Absolute Media is proud to welcome our latest new client, Little Estate Lawyers.

Whilst not exactly a hot-off-the-press news scoop (we were originally approached late in 2018), they are yet another great example of a client who originally approached us for a specific solution, then realised the invaluable benefits our rounded marketing experience in helping to establish their new small business, and are now been able to rely on us for additional marketing services.

Headquartered in Brisbane, Little Estate Lawyers are specialist Wills and Estates Lawyers. They operate across Queensland and New South Wales, focusing on the provision of exceptional, straightforward legal advice and no hidden costs to clients in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney.

With a successful legal career which started in 1997, owner Danielle Little worked for almost a decade for a large multi-national firm in litigation and estate matters before specialising in the area of Succession Law. She recently decided to start her own business and during that time chose Absolute Media ahead of numerous other digital marketing agencies to develop her new website design.

New business start-ups are often cost-conscious exercises and this one was no different. Working to a tight budget and with the brief to extend Little Lawyer’s new business brand into the digital world, both parties agreed that the new website design needed to make a strong impact, to become a point of difference from potential competing business websites.

Using a strong, classic black, white and gold colour scheme and some of the classic typographic qualities of ITC’s Avant Garde Gothic font collection, we developed a strong, single page layout and user interface design with the plan to include subtle animation and movement to the live version.

Absolute also catered to the fact that the site would inevitably extend in scope and content as Little Lawyers growth began to develop.

Danielle’s new logo design process with another agency hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as expected, so additional consultation was requested from us on how to address various issues and to ensure that the Little Lawyers logo and brand was both consistently represented and positively extended, to enhance the existing materials and maximise first impressions.

Just six months in and with their second office already open, Absolute have recently been appointed to also handle their Search Engine Optimisation requirements in Queensland and New South Wales.

As the song goes, ‘From the little things, big things grow’. Little Lawyer’s ability to call upon Absolute Media’s broad range of small business marketing services and experience as they develop a name for themselves is a great example of how important it is to partner with a company who take the time to understand your business, and can help you to take it to the next level at every stage.

Since opening our doors to Brisbane in 2005 we have always had a healthy proportion of clients pointed in our direction.

And we are pleased to welcome two more. The new start-up ‘A Happier Life’ and the longstanding ‘Moorooka Sports & Community Club’ have recently joined Absolute Media’s client roster. Both businesses were referred to us for our hugely competitive and very effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) capabilities.

A Happier Life is a hypnosis service owned and operated by former Australian test cricketer Gary Cosier. By utilising Psychotherapy and Hypnosis clients can benefit from their range of traditional solutions to help them quit smoking and lose weight, through to more forward-thinking areas such as life coaching and peak sports performance.

Mookrooka Sports is a traditional bowling club that has undergone subtle modernisation in recent years. This has seen the extension of the club’s facilities to include a new bistro, and to offer its facilities as venues for weddings, social functions and business. Additionally, to appeal to the very popular demand for barefoot bowls in Brisbane food trucks now regularly rock-up to serve hungry punters and craft beers have been introduced to the bar.

In a separate but very do-able manoeuvre, one of our existing clients recently relocated from Hervey Bay to Toowoomba, and wanted to bring their SEO results with them, which is very do-able. Essentially with a purge and replacement of all keyphrases and location mentions to start with, and underpinned by new fundamentals - Google My Business listing, address citations, and editing of the numerous backlinks that we had built - we have successfully transitioned the content and turned on the lead generation fountain in location for a range of terms which include Headache Toowoomba, amongst other symptoms that are treatable with acupuncture and holistic therapies.

Absolute have been providing SEO services since 2011. The increasing level of competition to get companies listed on page one, and our approach of working smarter rather than harder in order to retain our competitive edge, means that we’ve seen a recent surge for this part of our business marketing offering. Many big SEO businesses seem to bombard their clients with the appliance of science and in-depth analyses of algorithm updates, but it’s not as complicated as they make it out to be, and our results clearly demonstrate that fact.

If you’re interested in getting your website to feature in the page one results for a specific, search term or keyphrase, call us on 07 3300 6308 to find out more.

Website technology advances continuously, but rarely does it force us to upgrade older websites.

Since July last year, web browser software (Chrome, Mozilla, MS Edge +++) started labelling websites using HTTP as ‘not secure’ in the address bar. More info here: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/

Whilst not initially problematic, Google has recently raised the prominence of the warnings. Before loading an HTTP page, it is now also displays a prominent ‘site not safe’ page. The net result is that this is deterring visitors and prospects from viewing HTTP websites, who incorrectly assume that the site contains malicious content, which isn’t necessarily the case.

For clients whose sites are hosted on our web servers, we have purchased SSL certificates for those servers which means that you don’t need to purchase one for your own domain. These alone average between $80-200+.

However, to convert your website to HTTPS and achieve secure SSL encryption (showing a padlock in the address bar), we essentially need to locate and change all coded content links on for menus, images, hyperlinks, stylesheets, script libraries and videos, and setup the necessary page re-directions to make sure that all traffic looking for the old content successfully reaches the correct, secure content.

If you'd like your site upgrading to HTTPS, whether you are an existing client or not, we can help. Please contact us and we'll gladly provide an estimate.

We're sure many of you are familiar with the term SEO and what it stands for. If you’re not - very briefly - Search Engine Optimisation is the process of enhancing a website so that search engines such as Google and Bing list that site on page one of their results when people search using popular terms to find the product or services that a company sells.

As part of a marketing mix, we have a handful of clients that we provide SEO to on a monthly basis, all of whom have been using us to do so for a minimum of two years, some for as many as five years.

SEO is of course now a very competitive sector, and whilst investing in getting a page or site to appear on page one is possible, keeping it there is another thing, especially when the businesses you compete with who offer similar services, are also trying to become top Google dog too.

In our last month’s reports one of our clients had every single one of their terms ranking on page one, sixteen of which were in the top three, and eight of which were in the #1 spot. Not surprisingly their business has grown *significantly * since we started working for them three years ago.

So if your website is well designed, looks great and gets compliments, but rarely generates any enquiries or phonecalls, then it’s time to ask yourself what if it did? Once you have, call us on 07 3300 6308 and ask, what can absolute do to help?

Why is it important to write your copy in a specific style for websites, as opposed to print or other media? It has been shown that reading habits on screen vary greatly from reading habits off screen. People are much more task-oriented online, and read at least 25% slower on screen. It's a good idea to write about half the amount of text for a web page that you would ordinarily write for an offline document.

Successful website design is about keeping all your information organised in bite-sized chunks, tailoring your content to your audience, and presenting information in a way that can be easily scanned and searched.

1. Present Information Concisely

Visitors want information in bite-size chunks, and they want it now. Usability studies have shown that very few users (around 15%) actually read the text on a web page word-for-word. Rather, the vast majority of users scanned the content looking for keywords or phrases that either contained the information they wanted or possessed some relevance to their interest.

Page titles and meta descriptions are used by people and search engines - make sure they are relevant and concise and help to lead the user to the information they're searching for.

Here are some tips for keeping your content brief:

• Write concise sentences.
• Keep paragraphs short.
• Use subheadings to break up content
• Provide a summary or overview of key points for longer articles before providing the details.
• Provide clear, concise calls to action.

2. Use Bullet Points

Titles and bullet points are the most-read copy on the page. Lists are preferable to paragraphs because they are easier to read and scan, and also carry an implication of succinct information. Make sure that your bullet pointed information is concise, and not just your descriptive text with bullet points applied!

The following list shows which words tend to be read on a bullet list ("word" is read content; "ignored" is ignored content):

• Word word word word ignored
• Word word word ignored ignored
• Word ignored ignored ignored ignored
• Ignored ignored ignored ignored ignored
• Word word ignored ignored ignored
• It makes sense to write your bullet points then reorganise their placement according to importance.

3. Write Search Engine Optimised Copy

The content of your website is critical to its success on many levels; it can have an effect on your website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rankings (Google places emphasis on sites with well-structured content). Search Engine algorithms are made up of many factors and complex calculations. Why not make the most of the one factor that you have complete control over - your content?

Overall, good SEO copy has:

• A minimum of 300 words per page.
• Between 7% and 9% keywords per page.
• One principal topic per page.
• Links to other relevant pages on the website.
• Succinct, page and paragraph headings that are also rich in keywords.
• Summary bullet points.

4. Formatting

Keep your formatting clean and tidy. Most users want to find information succinctly and won't have time to appreciate a plethora of font styles, colours and sizes.

• Use the same font across all pages. A web-standard sans serif font such as Arial or Verdana is easy to read and ensures that your text will be viewable across all browsers and to all users.
• Underlined text is the standard convention to differentiate links form other text. Don't underline text if it isn't a link as this confuses and frustrates users.
• Use bold text to highlight important words or phrases.
• Avoid using all capital letters, even for headings - it is the web equivalent of SHOUTING!
• If you intend to use images or graphics in the content area of your site, make sure they are of a consistent style, and do not detract from the content itself.
• It's a good idea to ensure images are resized so that they don't increase page download times. If you want users to have an option to view a full size image, have the low resolution web version on the page, and then link that image to the higher resolution version.
• Remember to use a caption for each image - alternative text is an important usability aspect for users who have images turned off or who are using assistive devices (such as screen readers).

5. Provide Content For Offline Reading

Sometimes you may have a lot of information that your users need to read in full: case studies, white papers or reports for example. Allow your users to choose whether they want to read it online or offline. Rather than uploading the content of a long document, you can create a link to the document so it can be downloaded for offline reading. PDF documents are generally accepted as the web standard - they also look more professional and Acrobat Reader is free to download. Finally, ensure the document is titled appropriately for your website (rename the working file title if required).

6. Check Speling, Grammer And Punktuation

A website with content that contains grammatical and spelling errors can lack credibility and doesn't cast the business in a favourable light. How thorough and focused on quality do your potential clients think you will be if you haven't taken the time to check your website copy that is made public internationally?

For any further information or resources about content writing for the web, please contact Will Nuttall on 07 3300 0494 or solutions@absolutemedia.com.au

Q: What use is your website if prospective customers can't find it?

A: Nowadays, when we need a quick answer to something, more often than not we chuck the words into a search engine such as Google or Bing to see what solutions are offered.

Every day, searches are being made for the products or services that you sell, in your area, and when they are, is your website featured in the results? If it is but it's beyond the first couple of pages, then you are missing out on potential new business.

If you want to improve your search result position for search terms specific to your business, then you need Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it's known in Brisbane!

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving your website's ranking position in the organic, non-sponsored listings area of a search engine results page and when done effectively, it's like having a salesperson working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is now also considered to provide the highest return-on-investment of any kind of online marketing.

The factors affecting a website's ranking position include its design, its content and its level of 'endorsement' by other credible websites. Whilst the concept of improving your website's position with a search engines result pages is relatively simple, it is the strategy, and the implementation of actions specific to your business to achieve this goal, which are a bit more complex.

Absolute Media have been optimising websites for more than 10 years, which is a long time before someone invented the mouthful of a phrase that we now all know as Search Engine Optimisation. Brisbane has many 'SEO specialists' that will happily lock you into a long-term contract and charge you much more than is necessary to do a good job. But that's just not our way of doing things.

So if you want to:

• Increase visitor numbers to your website
• Convert website visitors into customers
• Grow your business online

… contact us today to organise a no obligation assessment.