SEO Agency in Brisbane

Our Story

Why We Do It This Way

One of the things that Brisbane SEO companies miss quite badly and it’s annoying when we see it is that they don’t really explain how an SEO campaign can work for your business. So you’ve got a business, you’re on a potential SEO company’s website, you’re looking for help, how does it work for you and your business? Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you understood a little bit about what SEO was? So I’m going to give you a little bit of a primer including very basic stuff about SEO services.

If you have a pretty ordinary website promoting and explaining what you do and you’ve got a common-sense approach to your marketing strategy. You just want to get your name out there and tell people good things that you’re doing. If that’s the kind of website, that’s kind of business you’ve got, this is the kind of SEO for you, very simple straightforward and valuable.

Success Stories

We love to see clients succeed. Our entire approach to SEO strategy centers on getting value for our clients, that’s why we’re experts at lead generation and conversion. There’s more traffic, more transactions, more long-term value and a sustained competitive advantage to be had by being the best in reality and in the Search Engines.

Our Team

SEO FAQ’s

Search Engine Optimisation can often be a complex topic and as an experienced and knowledge sharing Search Marketing Agency we are super-happy to answer questions from our clients & prospective clients.

We have created an entire page based on our SEO Frequently Asked Questions and we even have an SEO Tips section in this website. Deciding which of the SEO Companies in Brisbane to hire is difficult. Quick and cheap, but not long lasting, slow and expensive, but long lasting, something in between?

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SEO – A Deeper Dive

What you need to know when you already know enough to be dangerous 🙂

Find Out More About Our Digital Marketing Workshops

Part two of the making SEO work for your business, I really want to talk to you about how some of these fundamental things Google is paying attention to, can help you rank better and get better results for your business.

Some of the stuff that we really need to think about is just to recap that Google said don’t be evil, but most importantly what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself. Now how does this apply? Well links, people linking to your website is a very good way for them to signal to Google that you’re a very good website, they’re willing to sacrifice visitors, give up visitors to their own website to send them across to you and that’s a very good thing.

User Experience In Depth

Now the other thing would be user experience. When people have a poor experience that’s worth thinking about as well, so people that experience bouncing in and out of websites and when they find one that’s satisfying, in they go and they have a good experience and then when they’re done, they’re searching for something else. So one way to think about this is the SEO triangle.

Just like the fire triangle to simplify this so that you’ve got rankings in the middle and if you miss out on any one of these three sides, the rankings are going to be very hard to achieve, if not impossible.

For example and obviously, this is a simplification, there are two hundred ranking factors but ultimately Google is trying to make their customers happy (the searchers using Google). So they are evaluating the links that point at your website, meaning you’re categorised into a good or bad neighbourhood. They also check if the website is of good quality mainly based on the user experience.

What are you providing to people?

Why are they coming to the website and thinking this is dreadful and leaving. Is your website repellent? I’ve definitely seen a few of those. Or is it good?

Are they finding what they’re looking for? Do they think to themselves yep, actually this aligns with what I want and part of that is also the content and having the right keywords. If I’m using a certain set of terminology when I’m talking about the services that are on offer, then it’s worth thinking about them and discussing them in the way that those people searching are talking about them.

Well what’s the actual words? So for example children’s parties, they’re pretty popular, people search for those all the time. Now you need to consider what keywords people are searching for, in this example often it will be the mum of a kid looking for children’s parties, and they are often on a mobile, when they click through, they want to know:

• What’s the availability?
• What’s the cost?
• How do they book here?
• How far in advance they need to book?
• How many kids are going to be there?
• Is it a flat cost or is it a cost per child?
• What are the options? – Can they have a room? Do they just have a table in the room?

They have these indoor play centers and they have all sorts of different options. Now depending on how easy or difficult it is to navigate around and work out what the options are, can really determine the user experience of the website. But also if you were to say these are the birthday parties, that may well be something that comes up in the search but children’s parties may be the thing that really comes out in the keyword research.

The most relevant or most common way that people describe that is a “children’s parties” including the location, or “children’s parties” and then the brand. These things you can analyse and you can see which one is a good way to describe what you’re saying and not just SEO. You can even go back and look at AdWords data and see which ones are the right terms and AdWords data is even better because you get to see that click right the way through into the website and then even from the website through to the enquiry. You can see which keywords actually turn into enquiries, and you can put some more emphasis on those in the ads of course but also you can put emphasis on those in the SEO because those the ones actually transact into sales and money.

Fixing Your Website Content

We’re going to fix your site’s content, how do you do that? You look at what your visitors want, look at the keywords and decide which work best for your target audience. You can also have a look at what content already exists. Review the website and say well does anything already kind of fit? What do people really want? Often people say the customer is always right. It’s a great saying, the customer is always right, yes, but in this situation as an SEO agency, our job is to advocate for your (potential) customer.

If I’m talking to a client and they’re saying “oh no we have to have a bit about Fred’s department” but Fred’s department doesn’t do anything for customers and it really doesn’t take any external calls from potential customers. Fred’s department might as well be invisible to the outside world and that’s fine, we can just leave it off the website completely, focus on what the visitors want based on their search terms.

There’s a whole bunch of different things that really need to be done here but primarily clients really need to sort of look at this and say well let’s focus on creating content that the users want and let go of our own preconceptions about what we want to create. Often a website can turn into almost like an organisation, an organisational diagram, of what the business is all about and that’s not the purpose of a website.

The purpose of a website is to satisfy your potential customers and get them to contact you.

Sometimes businesses can be their own worst enemy, I’ve got myself a reputation now for being a bit blunt with people and saying what needs to be said, some people love it, some people don’t.

Choosing the right keywords

Often you have this situation where there are a few keywords that have quite a bit of traffic, you also have lots of keywords that have very little traffic and you have some in-between. It’s exponential, so there are very few keywords with lots of traffic and many keywords with very little traffic.

Which keywords do you want to go for? Well, the classic SEO problem is you then go for big keywords. We really want to rank for children’s parties nationwide, that’s what people are searching for yes, but hang on a minute, the Venice update many years ago means that Google is going to work out what your location is and they’re going to bias the results to be children’s parties location. So whatever your location is, let’s say you’re here in Brisbane, we’re then going to change “children’s parties” which should be right up here as a big keyword with lots of traffic to something like “children’s parties Brisbane”, which is more relevant and if you’re in Brisbane that’s much more likely to be you, and Google has worked that out over time. They’ve worked it out that people actually want a location. So, in that case, it may even show a map because when they don’t show the map their searches click the map and that way Google can tell which searches should or shouldn’t get the map, it’s pretty obvious really but most people don’t think about it and so Google is learning, it’s a learning system.

Here we are, you’ve now got the keywords, you have many keywords with very little traffic, so you could have something like children’s parties South Brisbane or children’s parties at the Gabba. Basically, the number of people searching for that and the amount of competition that there would be is minimal, so it’s way down there. Keywords with not much traffic, nobody’s really chasing them and even if they do, they’re so specific that you’re probably the most relevant search result anyway. Now a client would say oh yeah but it’s easy anybody can rank for that, they can and they should and you shouldn’t look at that and say oh well it’s easy so let’s not go for it because those things are the low-hanging fruit, you can reach those easy-peasy. Let’s improve your website and let’s get it ranking for some of the stuff that’s low hanging fruit, let’s get it. The good thing is that if the intent behind the keyword matches the commercial value your page offers it means the keyword is actually very valuable for you.

Commercial value per keyword is actually quite high because it means that if somebody puts in children’s parties or children’s birthday parties Woolloongabba and you happen to be in Woolloongabba and offered an event service for children’s parties. That means that you are absolutely striking a chord to say “that’s what we can deliver” and then people who find your website, they will get in touch. So you’re likely to make a sale and you’re likely to get the lead and you’re likely to find that that sale is quite easy, it’s not an uphill battle because it’s totally aligned with what you do for your customers already. A serious look at your Digital Marketing Strategy will help you uncover opportunities in Keywords as well as uncover any technical SEO issues.

So is it hard to get results with SEO?

In this case, no, it’s actually about aligning your business goals, i.e. what you do and what you want to do, with what the people who already look for you want. In meetings, I often talk about these with two hands in the air and I’ll talk about things fitting together like this because what we’re really trying to do is set your website up for the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that can actually deliver value and when people say to me oh yeah, well when can I rank? Well for this phrases that are already known to big G and align with what people want it could just take a couple of months, but it depends on where you’re at, if you’re absolutely starting from scratch even this “easier” stuff can take a little bit longer, it shouldn’t, but it could do and depends if you have done an SEO campaign in the past.

It could be could be a couple of months of cleanup and then a few months of actually doing the SEO but the reason I put it in here is that there’s a sweet spot that when the traffic starts lifting, maybe the competition has started lifting as well and you’re looking at a state or a city based keyword for a particular term “children’s parties Brisbane” or “SEO Brisbane”, you can become less relevant. So actually the commercial value falls because people searching for “children’s parties Brisbane” or “SEO Brisbane” may well be way on the north side, or way on the southside of town and they’re not going to drive to the Gabba, they know that maybe parking at the Gabba is not going to be that much fun and they’re going to have a hard time. So they might as well find somewhere local so they’d look for children’s parties south side or children parties Springwood.

I (Ben) have been doing SEO, especially what we call technical SEO, since 2001 since before it was called SEO and I’m always still learning. Basically you’ve got this situation where there is a sweet spot of organic traffic but really what you need to think about is that SEO is an accumulation of value and accumulation of strengths on your online presence. A strengthened meaning you’re basically trying to make your site better and better over time, getting stronger and stronger which means you can attack more and more competition. You can’t suddenly say hey, I want to rank for “children’s parties” no, because the competition is too high, you can’t just suddenly go from nowhere to the top and if you try and do that, you go out and do some crazy link building. People try this, they don’t have many links, so they buy tons, don’t do that, you just get penalised and it won’t last.

Finding the SEO sweet spot

What you need to do is think about well what’s in the sweet spot? What are the really good keywords?

Often I’ll talk to clients about maybe using some advertising, it’s a hunt for the really good keywords before we get there, so effectively you start the journey right, you start maybe walking step by step, you’re moving, you’re getting stronger, you’re getting closer to where the sweet spot is where the good keywords are. But what you do is you send somebody there to try and do reconnaissance, they go and do a bit of research, find a scout and they have a look and find out the good place to go and set up. You find which are the good keywords and that’s what AdWords and SEO Services can work on together. That’s really valuable, so I hope that’s helpful to understand the way commercial value works for each keyword and that there are keywords ranging from a lot of organic traffic to very small amount of visits and the competition is aligned with that.

Commercial Value – Final Note

One last thing worth noting in terms of commercial value. I’ve been asked a lot why these, the problem is that a lot of organic keywords are going to be irrelevant because if somebody is nationally searching for “children’s parties” or just “search engine optimisation”, they’re not even going to be in Brisbane may not have any intention of hiring a Brisbane SEO. Example: Take twenty-five million people in Australia and say well okay how many people are in or near Brisbane? Well say 10% (being generous), so of the people searching for children’s parties only 10% of them are in or near Brisbane, sort of ignoring that location customisation/personalisation for a moment, only a small proportion are going to be relevant and then even Brisbane itself is pretty big.

How many of those people in Brisbane are really going to be within striking distance of the Gabba in this case well a very small proportion again. So the relevance really does play a part in terms of which keyword can be right for you and I’ve certainly had clients rank for Brisbane wide keywords and they’ve just turned around and gone, no I’m not driving all over the city, I’m not doing that and then we’ve let the keyword go and we focused much more on lowdown stuff.

Now this advice I’m giving about this, this is based on real experience, really helping small/medium-sized businesses actually some larger ones as well but ultimately this stuff works because we’ve seen clients kind of make these mistakes or we’ve pushed people in certain directions, we’ve tried things that they really want. For example “I really want to be number one for Brisbane”, then we get them there and it’s not worth it, so advertising before you get there, it costs a bit but you learn something really valuable. So think about the return on investment from your website, think about how the people come in and how they go out, this is something I explain in almost every meeting.

Your Website Is a Box

If you think about your website, it’s really just a simple box, it helps you get away from the fact that it’s a pretty beautiful artistic thing, don’t worry about that.

The purpose of that artistic thing is to get people and visitors to come in and they either become leads or they leave, that’s it, that’s all we’re mapping here. So one of the most important things is to think about user experience and it really is the most important thing to look at your website and think about how people are getting around it and to get the stats measured. Whichever channel you’ve got people coming in, whether they’re direct, email marketing, organic and any of the rest. You want to know what they’re coming through and Google Analytics tracking will show this.

It’ll actually show you which channel is making what difference to your lead generation, and the people that don’t come in, they leave, they’re gone. Even if you’re doing SEO and you’re generating lots of traffic from SEO the proportion of people that come through and convert into leads could be quite small, this is the sort of information you need to know. I’ve taken clients from sort of zero or 1% up to 3% to 5% to 10% conversion rate, 10% conversion rate is really nice but the problem we’ve got is that if people come through and you’re 10% of them, you still have nine out of ten people leaving.

The Importance of Retargeting

Retargeting is a really nice way of advertising to those people. If you don’t know what retargeting is retargeting is an advertising platform where you can effectively follow visitors around the internet, wherever they go other websites can advertise to your potential customers and call them back to your website. If you’ve been to a website and you’ve seen advertisers sort of stalking you, it’s that kind of thing where you feel like you’re being followed around all over the place.
That’s very good and you can end up having people come back to your website and then buy because they’ve had that second click and they’re finally ready to buy from you.

Get Seen Online More

The second thing that we do is get people into the website. Now if you’re on this page or you’re looking at this because you need an SEO well great, that’s what we do for people but also even if you’ve got your own web designer, we would really like to make sure that we’re thinking about the user experience. So if we come across something that we think that they could improve, we’ll say something. We really will, we can’t help ourselves because we want to do things that matter, we’re going to make a difference to your business. If we pull this lever and double the amount of traffic and your conversion rate happens to be zero then you’re going to get twice as much of zero and that’s not good, what we really want to do is pull both levers.

If we can get you twice as many conversions, three times as many conversions and get you twice as much traffic, you’re going to have six times as many leads and that’s actually going to be measurable and make a difference to your business.

Content Marketing For SEO

Content marketing is one of those things where a good idea has been taken and run with by all sorts of people, so we think about content marketing for SEO.

Bottom of the funnel

The funnel is on the left, people who are actually buying from you is down there in the bottom left, so that’s the sale or a lead. Now you’re measuring that funnel, you’ve got that sale or lead being tracked in Google Analytics and you need to think about your keywords and you need to think about the position in the funnel. Now stuff at the bottom of the funnel, there are people ready to transact they’re very close to actually buying. So they search for things like they want to buy it, for example, ”what’s the price of x?”, “How can I buy x now?”, “cheap version of x online”, stuff right before they buy.

Top & Middle of the funnel

The middle is probably more like where they’re going to compare and look for other options and then at the top they’re just doing research and they’re looking at information. There are different types of keywords, there are navigational ones where they already know your brand, they would be more down the bottom. Informational where they’re just looking for research and information that would be up at the top and then stuff like transactional, they would really be a bit further down sort of middle and bottom.
Let’s pick them up, pick a market just temporarily, so let’s say we want to sell some drones okay, you’ve got a persona and I’ll explain where that comes into the funnel in a moment.

You’ve got a hobbyist then in comparison somebody who’s used to doing radio control flight, they both use Facebook like almost everybody in Australia they use YouTube, they follow some blogs and they also use Google search. So persona B let’s call him howdy guy, he’s got all the gadgets, loves Apple, as well as other big brands and then we’ve got a way to reach him we can get in via Facebook, he’s in different groups, he’s been to different places on Facebook. Then you’ve got YouTube and Google search including a range of different YouTube channels well almost certainly.

Now we’re going to plot these for digital marketing, this is where the content marketing framework comes in. Now you take the brand voice over here and you’d be plotting out what articles you want to write. So let’s say you’ve decided I’m going to definitely buy the Mavic drone, so “buy Mavic drone” would be the keyword. Well, you write an article in the brand voice about that keyword and because we understand the keywords and we’ve looked at what sort of things people are interested in finding out about it. For the content, maybe the experience of having bought it and your first flying experience and all that sort of stuff would be down at the bottom of the page. Now the hobbyist they don’t want to buy the brand one, the DJI or Parrot, so they’re going to buy the drone X, so whatever the drone is whatever the brand is whatever the model name is for example.

Customised Content for Personas

They would have read some content already looking for low-cost drones and you could easily just write articles and you could write multiple articles like that about different brands, you’d be careful that the articles aren’t too similar because that would get penalised and would cause problems. But if we just build this out a bit further, you can see that talking about how to fly the drone is more informational maybe they’ve never actually flown a drone before, maybe they want to get started, maybe they’re looking for the best-looking ones, the funkiest kind of features and stuff like that. There you go, you can just continue with this process and plot out a content marketing framework just by looking at the keywords, remember there’s that curve further up the page about how the keywords go together and then look at the different personas.

If you are focusing on a more experienced visitor, you’re writing for somebody who’s actually probably flown a radio-controlled aircraft, so you talk about it in those terms and you’d be using your brand voice and then you’d also be using keywords that you’ve identified from keyword research from that curve that are kind of specific and probably relevant to this person. You might use some jargon, you might use stuff that’s pretty full-on maybe some kind of keywords the hobbyist would never use, but one thing you’ve got to really pay attention to is that neither of these people can actually link to your website.

Writing Content for Industry Authority Websites

Now if you’re doing content marketing for SEO, these articles won’t generate links, they might, but it’d be very rare that they would. So if you’re going to create content that appeals to other websites, you need to look outside of your personas, you need to be creating content that isn’t necessarily for your customers and that’s where the big trade-off and real kind of problem comes with SEO is that when we want to create content for you as a customer, we then say hey we’re going to create this content and it’s going to look like this and it goes like that. But then you start thinking, I guess the clients won’t read that, that’s too technical or that’s not interesting. So now you’ve got a distinction between content marketing for potential customers like the hobbyist and experienced user and content marketing for somebody who’s in the industry.

Someone is in the industry is more likely to like, share, feature, and link to that resource we create. Creating content for links and content for SEO is actually quite different, going out and bashing out blog posts that cover all sorts of topics in 2013 that was the right thing to do, it really doesn’t work like that anymore. There are people still even doing it today it’s not worth it, but writing GOOD content and putting it on your website is worth it for content marketing. Segmenting your customers and addressing them and bringing them further down the funnel is a great way to think about every decision you make on your website.

If you think about it -if we’ve got a client that we’re blogging for and creating content that makes their customers happy – that’s great. But in terms of an SEO effort, it doesn’t really get them links, what it does is gets them traffic and that traffic generation ends up bringing people in we can retarget after they’ve considered their purchase a bit. We bring them in to look at l the products or service at a later date maybe they remember the brand naming and search for that and that’s very good for SEO but ultimately if you want to create content that generates links you’ve got to get outside of the standard kind of content marketing mindset.

Bringing it all together

That was a deeper dive into SEO, I hope that was useful. We’re the kind of company that really likes to give out a lot of information, but really just tell it how it is, there’s a lot of plain talking no fuss kind of stuff about how we do things because we want to make sure it matters.

We know it makes a huge difference for you but the thing is we’ll only take on specific clients that we can really work with, that really understand what we’re after and we’re really in to bat for them and it’s hard right, not everybody wants to have an SEO company that’s like that and that’s okay. We don’t suit everybody and not everybody suits us but if we go in to bat for you, we generally would not even talk to a competitor of yours. One of our FAQ’s if I sign up with you are you going to also help my competitor? Well if you are our client and you are following the plan and you’re on a contract you’re doing the things we want to do. We aren’t going to talk to your competitor, that’s it, we look after you and ultimately the work we do, we generate results and it takes time but it works very well. Got any questions, get in touch, give me a call, me and my team would love to help.