SEO can be a complicated beast to the uninitiated. There are no real rules published by Google so it really is a skill-set that is entirely based on experience and history. These are our top 5 tips for SEO success – whether you’re in real estate or e-commerce.

1. Checkout how your site is rated in terms of speed
With the launch of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program, Google and the rest of the world is increasingly rewarding the speed of delivery. Run a diagnostic on your site and then fix the related problems. Not only will your search ranking thank you but your users will too. Recent data shared by Google shows that the probably of a user bouncing from your website increases by 32% when the page load takes 1 – 3 seconds.

2. Use Unique Meta-Descriptions
Each of your products, or properties, should be set to include a unique meta-description that accurately describes your product or property thereby helping Google to find your page with more context.

3. Don’t keyword stuff
You know what they say, less is more. Google’s code (or googlebot as it’s commonly known) is pretty sophisticated and it can tell when you’re trying to pull the wool over its eyes. So don’t go crazy on the keywords, use the most relevant ones and don’t be overly repetitive on the page. It knows when you have relevant content, so trust in its expertise and make sure the content makes sense for a human too.

4. Review your site errors
If you’ve got lots of people coming to a page and not converting (either buying or contacting you) then it’s worthwhile reviewing your website errors and checking to see if there are pages not found or not loading properly. Good for the user, good for Google.

5. Add a sitemap, and markup your data
If it’s available to you, use google rich snippets to give more colour and context to your content. You can use them for products, events, recipes, news articles and video. They’ll then show your content at the top of the page with a bit more detail – images, review ratings and descriptions.

If you have questions on how to optimise your existing site without reinventing the wheel, hop on over to our SEO Strategy page.

Product Management

How getting your user persona and content model right will improve your SEO

By Anne-Marina on

March 7, 2016

- Product Management

If you’re publishing a website that is driven by content, as most are these days, then there are two key building blocks you should begin with before you even consider hiring a designer or developer:
1. User Personas that will visit your site
2. Content model of your site
Getting these two simple things correct at the very outset will ensure your site is setup to be well ranked in Google search results. It’s the online equivalent of surveying the land and putting in deep foundations when you build a house.

What are User Personas?
User Personas are a term thrown about a lot by “digital people” trying to make the landscape seem more complex than it is, but there’s nothing complex about them. At a base level, your user personas are the groups that your client base falls into – broken down into all the relevant information that client may be looking for and their habits and likes. For example, if you take our site, some of our customer user personas would fall into the below categories:

1. Small to Medium Sized Publishers
– Typically a business that is sub-75 employees
– Produces content that is distributed online (via websites, mobile apps, content aggregators etc)
– Has a small tech team but limited holistic digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO specialists
– May have one or more sites that are not yet responsive in nature

2. Real Estate Companies
– Franchise, regional or national
– May have an IT team but no in-house digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO
– Require assistance on improving their online presence to maximise customer leads on potential properties for sale

3. Start-Ups
– Still in the stage of boot-strapping, yet to hire digital expertise in-house
– Need help with turning their idea into a product and doing the logistical thinking around factors that could impact that product’s success
– Actively pursuing a product in one of the following areas: mobile apps, responsive websites, music streaming, mobile SMS & IVR
Or, another example would be a real estate website. Think of all the possible customers it has and then list those customers in order of importance, e.g.:
– Prospective Sellers
– Potential new franchisees
– Property Developers looking for contact details
– Other agents who want to work for the company
When creating user personas try to come up with as much detail as possible. Make them a real person, give them a name, age, family status etc. All of this information will assist you in getting inside that persons head and will ensure your site is best tailored for them.

I’ve got my user personas – now what is a content model?
Your content model should be the next thing to consider. A content model is exactly that, a description of all the types of content you plan to include on your product or website, information on how that content will interact with one another and details on what type of content should be structured versus not structured. Google gives ‘extra points’ to sites that have a well structured content model which makes it easier for it to read.

By having structured data, you can then more easily manipulate that data in future without having to reverse engineer your code. An example here may be a recipe website which has been created with a structured content model and taxonomy. Having this in place means that you can easily search on all recipes which are “Thai” in cuisine and you can sell advertising against those. It also allows you to easily extract that data from your CMS and promote it via a partner website. You can more easily manipulate that data by running a database query so that for every occurrence of the word “chicken” inside ingredients, you can insert a sponsor name in front.

Building the foundations that your business runs on is more important than the speed with which you get your website live. Solid foundations will lead to a more sustainable, stronger, business in future. If this article has inspired you and you’d like to find out where you can improve online to better your business, contact us for more details.

User persona image borrowed from Roman Pichler – if you don’t know agile and want to learn, his books are a great start.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

How will ad blockers impact ad-funded digital businesses? #advertising #media #digital

By Anne-Marina on

August 19, 2015

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

It seems that ad blockers are getting more and more air time these days, with many in the digital media industry confused about just what they mean for your business. We’ve taken a look and have given the basic facts on what you need to know if your online business is ad-funded.

What are ad blockers?
Ad Blockers are a software tool that users can download and install to run on their browser (on any device) which will prevent your ads from showing. They can be downloaded for free, or users can opt to pay for a more premium version. Some run on an open-source honour system, requesting that users pay what they think is fair. Typically, they block any ads from being shown on a page, for example on smh.com.au:

With ads:

Without ads:

For the end user, they get a much clearer reading experience and, one would argue, a slightly faster load time.

What is the usage of ad blocking software?
As with any product, there are always early adopters and usually they fall into the categories of adult entertainment, gaming and tech. So if your business falls into one of those categories, it’s time to start coming up with a backup plan. There are 144 million ad blocker users worldwide, which is growing at a rate of 70% year on year. As it grows, your potential revenue pool shrinks – so it’s time to act now. Usage is highest amongst those between 18-29 and skews towards the male demographic.

Who are the companies who are building ad blockers?
There are a good few options out there for users: Ad Blocker Plus, uBlock, AdGuard, Fair Blocker but contrary to popular belief this isn’t something being done only by the little guys. Apple’s next iOS release (iOS9) will make ad blocking a reality for web developers, allowing them to create extensions to prevent ads from loading and block cookies amongst other things. All of which goes hand in hand with some improvements they’re making to their News app (a similar idea to Flipboard), where they are encouraging digital publishers to provide their content and opt-in to iAd (Apple’s ad serving software). So when ad blocking goes mainstream on iOS, the only way to monetize digital content through ads will be through Apple’s own ecosystem.

Where does all this sit legally?
Coming after the business model of a company is nothing new and the internet has transformed the business model of many a company – you only have to look at the music industry to see that. Some ad blocking companies maintain a whitelist which insists that:

Ads are easily identifiable
Ads are non-intrusive to the user experience
Ads must be appropriate for the site that they are being served on

All of which seems to be reasonable. But one company, AdBlock Plus, when reviewing those sites that have requested white-listing, makes a determination of the size of the company, and if they are big enough, then has their parent company request a fee before going through the white-listing process.

What are your options to defend your business revenue?
It’s clear customers have had enough of intrusive pop-ups, overlays and interstitials. At a time when the other buzzword in the industry is viewability, how do you make sure your advertiser clients get their ad seen by your users without hampering the site experience? Native content is one way to go. Rather than having advertising that doesn’t relate to your users, have the kind that is meaningful and useful for them. Just make sure not to ad serve it – otherwise, it’ll get blocked in the process!

Agile, Product Management

Just what is a vertical slice? A guide to #agile development.

By Anne-Marina on

June 9, 2015

- Agile, Product Management

A friend of ours used to joke that the name of this company should be Vertical Slice because of the number of times we’d say it in a given day and how we’re forever having to explain to new people just what it means. It’s an agile term and yes, I know it sounds like we’ve drunk the kool aid – because we have.

So, just what is a vertical slice? Well it’s one way of describing a software development practise that can be applied to pretty much anything in life and it boils down to this: rather than developing different pieces of the puzzle in isolation, instead, work on making the smallest possible bit of the puzzle all work together end-to-end first.

For example, if you were making a trifle you would start with a very thin mould (thin slice) where you layer all the ingredients in on top of one another, leave it to set in the fridge immediately (where it sets much quicker because it’s not the full cake), then take it out, test it out and see what it tastes like (the customer response).

mke-agile-032014-slicing-the-cake-user-story-decomposition-4-638

There are lots of advantages to developing this way. In the first instance, because you’re making all the layers of the cake work together at the start, you inherently reduce your risk of blowing your deadline by working with technologies that might be difficult to integrate. You identify problems much faster, thereby giving more time in the project for thinking of a solution (rather than the converse which would leave you at the end of the project rushing to make layers work together).

Secondly you get to demonstrate a version of the end feature to your customer much faster, meaning you can learn from their feedback about whether this was what they wanted in the first instance and what you can do to improve the feature based on their actual requirements (not just what you think their requirements are).

Thirdly, it gives you the option to launch the full product faster. You cut out wastage in developing features and functions that are not desired by the customer (no matter how logical they may seem to the feature team) and, if needed, you can launch a solution that makes a date requirement but doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles that originally were envisaged. Meaning you get to market faster than your competitors.

We could go on but you get the idea. Take your requirement and boil it down to the simplest possible variation. For example, if your requirement is that customers can login to your site, and the full version has login across multiple different types of accounts, start by doing login just with Facebook. Don’t style it in your initial story. Boil it back to the basic requirements: – A customer can login from X device, using X browser, via their Facebook credentials This will give you immediate visibility of any technology problems and allow you to pivot your requirement much earlier without having wasted valuable resource on design.

*Vertical slice slide borrowed from Dave Neuman @ Slideshare

Professional Development

E-Publishing: How you too can be an author

By Anne-Marina on

May 30, 2015

- Professional Development

One of the great things about the digital revolution is that it has broken down barriers to entry in lots of industries – one of them being publishing. Did you ever dream of being an author when you were young? Now you can…

Publishing on Kindle and iBooks is pretty easy. We’ve written (and published) 2 kids books using the Kindle Publishing and Sigil open source tools.

If you’ve got kids and want to check the books out, you can find them here.

Product Management

#Responsive versus fixed width website design – does it really matter? Top 5 tips.

By Anne-Marina on

March 6, 2015

- Product Management

In short, yes. These days the internet is accessed through a plethora of devices: desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile and even smart watch. So what do you do when it comes to designing your website and which device do you design for? The majority of internet traffic is migrating towards tablet and mobile – Facebook apparently has more than 70% of its access from mobile devices – so you need to design for them all, and the only way to successfully do that is to design responsively.

1. Start with the user and the content
Content, content, content. Who are you building the site for and what types of content do they expect to see? How are you planning on connecting your content so that your user can find more content that is relevant to their needs? Think about the types of use cases that will be involved and what that means for your content length, style and tone.

2. Make the decision to design responsively, not adaptively
True responsive design continues to change even after the page has loaded – unlike adaptive which loads the size of page most suitable for the device size it believes you are on. You can see this in action by dragging your browser window to make it bigger and smaller – if the site resizes, it’s responsive; if it doesn’t, it’s adaptive.

3. Mobile First
Do the most difficult thing first, so now that you’ve established your content hierarchy, work out how that’s going to fit on the smallest possible screen size. What will it look like? Is it logical? Will someone be able to use it while they walk? Crack the mobile layout and the others will flow way more easily.

4. Test and Roll
This should really go without saying, but make sure you’re testing your design, not just for functionality, but for usability. Don’t design for an end state that a user might not want. Technology moves too quickly now to do end state designs for every screen of a site, so do the design as part of an agile development process. You’ll thank me later.

5. Make sure your designers and developers communicate constantly
A great design is fabulous, but if the effort to do that outweighs the business value associated with that feature then you need to revise the design – and vice versa. If the feature has masses of business value, make sure you tell the designers so that they can spend a bit of extra time on it.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

What gets better traction for publishers? Mobile Web or Apps?

By Anne-Marina on

February 13, 2015

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

A study from eMarketer notes that adverts on mobile web gets considerably more click throughs than adverts displayed via mobile apps. It’s a fairly significant difference, with 35% on mobile web, and 26% on mobile apps. So what does that mean for publishers who run an advertising model? Likely that it’s time to pursue a two pronged strategy similar to the one that the New York Times has been attempting.

Give those customers who are new and find you via search, Facebook and other social channels access on the mobile web with ads and native sponsored content and focus the effort on developing apps which are single purpose and not free to download – similar to the New York Times Now app which is $6 per month and gives users a summarized version of the top stories from NYT.

These apps should be directed towards your loyal customers, who are coming to you because of the types of content you provide and the brand recognition you have built up. Key to this strategy is remembering the different use cases that your customers have on mobile, and then the difference use case between mobile web (often a push scenario which is more transient) and apps (a pull scenario which is more consistent). Monitor your results, and in true agile style – inspect and adapt.

Mobile Apps, Product Management

New Year, New You. The 3 best tech innovations to help you get fit and stay fit.

By Anne-Marina on

January 20, 2015

- Mobile Apps, Product Management

The fitness space in digital technology has always been full of companies who think that their invention is the next big thing that will change the market. There have been lots of great ideas and moving into 2015 we decided to explore the best of them. The ideas that will change the way you keep healthy, and might change the world’s fitness.

1. Smart Contact Lenses: Novartis and Google
This is one of our favourites. One day soon it should help with an individual’s management of diabetes. Rather than diabetics having to monitor blood sugar levels by taking small blood samples, in future they’ll be able to be alerted automatically without doing anything. The premise is simple: wear contact lenses which will monitor blood sugar levels via your tears, this information is then relayed back to servers via a tiny antenna contained within the lenses. Genius!

2. Smart Watches: FitBit
FitBit recently announced their new fitness tracker which combines all the elements of a normal fitness tracker, with a smartwatch. It’ll begin shipping in February for around $250 (USD). It has a heart rate monitor, built in GPS to track your distance and speed, and will send alerts when you receive a new call, text and are playing music.

3. Smart Music: Dry Case
Speaking of music, there are only a few companies out there who are making technology for the swimmers amongst you. The ability to swim and listen to music at the same time has always resonated with people and spawned the evolution of underwater speakers. But what if you don’t want to share your music with others (or they don’t want you to share it with them)? The best solution for those who use Spotify through their mobile phone is the Dry Case. It’s big enough to hold an HTC One M8, comes with an armband, and underwater headphones sold separately. There’s a bit of drag with the armband when swimming, and they could do with making one that is specifically swimming orientated, but it’s a great way to keep yourself doing laps for hours.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

Globalisation of Content and Copyright – #digital #content

By Anne-Marina on

November 19, 2014

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

There were whispers this week that Netflix are in Australia and are in the early stages of planning their launch. We’re keeping our fingers crossed because the more competition there is in this market the higher the chance of actually getting content when it comes available.

You see, Australians are frustrated – much of the content that is shown on Australian TV comes from America and many of these shows air in the USA first, sometimes months before the Australian air date. 30 years ago, that was never an issue because there was absolutely no chance you’d be able to see the latest episode of Cheers before it actually arrived on your shores. With the advent of the internet, everything changed and now it’s possible to get access to the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy, or Homeland, straight through your pipe and to your laptop mere hours after it airs in the USA.

What this leads to, especially because of the plethora of spoilers coming from Twitter as shows air every evening, is thousands of people trying to get access to this content illegally. Let’s be clear – illegal downloading is not a laughing matter, it leaves content creators not being paid for work that they have undertaken and that’s not cool. However, rather than simply throwing more legal restrictions around to solve the problem it would make much more sense to strike deals that make the content available to anyone who wants to pay for it – without geographic restrictions.

Torchwood did this exceptionally well with Torchwood: Miracle Day – airing episodes across the world on a similar schedule to prevent viewers from missing out. We no longer live in a world where country borders prevent digital content from being shared, so don’t fight it like the music industry did, embrace it. I say welcome to Netflix and any others who want to enter the market. We’d just like a time where we can watch Grey’s Anatomy or The Blacklist in-line with the air dates from the USA so that we don’t find out the spoilers before we see it.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

Beacons: What are they and how can I use them to better my business?

By Anne-Marina on

October 28, 2014

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

The buzzword of the past few months has been iBeacon. Everyone is talking about it and how to use it to increase user engagement and revenue, but just what is it? First of all, iBeacon is merely the Apple version (denoted by the ‘i’) of a particular type of technology that runs on Bluetooth Smart.

Beacon technology is not exclusive to Apple, they just brought it further mainstream when they launched it across their US retail stores in December 2013. It’s designed to provide interaction with your customers according to their specific location.

Back to basics, it works like this:
– Purchase, at least 3, beacons from a vendor and set them up with their own unique identifier
– Create a mobile app for iOS 7+ or Android 4.3+ and triggers certain actions when it is in range of your Beacons (using their unique identifiers)
– Setup your Geo-Fence. Beacons have a 70m range, meaning they can detect your customers up to 70m away.

What is most magic about Beacon technology is that your customer doesn’t need to have the app running on their device when they are in range of the Beacon. Think of a Beacon like a light-house which is constantly pinging out a signal in a 70m radius.

So how does all of this help your business? A practical implementation of this might work as follows: You are walking around Woolworths and have the Woolworths application downloaded on your phone. The 3 beacons setup around the store pickup your device when they are pinging for connections.

By co-ordinating the feedback and relative distance you are from each beacon the application on your phone can determine which aisle you are shopping in (fresh food for instance). Using this information, they can then present you with an offer for a product in that aisle which is cross-referenced against your previous purchase history. Giving you, the customer, an appropriate, time-sensitive, location based offer that you are more likely to interact with than a generic offer sent to your email account.

That’s just one example of how you can use Beacons to further your business, but don’t limit your thinking to just in-store retail – there are lots of scenarios where you can use Bluetooth Smart, Beacons and mobile technology to increase your business. If you’re curious about how it could be applied to your business, get in touch and we can help you out.

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Publishing, SEO

Updated – Top 5 tips for SEO Success

Product Management

How getting your user persona and content model right will improve your SEO

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

How will ad blockers impact ad-funded digital businesses? #advertising #media #digital

Agile, Product Management

Just what is a vertical slice? A guide to #agile development.

Professional Development

E-Publishing: How you too can be an author

Product Management

#Responsive versus fixed width website design – does it really matter? Top 5 tips.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

What gets better traction for publishers? Mobile Web or Apps?

Mobile Apps, Product Management

New Year, New You. The 3 best tech innovations to help you get fit and stay fit.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

Globalisation of Content and Copyright – #digital #content

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

Beacons: What are they and how can I use them to better my business?

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