Making engaging About Us pages that inspire action

A key reason why webmasters and business owners overlook the quality of an About Us page is because they feel it doesn’t relate to product enquiries or the exciting benefits and values that other product pages do. Neglecting the About Us page however, can do damage to product and conversion pages themselves. The main people who read your About Us page may be looking to build some understanding and trust before ‘taking the leap’ to buy or contact you, or they may simply want the feel of some human personality to know they’ve found something unique. Because of this, you need to make sure that you are doing what you can to stand out, represent, and invest your ideals into the readers mind in this space.

 

Give vital Information

What do you actually do? How do you do it? Finding this information is probably the reason why about 90% of your users are on the About Us page to begin with. Try not to delve deeply into impressive statistics or what your strong beliefs about your industry are before confirming with potentially high-end users that they’ve definitely come to the right place.

 

Get personality and benefit across clearly

When we discussed the importance of conveying a consistent feel and attitude across logo, brand name, headings and more, this also applies to the About Us page/s and can be achieved fairly simply.
Think about what personality is going to be consistent from introduction to giving information and to sale, and how that can be conveyed in your language. Are you a highly experienced firm that is proud of its achievements and has historical points of interest? Are you a fun and exciting gym that loves all of its members? Whatever your stance is, it needs to come across in your writing in such a way that your audience immediately picks up on the vibe and feels included. When they leave your About Us page to look at products or content, they should continue with the same mood you set them up with.

 

Be social

Does your business have a figurehead that is commonly involved in several aspects of customer interaction? Be sure to list them right at the top with a happy profile picture and description.
Are there also key staff members that make the business what it is? Be sure to list them and their positions as well. Some websites list their staff with descriptions a whole new web page in an effort to engage the idea that certain fields of services or outcomes are handled by very personal and professional experts.

 

Give proof where appropriate

Testimonials and success stories have several homes on most websites, and the About Us is a great place to list your best. Be sure to cover the scope of your key services and benefits, and don’t get stuck into the details - your user should be able to simply understand how their needs might relate.
Other helpful aspects to include are authentication and awards. Keep it short and sweet as you may need to update this regularly, and provide some simple imagery to get the point across. If you have some stand out strategic partnerships or previous users be sure to list them.

 

Use simple and effective design

Layout, colouring and design elements should allow users to begin and finish reading where you want them to in the most straightforward way possible. Although, this is easier said than done… here are some ideas that might help you out using the UK Coca-Cola About Us page as an example.

‘Introducing our business’ kicks your journey off with prestige, you don’t even have to click on the article to learn the big impressive numbers they want you to know.
‘Our Leadership Priorities’ gives an up to date nod to the company’s Corporate Responsibility, which does wonders for their public image and what you quickly learn about the brand’s personality.
After the big boxes about where the company came from, what they’re up to now and where they’d like to go is done, you have a mini-library of options to choose from and continue to become engaged with the business. And on the side of these pages is a constant ‘browse our brands’ option users notice that makes it all worthwhile!

 

Finally, think about your SEO, and links to more options

Hopefully after reading other Online Marketing Guides, this is already in the forefront of your brain whenever you’re making new webpages or testing out new marketing ideas. If there’s a logical path to calling you after an explanation of the team; add a link to ‘contact us’. If there’s a small spiel about the helpful information you give to your followers, share a link to subscribing or your social pages. Remember to make sure that your hyperlinks are smart and SEO primed.

 

Finding the mix of writing, design and SEO difficult?

Career Exchange can help allied health clinic websites to get back on track with engaging webpages so that you can increase your influx of natural interest. Our team has the design, writing and SEO marketing capacity to tackle almost any challenge and we are geared to the clientele challenges that allied health Australia face. To chat about what might be possible contact 03 9670 9590 or email info@careerexchange.com.au.

Tracking your Success with Analytics

Part 2 – Understanding the Statistics

In Part 1 of Tracking your Success with Analytics we talked about how beneficial the Google Analytics tool is for measuring your site’s performance and how to set it up. Now that you have hopefully had a chance to click around the system a little, we will gain a better idea of what is going on and what will be important for you to learn. There are an abundance of options and statistics to look at, but chances are you won’t need most of these quite yet so don’t feel too overwhelmed!

Below are some of the key metrics that will show up in the Standard Reporting ‘Overview’ section that you will get to know. Be sure to check the timeframe in the top right corner so that you’re getting the right dates you’re looking for.

Basic Statistics from your Overview. They will show as 0 when no site activity has been tracked yet

 

                                                            

Visits - How many times people have come to the site.

Unique Visitors - The number of individuals who visited the site.

Pageviews – The amount of times people have viewed your site and its pages.

Pages / Visit – The average amount of pages each of your visitors are viewing before leaving.

% New Visits – The rate of visitors to the site who have not been there before.

Avg. Visit Duration: The average amount of time people are spending on your pages before leaving.

Bounce rate - The percentage of people who only viewed one page then left. It is common for a blog to have a high bounce rate as people generally read one article and exit.

Exit rate – The percentage of people who have left a page without viewing further pages.

 Standard reporting options allow for a deeper analysis

Filters

It is recommended that you set up an alternate profile with a filter on it that will filter out visitors from your own company office. This way the results are not artificially inflated by staff looking at your website (especially if your initial traffic is slow and many changes are being made to your site).

Goals

Another important practice is to set up goals for your website. When a goal is completed it is called a ‘conversion’. You have complete control over the goals on your website; however you do need to manually set them up. General goals may be a visitor purchasing an item, or visitors that have clicked through from the home page to the contact us page, or subscribing to a newsletter. Goals can be set up to be sequential where you can track the progress of every step of the goal, i.e. this could used to track the shopping cart system of a webpage and finding out at what part of the process people are abandoning their cart.

View of the Google Analytics Dashboard. The black squares are where the data is displayed. The dashboard provides a basic overview of your website's progress. Click standard reporting to get into your overview

There are many tutorial videos for Google Analytics available on the Conversion University youtube channel. Google Analytics can also be integrated with Google Webmaster Tools, Google Adsense, and Google Adwords providing quality data across all platforms.

To Do

o    Test that views and visitors are being recorded in your analytics account

o    Become familiar with selecting different timeframes and viewing different statistics

o    Setup filters to receive more realistic data

o    Setup goals to track your ‘success’ points

For HR / Psychs

When setting up goals, think about all the small steps and activities involved in leading to a positive outcome to your business. If it’s incoming phone calls, it may be an idea to set up those who click through to ‘contact us’ details as a goal, and give it a dollar value that you think reflects the average contribution it makes. Other goals that aren’t directly related to purchasing (such as an online cart system) include; clicking on email options, alerts and newsletter subscriptions, creating an online profile, viewing pricing details of certain services, and sharing content with other users. If you notice that the pages containing these conversions are receiving high bounce rates, it may mean that you could be more convincing and to the point in communicating the core benefits.

Track Your Success With Google Analytics Part 1

Part 1 - Intro and Install

Google Analytics is a highly integrated net tool that puts a ‘finger on the pulse’ of your site’s activity. Without it, web marketers and small business owners find it difficult to know how their website efforts are performing. Google provides support for Google Analytics users in an effort to make it accessible to everyone. Having a basic familiarity with HTML will help with setting up GA. If not, you won’t lose out. In general, all webmasters and web marketers should be using Analytics frequently!

Here are just a few things Analytics will allow you to do:

• Check how many people are coming to your site in any chosen timeframe, from where, and how they’re searching for you
• Check your most popular pages for visiting activity, and which are generating sales and other conversions
• Check how many people are new or returning users, how long they stay for and how many exit immediately 
• Most importantly: you can use all the above and more to decide how well / not so well just about everything is going!

An example of the Google Analytic tracking code. Here it is inserted in the Footer (bottom) of every page. It is Written in Java script and is entirely generated by google, so do not worry about not being able to understand it. Google can only track pages with the code, so Make sure the code is installed on every page of Your website. 

You can sign up for a free account at www.google.com/analytics, enter your gmail account or make one. Once there you need to enter your website address which will give you a tracking code. Google doesn’t automatically track your webpage, so in order to do so you need to install the provided tracking code.

Once installed, allow a few days for data to be generated. The sooner you implement it and have a plan of continually setting up and tracking new pages the better. Next we will look into what this program can do to give you that “Wow, I know stuff about my site now!” factor.

Hit List

        Made a Google Analytics account

        Installed the necessary tracking code

        Get a basic feel of the site’s navigation

Rankerizer – A Search Engine Rank Tracking Tool

Do you go into Google to try and find where your website ranks against different terms? This can be a painful experience where most of us would give up or lose track. Fortunately tools are available to help track how your key terms are performing over time, so you can decide how well new SEO efforts are going and where you need to re-energise existing pages. Rankerizer is one of many such tools that helps you stay on top of your website’s search engine rankings.

What does Rankerizer do?

Rankerizer tracks the Google, Bing and Yahoo search ranking for search terms for any website you want. It is a free and powerful tool which can be used to check if the changes you make to your site are increasing your site’s rankings. You can use Google Analytics to identify terms used to find you site and then use Rankerizer to track where you are ranking on those particular terms. You can also use it to track those same terms for your competitors’ websites. Rankerizer also can be used to monitor the number of backlinks and display your PageRank for your particular webpages. When setting up Rankerizer be sure to change the country so that the data given is relevant to you.

As Google’s results are becoming more and more personalized, Rankerizer’s results can vary more between tests. This does not mean it is an irrelevant tool, just take the results as suggestions rather than gospel. Use it to see trends and to see if your optimization efforts are making a large scale difference i.e. from not ranking at all in one month to suddenly ranking number 23.

There are other services available; however this one is free, very easy to use and provides good data.

  Rankerizer main screen. In this example we just See Google Search Rankings. It also shows other search influencing factors such as Backlinks and PageRank

Saving Externally - If you’re the type that prefers to have things saved in spread sheets in your own format, exporting to excel is straightforward. This way you can also compare results to other reports.

Choosing Keywords – Make sure you have all the keywords associated with recent, ongoing and upcoming page changes being made to your site. It’s good to come back to choosing keywords every month or so to make sure you are keeping up to date with how your efforts are working. Be sure to revise your keyword skills with our Trends and Keywords article.

To Do

o    Go to the Rankerizer site (or a similar free tracking tool) and install

o    Add your site’s details and change the settings and frequency

o    Add keywords you would like to improve on and track

o    Regularly check how things are going!

For Psych and HR

If you’ve recently removed areas of your website, be sure to still keep tracking previous terms that you used to use. They may come in handy again, but you also want to be sure that if you no longer offer a particular service that it stops ranking highly or risk misleading your users. On the other hand, when you create new areas and pages, be sure to make it a habit that associated keywords are being tracked!

We hope these SEO guides have been helpful in building your online presence!  Up next we will be looking into Google Analytics which gives priceless insights into your website traffic and can also be used in conjunction with these SEO guides.

If you’d like to continue building your SEO strength, be sure to speak to us to discuss where we may assist, call 03 9670 0590 or email info@careerexchange.com.au.

SEO - Links – Off-Page Ranking and Lasting Quality

Did you know that your Google ranking can be strongly affected by external pages that link to you? Did you also know that there are better ways to use links like “click here” to boost your ranking and user experience?

We discuss easy ways to get more out of your linking efforts that you can use in addition to our Google Trends article, and really give lasting benefits to your site traffic!

Off-Page Ranking and Back Links

Hyperlinks to your website from an external website (i.e. one that isn’t yours) are called backlinks or backwards links. Search engines look for and count the backlinks to your website, Google looks at backlinks as a form of legitimacy and quality. The thought pattern is - if a website has more websites linking to it, it must have something worthwhile that people are looking for. More backlinks generally mean ranking higher in the organic search results for the relevant keywords. However, there is a quality over quantity factor, meaning if more prominent websites link back to yours as opposed to a relatively unknown one, the link from the larger website will carry more weight.

Link building is the process used to try and generate more links to your website, which essentially involves contacting other web pages and asking for them to link to you. This can be a laborious task. Social media provides a fantastic opportunity to build links, not by asking people to link to you, but through providing high quality, interesting content that people want to share. This is a much more rewarding way to link build, however we will cover several social media and backlink finding options later.

How to make quality links

To make quality links, you need to make sure you’re relating to what your user is searching for. Search engines look for the content in a link to help searchers, so the days of relying on “click here” are quickly coming to a close. Below are some examples of bad links that can add unnecessary text to your page, and good links that can help your SEO. Other than that, they will also look a lot better when users scroll through your information looking for pages of interest to go to next!

Poor                                                                                      Better!

To contact us, click here                                                     Contact us

Find out more about Web Marketing                              Find out more about Web Marketing

To place an order click here                                              Place an order

Other Important Notes on SEO

If you are a genuine website producing great relevant content and being consistent with the keywords you are using, you shouldn’t run into many troubles with SEO. Some choose to outsource SEO options, and there are tools and solutions available at rather large prices. Avoid anything that guarantees number 1 ranking or spams you in any way. Also be careful of sites that quote low prices without details on what will be achieved or what personal details they require. As the Google search algorithm is getting more and more complex, it is becoming more and more obvious that web developers just need to follow Google’s code of best practices and create relevant engaging quality content that people want to read and your web page will rank highly.  

Finally, be sure to save the below Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors!

This is a Great chart for SEO and sums up all the components rather nicely. Courtesy of Search Engine Land!

To-do list

        I have an idea of my current backlink activity through Google Webmaster Tools. (see webmaster tool setup article)

        I have taken note of any potential blocks in my pages that may be affecting my usability and ranking.

        My hyperlinks are relevant to the page they lead to, and I have altered links that say “click here” etc

        I have noted how my general SEO health compares now after changing some tags and headings

For Psych / HR

Even when contacting for example business or psychologist advice websites, you don’t need to write up a huge business proposal of why they should be linking to your site. They link to businesses their current users may be interested in and you provide this business, simple. Let them know you have looked over their site and like it, then explain briefly what your site is about and why linking to you may be a benefit to their users. You can copy and paste parts of your email content for different users, just be sure that the content applies each time and that you’re saying something of interest to them.

SEO - Trends and Keywords

We have previously talked about how making titles, tags and key terms relevant to your audience is a huge part of getting more interested people and potential customers to your website. Now we are going go beyond using logical terms and find trending keywords that are actively being searched for by your audience!

Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to find out what exact terms people are searching for to put into (and exclude) in your titles, tags, headings and paragraphs!

Don’t let the simplicity of this tool fool you, many online investors and writers use Google Trends to find out what people are searching for against timeframes and country to grasp online opportunities as they arise.

Let’s get started: Say for example you want to sell rain jackets to Australians. People may search for these by typing ‘raincoat,’ or ‘rain jacket’ and we want to know what words to use to show up more in Google results. Type ‘raincoat’ in the first ‘+Add term’ box and ‘rain jacket’ in the one below, limit to Australia and see a comparison. We will see which term is more popular, a seasonal trend (literally, as we come toward colder months searches go up) and a higher popularity in Victoria!

Does this mean we should completely steer clear of putting “rain jacket” into our headings and text? Absolutely not! People are still searching for it, but we now have perspective about which terms are more relevant to our audience, and what we can expect to see a greater response from. 

Play around with this tool, get to know the different options. See what happens when you type in terms related to current events or political debates! 

When you are familiar with this tool you can start putting in terms related to your business and its services, and pay attention to the ‘related terms’ results. Make sure you are searching by the countries the particular webpage’s services can provide for. You will quickly notice that searching for fewer words is more popular than several words at once.

To Do For My Business

        Have you brainstormed keyword ideas with staff members?

        Have you run a trend search for important aspects of your homepage and top navigational links?

        Have you checked the location and time sensitivity filters for your search?

        Are trending words included into URLs, Headings and paragraph text?

For Psych and HR

Before you start brainstorming and searching for trends, it can be a great idea to write up a list of which webpages or services you’d like to get the most attention to. This will most likely be pages that have big important updates or where purchase decisions can be made. After this be sure to optimise pages that people may search more frequently for, this may include informational or advice pages.

Need help with SEO keyword selection?

We also survey our clients’ website plans and use various SEO tools at our disposal to select and implement the best keyword strategy suited to your goals. Contact info@psychpress.com.au or call 03 9670 0590.

SEO - URLs, Crawlers and Site-Maps

Have you ever wondered how Google searches all of the world’s websites and gives us the best results so quickly? This is organised by and intricate system of Spiders and Crawlers, and we’re going to have a look into how your website fits into this system! We’ll also show you quick and easy steps you can do with your URL organising and sitemap to make sure Google is indexing your website!

URLs

What you see in an Address Bar is called a URL (Universal Resource Locator). It is the address to the webpage you are currently on. This is easy to see.  It is ideal to have URLs containing wording that is related to your page rather than a string of numbers or characters.

Figure 1 - This is the address to the Psych Press About Us page.

This example is for the Psych Press about us page. Notice how the URL has “about us” in it. Your users should be able to quickly recognise what the URL will bring them to as the page loads and when they see it again, if retyping your address. The influence on search rankings isn’t huge, but it is still an influence that is easy to change! Google also reads hyphens as a space but underscores as linking two words together, so keep this in mind. Apart from these considerations, having comprehensible URLs will help greatly with analysis with Google Analytics (which we’ll get into later!).

Spiders and Crawlers

Your website will be crawled by a spider or crawler. These robots index web pages for Google’s search database. If they cannot crawl your website you have a problem. This means your website will not appear as high in Google’s search results. The best way to do this is to create an account with Google Webmaster Tools and check your website’s crawl health. You will need to insert a Meta tag into the HTML of your front page in order for Google to verify that you are the owner. Google will provide the Meta tag for you. Once this is set up you can go to your webpage’s dashboard on Webmaster Tools and see if there are any errors. You should also get accustomed to the ‘Traffic’ and ‘Optimisation’ areas of this tool as this is where you can see which key terms are becoming more effective in attracting clicks to your site!

Figure 2 - Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors page. Detailed reports on all the crawl errors are available through webmaster tools. There would not be green ticks if the entire website was unable to be crawled.

 

 

 

 

Site Map

A quick and easy way to ensure all your pages on your website are seen by the crawlers is to upload a site map and then tell Webmaster tools where to find it on your website. A free site mapping tool can be found at XML-sitemaps.com which is quick and simple to use and will give you the site map file you need. Find it here at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.   It has a max of 500 pages, which is more than enough for most websites. Once the map is complete upload it to your website and connect it to webmaster tools. The site map will assist crawlers in finding all the pages on your website and improve site visibility to searchers interested in your services!

 

To Do For My Business

        Are your website’s URLs logical and user friendly?

        Is your website connected to a webmaster tools account?

        What is the health of your webpage?

        Does your webpage have a site map registered with Webmaster Tools?

For Psych and HR

In Webmaster Tools, don’t become too concerned with common errors such as the “404 not found” error if you’re often removing parts of the site. If you follow the error links given and realize it is no longer required or linked to on site it shouldn’t affect your SEO. Another good use of Webmaster Tools for you will be to check how often your page is being crawled, which will usually be around once a week, and backlinks tend to take longer to show up. If you’re making changes and want to check on backlinks or errors the crawl times will give you an idea of when you can expect results. Just keep in mind that all Google ‘tools and rules’ are being further developed all the time!

SEO –Headings that increase Rank and Usability

Heading Tags

The benefits of polishing up your headings are three fold – 1) they are a quick and easy aspect to change to influence your search rankings 2) a well crafted heading can inform the user that they have come to the place they intended, and 3) it can induce them to be curious and search for more information on your site. Here’s what you can do to get things in order...

When Google sends out its spiders to crawl the interweb, the spiders (most often called crawlers) pick up on headings and report them back to the Google search algorithm. Big letters on a page does not mean it is a title. The spiders are blind to all the cosmetics on a website and only recognize certain heading codes.  Use the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 tags to specify the heading and the subheadings.

 Figure 1: How heading tags appear to the viewer

 You shouldn’t run into any issues if you keep these in mind. Most website editors do this automatically. Make sure you are using your relevant keywords in the titles, however do not overdo them or use long forceful sentences.

Figure 2: HTML code view of Heading Tags. The H with the follow number inside the < > are the heading tags. The <P> is used to specify the next paragraph.

 

 

 

 

 

Headings that help your content

People often browse web pages by skimming the headings generally before beginning to read the actual content of the article. So not only will improving your headings be beneficial to SEO, it will also give your website stronger chances of being viewed and read. Below are some considerations for making sure people won’t miss out on your important information, and then become enticed to read more.

·         Will my intended audience relate the heading to their own interests and needs? Eg. “An affordable ‘XYZ’ service for Health Professionals, delivered fast”

·         Do headings give an idea as to what they’re about to read or view? Eg. “How do you Identify Competencies specific to Leadership Roles?”

·         If you’re about to describe a service, does the heading include a goal-orientated outcome? Eg. ‘How can I save time to hire?’ these kind of “I” and “my” statements are also more commonly typed into Google!

·         Does the title make sense in relation to where they have most likely come from? If you have a link on your home page for “opening hours” then your opening hours page should reuse this text.

If your headings can represent the core benefit of what reading the page will bring to the user, along with the above you’re doing your content a favour!

To Do For my Business

        Make use of H1, H2 and other heading tags

        Use just one H1 tag per page. Google gets confused easily.

        Your headings have the most relevant terms

        You haven’t overused the same terms in headings

        A colleague has read over your headings and noted anything that sticks out or doesn’t belong

For Psych and HR

Remember the formality behind your brand and your typical audience when making title decisions. You wouldn’t pair big promotional or extremely cheap sounding terms if you’re trying to get across a feeling of a premium or high quality option. After addressing the main reason behind why they’re there and core benefits in H1, think about common terms that people look for especially if you have a lot of text. To help guide them to what they need to know you may use simple titles like “contact details,” “open times,” “prices,” and “book now”.

Now you have some great tips to get your pages starting to perform! To achieve specific SEO outcomes for your website please feel free to talk to one of our specialists, ring 03 9670 4275 or email info@psychpress.com.au.