What is SEO and do I need it?

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What what is SEO and do you need it on your site? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be a confusing concept to get your head around. Many of our clients have never heard of the term when they begin their website project and are unsure if the need to do it. Below you’ll find some helpful information which covers what SEO is and why you need it.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing the visibility of your website in organic search engine results. These are the results which come up on a google search which are un-paid. SEO includes both the technical and creative elements required to improve your rankings, drive traffic to your site, and increase awareness in search engines. There are many aspects gf SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web.

SEO isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites. It’s about making your site better for people to navigate around and use too.

Why does my website need SEO?

So What is SEO and why do I need it? The majority of web traffic is driven by the major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. When looking for information online the majority of users will go to Google, Bing and Yahoo to type in their search query so it’s important to show in these results.

Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic, or people looking for what you offer. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on opportunities to drive traffic to your website.

The words that users type into the search box on these search engines carry massive value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can either make or beak your website’s success. Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO can have an huge rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.

Why can’t the search engines find out my site without SEO?

Search engines are smart, but they still need help. The major engines are always working to improve their technology to crawl the web with greater depth and efficiency and return better results to users. These search engines are also constantly changing the way in which they rank websites.

In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a big advantage in visitors and customers.

Constantly Changing SEO

When search marketing began in the mid-1990s, manual submission, the meta keywords tag, and keyword stuffing were all regular parts of the tactics necessary to rank well. The search engines have refined their algorithms along with this and so many of the tactics that worked previously can hurt your SEO today.

In the world of search, change is a constant and because of these you need to understand SEO, it’s changes and constantly make changes to your website to reflect this.

If you want to find out how we can help you with your Google Adwords then get in touch.

Merry Christmas

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We can’t believe that Christmas is only four sleeps away! Most of us have completed our Christmas shopping, and some of us (ok, one of us) even had ALL of our presents wrapped at the end of last month. No fighting through crowds for last minute presents this year. Just fighting the Christmas traffic to get home at the end of the day.

Christmas stress aside, we are really looking forward to spending the Christmas season catching up with family and friends, organising our summer Digital Operative family BBQ, eating lots of great food, and reflecting on the year that’s past.

2016 has been an amazing year for us. We’ve grown with such speed that sometimes it’s been scary, sometimes it’s been bumpy, but mostly its been fulfilled and exciting!

We’d like to thank all of our wonderful customers and contractors for being part of our journey, it’s been a blast getting to know you all, and we look forward to continuing to grow these relationships in 2017.  A special shout out to our most organised customer EVER (you know who you are) who was so well prepared for the redevelopment of their company website that we were able to turn around an entire build to go live in just under two weeks. (I’m tempted to bring her along to all of my meetings to discuss “The importance on having your content before you start your build”).

So time for a little break. We will be closed on the statutory days, and mostly working in the sunshine at home on others, but we are around so if you need us please pick up the phone, or send us an email, we will get back to you.

We hope you have a wonderful Christmas and an enjoyable and safe New Year.

The team at Digital Operative.

 

New updates to our social media management tool

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We’ve got some great news for our customers who are using our social media dashboard. We have added some new features.

Hashtag research direct from the scheduler page

This is a new AWESOME tool. You can now enter a hashtag that you THINK might be used (like #HEALTH, #SALES, #TEASHOP) and you’ll see a list of relevant associated hashtags that are popular. It even suggests which are the best to drive visitors to your social posts.

14 day free trial of the PRO version on signup

Any new account signs ups will receive a 14 day free trial of the PRO version of our dashboard.

Annual Pricing

If you decide to sign up to the PRO version and pay the annual fee upfront (instead of monthly payments) you receive a 30% discount.

Monthly payments are $29.95 and annual payments are $249.95

We’ve improved the content research function

Images research and google alerts are now integrated in to this function.

General improvements of all sections and we’ve added integration of Google Alerts. Users can also choose to insert the original page link or leave it out (Facebook search).

Website/Hashtag quicklinks from scheduler

As well as one click hashtag research and insert, we’ve also included a quick link to your website. As long as you have completed the website field in your settings, one click will type it in the scheduler.

We have LOADS of wonderful new goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Help is at hand for your social media

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Is your company already regularly active on social media? Do you currently use a social media dashboard to help you manage all of your posts?

As of August 2015, there were 3.175 billion active internet users. That’s nearly half of the world’s population, all connected to one another. Even more impressive is the number of those that are using social media: 2.206 billion.

One third of our planet are tweeting, liking, sharing and hash-tagging everything you could possibly think of. And that number is set to continue rising; last year alone had a boost of 176 million more social media users. Facebook is reporting half a million new sign ups every day.

Your customers and your competitors are using social media so you need to make sure that your company is on it and represented professionally as well so that you don’t miss out.

FREE SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARD

At Digital Operative we can offer you a free social media dashboard that can help you out

It helps save time
Schedule social media posts in advance for a week / month etc.
Handles all your company’s social media interaction in one place, with a single login.
Ridiculous easy to use.

It creates image posts
A picture paints a thousand words. It creates high impact image posts with zero Photoshop experience.

It find relevant and engaging content to post
Easy content finder. One click posts awesome videos, news, trending content, and much more…

It improves and measures campaign performance
Measure best performing content / hashtags.
Finds optimal times of day to post.
Easily reschedules most successful content.

It’s Free
We hope you’ll upgrade to our Pro version that has even more features (and a small monthly fee), but you get all these features free. Forever.

Here’s the Feedback we’re getting
“I got home this afternoon and have been posting things like crazy, IT’S SO EASY! I am going to send it out to all my friends. I wish you great luck on this, It’s a winner”.

 

Social Media Dashboard

For a free account to self-manage your social media. You can sign up for our FREE social media dashboard here.

HAVEN’T GOT THE TIME TO WRITE YOUR OWN CONTENT? DON’T WORRY

We have a fantastic content writing service that is a perfect fit if you don’t have the time to write all of your social media content. Below we have outlined six reasons why businesses use our content writing service:

  1. It saves you time so that you can do what you do best, run your business.
  2. Fill out a questionnaire about your company so that we have absolute understanding of how your company operates, its values and what you would like us to write your social media about.
  3. Anyone visiting your social media pages will see activity not days or weeks ago but often hours ago, therefore projecting a professional image of your company with assurances that someone is available to talk to in your company.
  4. You have 7 days to review, edit or delete the content that has been scheduled for your company before it gets published, therefore keeping you in complete control of the content that is going out on social media about your company.
  5. Pictures paint a thousand words, with this in mind we create professional looking images to appear on your social media pages amongst the content that will include your branding, logo and contact details.
  6. You can see which hashtags generate the most amount of traffic to your website and then include them with any content that you choose to upload.

Supporting the New Zealand Spinal Trust

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The team at Digital Operative have been working away over the last few months to help the New Zealand Spinal trust launch a new website. Launched just before christmas in December 2015, the new site has improved design and functionality and a new e-commerce facility that allows them to sell their resources and collect donations online.

Hans Wouters, General Manager of the New Zealand Spinal Trust said “Gary’s strategic approach and attention to detail is rare to find in one package and we are thrilled with the result. We fully anticipate the new site to dramatically increase our ability to communicate the many different things required to help people with an SCI find their future. The new e-commerce facility will also make ordering our resources and making donations considerably easier than it has been. Gary’s selection of web platform has already proven very valuable giving us the ability to create content swiftly and easily and respond immediately to needs and opportunities as they have arisen.

It is our intention to benefit our readers as much as we can and become a reliable resource for getting answers to all things spinal in New Zealand and beyond. The Trustees and staff are truly grateful to Gary and Digital Operative for their incredibly generous support and outstanding final result.

Congratulations and thank you Digital Operative!