Happy Valentines Day

Who says i am not romantic……

Get a load of some of my favourite Valentines day cards…

Love You All.

Life is a Blank Canvas

Life is a Blank Canvas, it is time to make it yours.

For me this image represents what life is all about. Amidst the koas of the background noise you have the ability to create your own path. It is a blank canvas from which to build from, start today.

Image: Daryl Cygler

Location: Epoch Art Gallery, Redhill. My good friends art gallery ready for another kids paint splatter party. Blank canvas’ in front of a wall that has hundreds of parties. Great fun for the young ones. It is a colour explosion of creativity and fun.

Local SEO Pages for Local Businesses and Organizations

Local Businesses and Organizations need Location SEO Pages

Being from a more mature generation i remember the process of going through the yellow pages to look for business contacts. It was not just about the listing but also the location and size of the advert on the page. The bigger the better , all in the effort to capture the searches attention. Yellow pages (offline) has since died a slow and painful death for the owners. Why, because people are searching online for instant results and with the aid of mobile phones getting very geo-specific listings realtime. All very powerful stuff. Do you want to be part of this? Do you want this traffic?

A Single Local Specific Page could be all the difference

Local business need to focus in on local search for products and services. With that Google have an excellent portal that every local business should be part of in order to increase their visibility online.  Given that Google owns roughly 90% of the UK search market it makes sense to be in a platform that will give your business the greatest opportunity for marketing success.  GOOGLE MY BUSINESS is a great platform that enables your business to do just that. Long story short, it enables red pin listing to be shown pride of place for relevant service and location based searches. These are shown within the main search result as Local SEO Listing and within the map feature and highlight services, contact details as well as customer reviews. All features represent great opportunities for INCREASING your businesses local exposure.

Optimising your Local SEO PAGE and Google My Business Listing

I won’t go into the process of filling out the listing details itself as it is all quite explanatory within the Google portal. What i will say is local business websites only have a few pages within their site, please ensure your website homepage is as local and service centric as possible.  Some tips for that below.

• Avoid complex or nested tables. Complex layouts are harder for users and Google’s algorithms to understand, and may not display correctly on mobile devices.
• Use a simple format, and don’t have overrides without schema.org markup. For example:
  • Describe your opening hours as “Monday to Wednesday and Friday: 9am-5pm, Thursday 10am-4pm instead of “Monday through Friday 9am-5pm, except Thursday 10am-4pm”
  • Say “Open 9am-12pm and 1pm-5pm” instead of “Open 9am-5pm but closed for lunch 12pm-1pm”.
  • Ensure your web developer can wrap as much schema code around the organisation, name, address, and phone number. Once live it can be tested here with the rich snippets tool so as you can see what Google understand about your local page.
• Use common names and abbreviations. When describing the day of the week, use the complete name (“Monday”) or one of the common abbreviations (such as “Mo” or “Mon” for Monday).
• Use 24-hour format or specify AM/PM. The time format should be what’s customary for the location, either the 24-hour format (“15:00”) or specifying AM/PM (“3PM” or “9am”).
• Be explicit on the opening hours times. Instead of saying “open from 11am to close”, or “open from 11am till dusk”, say “open from 11am-11pm” since the closing time isn’t immediately obvious otherwise.
• Split off each department separately. If a service or department available at the location has different information (e.g. a different phone number or different opening hours), split off the department into its own section to display the information.

With all this optimised relevance also ensure your Google listing is pointing to your homepage as this will give the most relevance in favour of the listing.

Hope this all adds value, you can refer to this Google guide for optimising your local webpage for the best chance of being seen with your little red pins.

Hope this all adds value. Enjoy being busy 🙂

Mobile Usability Warnings from Google

Mobile Heads Up People…..

Google are sending out warnings to webmasters notifying them are significant shortcomings in relation to their site being rendered on mobile devices.

Come on, If you are serious about being present on the web, you need to have a site that is rendered to suit different viewing platforms. It adds to YOUR users experience not to mention all the other signals it sends out for SEO.

Get with the mobile revolution or expect to see this notification soon.

Disclaimer: For those of you that are really savvy. No this site is not responsive, hands up. Guilty, I am working on it.

Why Technical SEO matters – 2015

Technical SEO is the first phase of any SEO Campaign

If you can address your Technical SEO issues in-house, you will be well on your way to gaining some valuable wins on the organic landscape.

A man walks into a doctors surgery and says “Doctor I am having trouble with my knees, I need to be able to run faster and i need you to repair my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) Injury.” So the doctor takes his word for it, books the surgery and preforms the operation straight away. The results are not conclusive. Who do you blame? Does this process even sound right?

This is what is common in the SEO world. All to often site owners will come to SEO agencies or consultants and say nothing more than i want more links to my site. Using the analogy above, i hope you can understand why we as SEO practitioners think it is crazy in all instances. As in the example of the doctors surgery, the first thing that needs to be done and should be done is a full appraisal of the patient, in this case the website. I have seen too many cases to ignore the value of a technical SEO audit in the first instance. Massive gains can be achieved from simple technical fixes.

To give you any example of technical recommendations making a difference i have highlighted a clients SEO visibility timeline. SEO visibility represents the organic search visibility for a domain over time. It is made up of a domain’s ranking keyword search volumes and positions. What this graphs shows is a series of peaks and troughs, all related to technical faults and fixes affecting the site. You can see the impact technical issues can have on a site, pretty conclusive.

As a reference for Technical SEO issues, Moz have just released a 2015 Technical SEO Guide. It is very comprehensive, so rather than try and better it i am just going to link to it. Please review it as it is the best around. http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Given the length of the guide you will see that there are quite a few elements to technical SEO. Hopefully this will give you more of an insight to the array of issues that need to be reviewed. I suggest you work your way through this and address what elements you understand and what ones you don’t. The ones you understand proceed to fix accordingly in-house and the other please consult your local SEO manager for advice.

As normal, before any of the changes are done, benchmarks should be established to measure the final results related to the improvements.

Get to it.