now. I bet you outsource your legal and probably your accounting work, right? There are a lot of businesses, across hundreds of industries that depend on outsourcing every day; however, it still remains difficult for a lot of business owners to take the time and think through the many advantages of outsourcing their web and marketing projects.

If marketing is not a real strong point for your company, you should be outsourcing this to a vibrant team of creative and talented marketing professionals, this way you will get the required ROI while increasing your profitability. Well, that's the idea anyway.

We'll delve in and see just what it really takes to develop an internal team and look more closely into the very reasons why we think that outsourcing your marketing is the smartest and by far the shortest way to to the top.

People

Keep your marketing in-house: Think about the high cost of acquiring staff and time involved in the onboarding process. Let's face it, if you’re not a blue chip corporate, it's going to be hard finding talent team members for your business. In the end, you're going to end up putting up with average team members that will go to work for an acceptable pay cheque and in return will create less than adequate results.

Every business owner will tell you that recruiting and training a group is a huge undertaking and requires deep pockets. That's not to mention, the high risk that making bad hires possibly has. Budget in the time and costs needed to bring on and mould a group that is capable of delivering quality projects time and again while meeting deadlines, well, let's just say that your chances are not high.

Outsourcing Your Marketing Team

Firstly, if you do outsource your marketing, you're not going to incur the high costs of hiring team members and making sure they're always busy. A well-chosen and talented marketing partner is going to provide a ready-made team of creatives who are set to go on your marketing campaigns. By outsourcing, you’ll gain the benefits from a marketing team that aligns marketing and sales campaigns to produce goals that drive revenue.

Internal marketing teams get tied down creating collateral that's only used a mere 25 per cent of the time, mainly due to the fact it's not really that relevant. And yet, 75 per cent of the opportunities that go begging could be completely avoided if only people had the right internal collateral.

Having An Internal Team

If we take a close look at companies that rely on internal marketing efforts: We'll see that 90 per cent of those businesses that have their sales and marketing teams on different pages have a badly managed CRM. The 10 per cent of businesses that have well-honed systems turn to outsourced teams to take care of them and even then don't see a positive return on their efforts.

Outsourcing For Better Business Systems

Any marketing processes are only as good as the team members that are leading them. By outsourcing marketing, you’ll have players that have a deep understanding of marketing optimisation and CRM management. A well-honed marketing team will lead from the front and be able to implement a strong programme that works in with your budget and goals for the future.

If you have chosen to develop an internal marketing machine, the first thing you do is bring onboard HubSpot or other marketing tools, and you then employ a small team of marketing guns to start and run the machine. They learn all the software online and they're ready to go - right?

What makes a great marketing team so successful are the processes they have in place. Without a deep understanding of how to get the best from these tools to prospect, engage and nurture in the proper order, your company’s marketing programme cannot fly.

Outsourcing Marketing Processes

A well-groomed marketing team can increase revenue, that's a given. Outsourced marketing teams specialise in a process: creating and developing campaigns through revenue-producing activities that fit within your allocated budget to attract new prospects and through the buyer's journey convert them into happy customers. Beginning at the very top of the sales funnel right through to the bottom, an outsourced marketing team will target on leads, drive traffic, convert them into leads, and finally nurture prospects to close.

Take a look at your current marketing costs as they compare to your revenue stream. If you’re not happy, then outsourcing your marketing may be the right choice for your business. Reach out to our creative web design Auckland team today, talk to us about how outsourcing your marketing can help your business achieve the results you desire.

Creative Agency East Auckland

Searching for web design East Auckland? If you’ve already tried an East Auckland web designer and wished for a more creative and customised website design, try working with Hart Design. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers offer contemporary website design, logo design and marketing experience for your business.

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Is Inbound Marketing For You?

I think it's fair to say that most of us have learned to market and gain clients by being able to take the attention of our prospects away from our competitors, by having them pay more attention to our marketing message and for them to take action in our favour. If we’re looking at marketing in general, I think most of you who have been responsible for bringing in new projects will agree – it’s getting harder.

And maybe instead of saying it’s getting harder, we can say “traditional” marketing is getting harder. These notes might ring true to what you’re experiencing in the office now. Networking events are not as fruitful as they once were. They are filled with non-clients, non-referrals, competitors, and so on.

It’s getting harder to have face time with those decision makers in companies, and I’m talking about actual meetings, not through an app. It actually requires the dedication of a full-time person – not someone who is already balancing a hundred things on their to-do list, to just add this to the mix.

Both young and small companies seem to have it harder than those who have been around for a while. Then we take a look at some statistics that further backs up this mindset:

86% of people skip tv ads

91% have unsubscribed from emails

44% of direct mail is never opened

What this is showing us is that we, as a society, are being selective about what channels we allow to come in. In a world where technology changes at a rapid speed, here’s what we know for certain: It’s easier than ever to turn off messages and advertising if you don’t want to see it.

Paying the extra $2.99 for an ad-free app is a no brainer

We go online to get our news without having to buy printed publications

We work our social media feeds to ignore ads

We pay for Sky TV, or use our DVRs, so we can avoid commercials

We listen to music on Spotify, so we don’t have to listen to radio ads

We are constantly working to find ways to narrow our input and content and to do that we need to start with all outbound marketing and advertising.

People used to love marketing. What happened?

The answer is simple: We as humans have changed. In the 90s, office hours were centred on a standard work day. It gradually gets longer over time, but we still worked in a cubicle like most.

Now, if you’re like me, the day never ends. I was laying in bed last night at 10:30 responding to emails I didn’t have the time to earlier that day. We aren’t sitting in an office anymore, having people who want to sell us stuff schedule time with us to show us their new products or service.

Why? because we look things up ourselves. When you have a question or are looking for something specific, where’s the first place you go? Google. Who picks up yellow pages? What the hell is that anymore anyway?

Essentially this boils down to the fact that the client – or customer, or consumer – is in complete control of this situation. We as consumers can shut a channel off that’s reaching out to us. We can make all that marketing someone is doing and spending tonnes of money and time on very quickly go away.

To attract our ideal clients, we have to provide them with something they will LOVE.

This process, my friends, is called Inbound Marketing.

Instead of buying ad space (billboards, magazines, newspapers, online ads, etc.), buying email lists, or cold calling, inbound marketing focuses on creating remarkable content that pulls people toward your website where they can learn more about what you sell on their own time.

The inbound methodology has four main stages.

1. Attract

It’s centred around bringing people to your company through content creation, social media, blogs, videos, etc. You want to attract those ideal clients by creating content that is valuable and easy to find. What kind of pain points do your customers have? What kind of solutions do you offer to them? How can you help them by telling YOUR story?

2. Convert

Conversion happens when we allow those ideal clients to exchange their information, like maybe just their name and email, for a free piece of valuable content, like a downloadable form, or a checklist, or a webinar.

3. Close

This is centred on lead nurturing techniques to help bring people further through the buyer’s journey to becoming an actual client.

4. Delight

Is all about helping those in your pipeline become promoters FOR you.

To run effective inbound marketing campaigns for ourselves and our clients, we use a software called HubSpot.

If you are looking for something new to try for your own business, inbound marketing is the way to go. Don’t overlook it. It will change the way your company generates leads.

If you are excited to learn more about how Inbound Marketing can work for you and your business, reach out to our creative Inbound Marketing team today.

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Web design - Content That Help Your Company Generate More Leads

Your business has been using digital marketing tactics to increase traffic to your website. And the good news is, it’s working!

However, There's a downside to this, with all those new visitors, you would think they would be converting to leads, but they're not. You managed to get them to your site, but you failed to capture any of their information before they left, and that's not a good thing.

If your company has a product or service that you want people to buy, your site has to do a lot better.

So, the question is, how do you get all that traffic to your website to part with their valuable information? Once you are armed with their information to do become leads that you can nurture for even more valuable information. The answer to this is with the age-old principle of reciprocity.

Looking at the principles that marketers can leverage, reciprocity is one of the most powerful. People tend to feel uneasy about taking something without giving anything in return… and they’ll do pretty much anything to alleviate that feeling of discomfort. And, that’s where the smart content marketer sees their queue.

To engage the principle of reciprocity implements something called a lead magnet. This can easily be defined as, “an irresistible bribe offering a huge amount of value to a prospect in return for their contact information.”

Entice them with valuable content in exchange for their contact information

Your not just some strange entity scrapping for information – you need to be the source of the information they want. And, because reciprocity drives so many of us, site visitors will feel relaxed about passing on their contact details. After all, you’ve given them something (or will give them something) of value.

In saying this, don’t ask for too much information in round one. Rule of thumb is that the more valuable the offer, the more information you can ask for. Keep that in mind so you don’t scare people away.

3 examples of valuable content offerings:

1. Checklists

Checklists are great for breaking down a complex or daunting task. Let’s say you’re a printing company. Your ideal customer is a small to medium sized company with a need to print short run catalogues on a regular basis. You could publish a checklist that walks your potential customer through the process of setting up a template to produce imposed print-ready PDF's to save time and pre-press costs.

A checklist, while valuable, is not as deep as other types of content. So, the form people need to fill out should only require fields for their names and email addresses.

2. How-to Guides

How-to guides are perfect for the Consideration Stage of the Buyer’s Journey. According to HubSpot, at this point, the customer has defined their problem and is on the search for ways to fix it.

For this example, let’s pretend you own a chain of hardware stores. Your buyer persona is Martin. He’s a middle-aged homeowner who likes to do home improvement projects on his own.  A valuable piece of content for Martin would be a DIY step-by-step guide on how to refinish kitchen cabinets.

This lead magnet offers the customer more value to your form can request more information, like their phone number or city address.

3. Toolkits

The best way to describe Toolkits is to say that they’re a digital compilation of a bunch of resources your potential client may need. They’re great for establishing your expertise and trustworthiness.

Say you’re a lawyer that specializes in commercial mortgages. Your toolkit could be “The Commercial Property Buying Toolkit: Everything You Need to Know to Buy a Commercial Property in 2017.” Because of the toolkit’s high value, you can qualify your leads even more on the download form. Try asking for their address, website link, how they came across your website, etc.

There are many ways to create irresistible content for your potential customers.

If you suspect that your website is not returning the ROI you're looking for, get in touch with us. We are a web design Auckland agency and look forward to working with you on your next website design project!

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Significance of Bounce Rate & How To Improve It

Cast your mind back to your childhood, and it would conjure up fond and exciting memories of bouncing a ball without a real strategy, but merely for the sheer delight and fun of it.

However, in the context of web metrics, it constitutes something entirely different. Technical jargon sometimes has the best of us feeling overwhelmed. Don’t fret it can be a little tricky grasping how to calculate a bounce in Analytics. Help is at hand. The team at Hart Design have put together a blueprint to assist you in understanding what a bounce rate is and differentiate what is not and how to improve it.

What’s Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of single web sessions on your site. It relates to the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the entrance page without viewing any other pages. They don’t access any other internal links nor click on the drop-down menu. In effect, they don’t require browsing any other pages due to finding what they want or not finding what they want, as such. So, no, your website bounce rate is different from your email bounce rate.

The bounce rate is often mistaken for the exit rate. There is a clear distinction between the two. Bounce rate is a metric that measures single hits, whereby people land on your web page and navigate away from your site without viewing any other pages.

It might be a wee bit tricky to wrap your head around what exit rates are. So, what precisely are exit rates? Exit rates comprise the percentage of people who exit your website on a particular page. However, it might not be the only page they viewed on your site. The page from which they exited might be the last in a succession of visits (page views) on your website design.

Differentiating between Bounce Rates and Exit Rates

To distinguish between bounce rates and exit rates, let’s look at an example:

If we measure the bounce rates and exit rates for a thank you page, a high bounce rate would be cause for concern. It indicates that people are entering the thank you page only and then leaving without engagement. It would be of even more concern if they did not fill out a form to hit it, which results in a lack of conversions.

In this instance, a high exit rate would not ring alarm bells. It signifies that this page is the last in succession of visits (page views). People who exited from that page were redirected to that page after filling out a form on your landing page, downloaded the offer of an e-book, video, etc., and left as they got what they wanted, the supply of a gift.

Bear in mind that we are creating a possible chain of events. The gift offers can vary based on page metrics.

How to Improve Bounce Rates

Let’s look at how we can improve bounce rates now that you have learned more about what a bounce rate is.

Overall, high bounce rates are crucial in determining how your entrance pages perform in comparison to visitor expectations. Your page might not be usable and unrelated to visitor expectations. Do not make changes to amp engagement until you have carefully followed the steps you need to take before redesigning your web page.

It is vital to note that bounce rates indicate that someone has hit your web page and exited without viewing other pages on your site. It does not always provide information on whether it met their expectations or not. You need to explore the page metrics and other aspects of your web presence to consider before optimising your page. Below is the framework of these steps:

1. Establish a mobile-friendly website

More traffic and searches online are initiated on mobile devices rather than desktops. Therefore, it is a priority that your website is mobile-friendly; that your site does not take forever to download. Not only should your site deliver an engaging experience it should be easy to navigate too. Mobile users are more likely to abandon your website if the content is difficult to read.

Videos foster interactivity, engagement and are valuable when explaining complex topics and presenting it in a way that it is easy to digest. Clients would prefer watching a video about a product rather reading about it. Creating videos that are brief and to the point, conveying the necessary elements are more conducive to mobile users. These refinements are specifically for video usage.

Look at the mobile experience for users as a whole when examining and putting these contingencies in place.

2. Review your bounce rate that emanates from different sources

On occasion, the sources driving traffic to a particular page might have a bearing on its bounce rate.

If for example, you have an exceptionally high bounce rate for visitors arriving from social media it might be worth looking at the message linked with the content you are conveying. It might be useful to have a more strategic approach to ensure that links direct you to related pages or posts. Irrespective of the source it has to relate to visitor expectations.

3. Avoid mistakes that could affect the user experience

Full-screen pop-ups and half-screen pop-ups are annoying and painful when you are trying to read and have to close pop-up windows before the content is fully visible. Google has also been clamping down on Pop-up ads in a bid to make the users’ experience of its search a positive one.

You want to entice your visitors to your page and have them remain long enough so as to nurture them to convert. According to Nielsen’s study, ads that relate to the content the user is interested in won’t hurt. For example, placing ads between content is more permissible. Avoid those that will distract and disrupt the user experience and result in them abandoning your site.

4. Best Keywords

Keyword intent should relate to your content to make sure that organic visitors have access to what they want.

For example, when someone is searching for “rugby,” are they interested in learning more about rugby, do they want to watch rugby or participate in rugby? But if someone is using the query, What rugby clubs are there in Pakuranga?”, they most likely want to take part in rugby or watch rugby rather learning more about the game.

When you assess the keywords your page is ranking for; it is imperative that they are aligned with the actual content. Now you can align your web pages in groups of topic clusters. That way you can manage and entice organic traffic and provide a better user experience.

In conclusion, bounce rates are the hot topic in marketing – therefore, interesting and fascinating. When you explore bounce rates, be sure to look at it in its entirety. Bounce rates can help you determine how well your landing pages are performing, how long visitors remain on your site, where they arrive from and what devices they are using. You can glean insights from page metrics and optimise your landing pages to ensure positive user experience and ensure higher conversion rates.

Last but not least, there is no one sure fire way of improving bounce rates, but understanding it and how they assist with the optimisation process leads to a significant website.

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Why Your Decade Old Website Design Is Costing You A Fortune

We can think of many things that can be classified as ‘oldie but goldie’. An exquisite bottle of cellared wine, perhaps, or that rustic and charming bach where you spend your yearly summer vacations. A website, however, is certainly not one of them. Our team has been active in the web design Auckland scene for over twenty years and we are all too familiar with the dangers of not keeping up with the times. Here are 5 reasons why an outdated website design could be costing your business a fortune.

1. Different devices, different needs.

Your decade-old website design might have served its purpose well back when Kiwis accessed the Internet using only desktops. However, the rising popularity of connected mobile devices coupled with a steady decline in desktop usage signals a need for companies to cater to on-the-go consumers.

According to recent consumer research conducted by Nielsen New Zealand, about two-thirds of Kiwis regularly consume digital content via a smartphone. If your website cannot be properly viewed on mobile devices of varying screen sizes, you could be losing potential customers right now as you read this.

It is time to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your current website. Is the design responsive such that it adapts to different screen sizes? Is the content legible or does it spill over beyond the screen? Is it easy to navigate or does it take you on a tiki-tour? Has your website been optimised to load quickly on slower data connections?

These are just some of the preliminary questions you should be asking. If you would like a more comprehensive strategy for a website redesign, feel free to give us a bell. Our experienced web design Auckland team will set you on the right path towards a brand new website that generates business for you.

2. As web design trends change, so do consumers’ expectations.

Consumers today do not simply expect to find useful products and services online. Looks also matter a great deal. Modern consumers expect their favourite brands to be trendy because that would make them trendy by association.

It is important that your website design keeps up with the latest trends in the industry. Antiquated website design could hurt your business by scaring away trend-seeking consumers or worse yet, by unintentionally giving off the impression that your business is no longer active.

3. Irrelevant copy and outdated images can hurt your brand.

As your online presence grows, your brand has to evolve. If your website consists of the same copy and images from a decade ago, your brand runs the risk of becoming irrelevant and unable to relate to present-day consumers. Your business will inevitably suffer if you fail to engage new customers.

To illustrate, New Zealand Inland Revenue’s What’s Tax website uses the example of buying an MP3 player to explain the concept of GST. It works for this purpose but you must admit that it hardly is the most relatable example. Those who had once bought an MP3 player have since moved on to iPhones and Spotify while their kids have no idea what an MP3 player even is.

Fortunately for the IRD, government institutions are not known (or expected) to be trendsetters when it comes to website design. We might shrug it off or joke about it as another instance of the government being slightly out of touch with reality.

Consumer brands, on the other hand, are not given such leeway. Having outdated copy on your website is equivalent to offering customer support only by snail mail, a quaint feature that might raise a chuckle or two from potential customers before they pass your brand over for the next email-friendly one.

4. Old school SEO practices can backfire and decrease your website’s ranking.

What makes SEO such a challenging and exciting industry is the fact that Google is constantly rolling out updates to its search engine algorithms. Old school SEO methods that were once tried-and-true may no longer be effective. In fact, your website could even be penalised for the continued use of some of these practices. If your website design has not had an overhaul in ages, it could actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts.

Not long ago, Google has decided to favour mobile-friendly websites by boosting their rankings in search results. This is further evidence as to why an outdated website can be dangerous for your business. Again, if your website design does not adapt to different devices, now is a great time to drop us a line!

Stuffing heaps of keywords on a web page is a classic SEO technique that now does more harm to your business than it does good. Search engines have become a lot more intelligent and are now capable of filtering out pages spammed with multiple keywords. Producing quality content is the way to go and if your business needs a boost in this department, Hart Design will work with you to gain more leads with results-driven SEO.

5. It can be difficult and costly to maintain an outdated website.

The costs of having a dated website could be hidden from plain sight. Similar to web design and SEO, web development is another industry that goes through rapid and radical changes on a periodic basis. If your website fails to abide by recent web standards or use the latest technologies, its performance could be undermined and its security compromised.

Newer web technologies help to streamline the development process and to ensure that websites run smoothly. Older websites can, therefore, feel clunky to use and it is not uncommon for them to break ever so often. This could become a real financial burden on your business due to the costs of repeatedly fixing the website on top of the loss of customers during downtime.

Furthermore, many of the tools used to build older websites are no longer supported. If left in place, they become vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to hijack a website. Recovering a hacked website is a tedious and expensive process. Your brand could also take a hit if your customers come to believe that their data and privacy are not protected.

If you suspect that your website has become a dinosaur and that you might be incurring unnecessary costs due to any of the reasons above, get in touch with us. We are a web design Auckland agency and look forward to working with you on your next website design project!

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How To Keep Your SEO Content Working

Google’s RankBrain is established as the third most significant ranking factor for search results. It begs the question; how does Rankbrain impact SEO strategies in the foreseeable future and beyond?

Google launched its revolutionary machine-learning AI system at the beginning of 2015.  A system used worldwide. It aids Google in processing never-before-seen queries, ambiguous queries and yields more relevant search results for users.

In effect, RankBrain is essentially a tool for refining queries. However, Google indicated that RankBrain is also an important ranking signal.

Implications of how to undertake content marketing strategies for RankBrain

Google uses more than 200 different ranking factors which constitute ranking algorithm. RankBrain being the third most significant factor transforms the way it understands unknown and more complex search queries. Therefore, more engagement by users, as they will find relevant topics irrespective of whether they typed in a long query or used natural language.

So, how do we as content marketers keep abreast? We need to evaluate how Google’s current search engine algorithm operates in 2016 and stay informed of Google’s present state.

Should we care about Google’s Newest Algorithm?

Statistics indicate that Google leads the search share volume worldwide, hovering around 63% of the desktop share overtaken by 94% of mobile share in July 2016.

We have heard of Google’s numerous algorithm updates over the years, names like Pirate, Pigeon, Penguin, Panda come to mind. Which one is of importance now?

Google announced its new Hummingbird algorithm update, and it is estimated to affect 90% of search queries, according to Link-Assitant.Com.  However, Google’s revolutionary machine-learning AI confirmed October 2015 brought about changes and will continue to evolve, altering the world of SEO, and is the one we need to keep updated on.

How RankBrain affects Content Marketing

SEO is important and determines how effective our inbound marketing is, therefore, relying on strategic content marketing, for a start. Distributing content established on our site’s ranking signals for Google, namely;

New content

Keywords

Linkbacks

UX metrics

Click through rates

The signals mentioned above have verifiably been crucial to ramping up rankings.  However, RankBrain is a game changer.

Most SEO is reliant on high-quality, in-depth content that has the users in mind.

Optimising for Google Presently and in the Future

Let’s explore the ranking factors mentioned above and how to adapt your content marketing strategies accordingly.

Keywords

Aim to use natural language and content that targets a broad range of audiences. Use keywords to give you an idea of the topic. More importantly, you need to understand and identify what the users are looking for and provide content that is relevant to their search.

Keywords are still useful, and when you need to use them, perform a semantic keyword search. Search Engines have become more advanced and evolved over time, placing more emphasis on the meaning of words and their intent.

Inbound Links

Link building has evolved but is still crucial to SEO.  To earn valuable linkbacks ensure that you create high-quality content that is helpful.

Also, consider other link building strategies, like ‘natural link building’, by reaching out to bloggers, directories and other reliable sources for links to your content. Firstly, create content that is niche-focused specifically with your targeted audience in mind.  Once you have created, the content, identify outlets that could reap the benefits of sharing your content. There are numerous strategies for determining these outlets by networking and building relationships and so forth.

User Experience (UX)

Good user experience is crucial not only for conversion but ranking and SEO. Ensure that your title tag and meta description attracts the attention of the user and piques their interest.

Your website must be easy to navigate and be of benefit to your targeted audience. Be mindful of using links that are natural for the reader, so that it is beneficial to both SEO and the user.

Crawl Users

Marketers can ensure that Google crawls its web page or site correctly by putting some things in place. Be sure to use the proper status codes on your site. For instance use, 301 redirects as opposed to 302 redirects and they don’t command search engine crawlers that a page has moved.

Google has developed crawl error reports which assist you in identifying why Google was prevented from crawling properly.

You can take it a step further and block particular pages from being crawled by using robot txt. Every site has a crawl budget, for example, a login page does not need to rank. Hence, allows leeway in your budget for more important pages.

RankBrain will continue to evolve and gives content marketers the impetus to understand and get to know their target audience and refine their content and adapt accordingly.

Due to the new breakthrough development in AI, augmenting business strategies and important decision-making are limitless.

Get in touch with Hart Design today and our expert SEO Auckland team will optimise your website design and boost your conversion rates to no end.

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Your SEO Success Starts With Quality Content

Hart Design is more than just a web design Auckland company. We have available a series of complete online marketing packages, which includes a specialist Content Writing component. Our aim is to set you apart from your competition by offering a managed online marketing service – coupled with our SEO services NZ friendly websites; the foundation of our proven track record in Google rankings – our packages provides proven results in search engines and will ultimately generate more leads for your business.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, you may have heard the phrase “Content is King”. In today’s environment, quality, original content is a business’s most powerful marketing asset.

Never underestimate the intelligence of Google’s search robots “spiders”. You can no longer fool Google by simply using keywords and key phrases alone to get good search engine rankings. The introduction of Google’s new search algorithm diminished the value of simply using keywords in preference of more sophisticated ways of determining a website’s ratings.

This was to eradicate the high level of “keyword spam” that was infiltrating the web by sites filling their pages with (often) inappropriate keywords in order to push them up the rankings.

Google’s modern powerful anti-spam methods counteracted this by establishing a system that recognises not only keywords but also the quality of the content that is written on your website, ensuring that only high-quality, original content ranks well.

Therefore, in today’s climate, SEO no longer means filling your web page with keywords and keyphrases. They still have their place but they are no longer the high-value element in determining your website’s ranking. Well written, original content with engaging, valuable information is fundamental to your online marketing success.

For businesses to rank well in Google they need to offer content that is current and regularly updated, well-researched and newsworthy.

This has given rise to a new generation of credible Search Engine Optimisation companies – it is no longer the domain of “smoke and mirror” SEO operators. In New Zealand, Hart Design is leading the way with their top quality web design Auckland – built using correct website architecture, and providing the ongoing marketing support that is essential to climbing the Google ladder.

There’s no silver bullet to great SEO, that’s why Hart Design has developed our online marketing packages, where we will work in with you to provide frequent, quality copywriting to a professional standard, written to engage both your reader and Google’s search robots. Quality content will not only boost traffic to your website but connect with visitors in such a way that they will keep returning.

Ask us for our latest search engine ranking success stories.

Get in touch with Hart Design today and our expert SEO Auckland team will optimise your website design and boost your conversion rates to no end.

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How Much Of My Budget Should I Spend On Digital Marketing?

Like a fish out of water is an idiom that describes how you might feel as a business owner when it concerns digital marketing strategies and ideas. The colossal evolution of digital marketing requires companies to allocate a larger percentage of their budget to digital marketing if they want their business’ to grow and to promote their brand. It raises important questions.

Typing in Web Design Auckland is a start for most companies but how much should you be forking out on digital marketing in 2017? Is there a yardstick by which you can measure your business against your competitors? How do you keep abreast with the various strategies and ideas in the marketing industry? Essentially, it boils down to effective planning and budget.

Here are a few pointers to consider:

Maths Marketing

First and foremost, establish whether you know exactly what your budget is for the year. All too often, companies have no idea and are expecting their marketing agencies to come up with an answer.

You developed a digital plan, now for the strategy

At present maths is the driver behind modern marketing. It helps clients to measure marketing performance and how much they spend:

Start-up and new businesses:  Startups need to jack up before allocating money to marketing. New companies; those who are operating for one to five years, it is recommended that you use 12 to 20 per cent of your total revenue or estimated revenue on marketing.

Established businesses:  Those firms that have been operating for more than five years, and have a portion of the market as well as brand equity, we recommend allocating 6 to 12 per cent of their total revenue or estimated revenue.

Although it may seem to be a large percentage, do bear in mind that new and emerging brands attract new market share and establish brand recognition with a clientele that has no idea whatsoever, who they are. Hence, the high cost. As soon as the branding is determined and a part of the market is brand-conscious, that number decreases notably.

Chicken and Egg Problems

What is it? You have to develop your brand to generate income, but have no money to assist you in doing so. Can you identify with it? It is known as chicken and egg marketing. Rest assured, that to develop a brand you have to crack lots and lots of eggs. It is, therefore, imperative that established brands and startups alike are ably funded. In all likelihood, it might take more time and money than you initially expected. If you don’t have extra funds in your marketing kitty, ensure that you spend carefully and is fixed to particular outcomes. It is counterproductive to spend all your dollars on a project done incorrectly, and then having to redo it again. Nail it down, the first time.

Fear of Missing Out

What exactly is ‘fear of missing out marketing?’ It is a marketing phenomenon, whereby, you rely on hype and intensively promote your product/service to drive sales and engagement, namely;

Website Design

Branding

Advertising

Content

Social Media

Events

The cost and marketing techniques will vary considerably, depending on the service or product you offer. However, each of the above will take a sizeable chunk out of your budget.

What should you spend it on?

Firstly, take a look at past digital marketing endeavours you may have made. If it were successful then, it would be worth your while to invest in again. Secondly, look at current digital marketing strategies used by many businesses, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media and email marketing, as these look to be the most effective areas. Here are some of the investment aspects incorporated into their digital marketing budget.

E-mail – Generating leads can be utilised to produce a database of prospects you can contact via e-mail. E-mail marketing prevails, as it is still one of the most efficient ways of turning prospects into clients.

Mobile Marketing – An ever increasing amount of people are using their mobile phones or tablets to access the internet. Mobile marketing strategy enables you to reach users at any time or any place. Therefore, it is vital that your website is mobile friendly and also avert any penalties in search engine rankings if your site is not optimised for mobile access.

Do Research – The digital landscape is fast-paced and undergoes rapid changes. Make allowance in your budget for investigation and exploration of new and advanced technology and to keep in touch with your targeted clients.

Video – According to a report on ‘Wyzowl ‘ 91% of companies indicated that they plan to grow or maintain their spending on video marketing in 2017. The ‘Wyzowl’ report for 2016 shows that 83% of businesses who use explainer video on their homepage found it to be a useful tool. Video is a versatile marketing tool and permits you to be creative, and you can enjoy success in interacting with your customers.

Analytics – Analytics can be the source of valuable understanding by analysing your traffic; who, how they arrived at your website, the pages they frequent, providing you with relevant data to optimise marketing strategies.

Apps – Apps are another great tool you can utilise to create a more personal relationship with your customers. It helps to improve customer happiness. Hence they keep coming back. Design an app with intent and return on your investment.

It is pretty obvious that what remains on a budget is dependent on what is essential for the business. With the ever-changing trends and fluidity of data obtained from a study, what is applicable today might be out of date tomorrow.

Having said, that; here is a breakdown of the digital marketing budget of most businesses:

13% for Digital Advertising

12% for Content Marketing

12% for Website Development

The remaining 63% for the groundwork, which might comprise of appointing a manager, an agency, software, research, digital marketing, in-house training, etc.

Key points

Engaging your audience is pivotal in ensuring success in digital marketing.

Do your homework, get to know your targeted audience, your competitors and keep up to speed with the digital marketing world.

Ensure that you follow the steps to establishing your brand, in a quantifiable, strategic manner, so that you get value for your money.

Evaluate what was successful in the past and what was not. Adjust where necessary.

Do you want to get the most from your digital marketing budget? Contact us at Hart Design