Services – Justin Aldridge

Here are the services I can offer to businesses to help them with their online marketing campaigns.

These are all services which I have honed over the years whilst effectively adapting them to my own websites.

Search Engine Optimisation – SEO

SEO is the starting point of any online marketing campaign. The purpose of SEO is to ensure that a website is fully prepared to maximise its potential on search engines. A poorly optimised website can result in less leads and sales being generated through it.

SEO also includes analysing all of the available potential in a client’s particular niche to ensure that all opportunities to grab traffic relative to different and related search terms are taken.

When it comes to optimising a website for SEO purposes the following are some of the items that need to reviewed and addressed:

Title tags
Meta tags
Page urls
Website structure
Indexing structure
Internal link optimisation
Image optimisation
Duplicate content considerations
Page load speeds
Canonicalisation issues
Keyword reviews

There are many others factors of a website that need to be reviewed and I will go through all of these with you.

Is it THAT Important?

Of course it is. Search engines are under no obligation to crawl, index or rank your website. You have to earn the right to be featured. SEO lays the groundwork for your entire online marketing campaign and success.

A badly optimised website can actually do more harm than good so getting this right is quite crucial.

It is possible to rank a website highly on search engines using just targeted links and without any SEO, but the process is made much easier if proper SEO has been carried out on the website to begin with.

Content and Keywords

SEO is ultimately all about content and keywords. Search engines prefer to find pages of unique content around specific topics to serve as results to their searchers. It sounds simple enough but maximising this, without overdoing it, is key and often complex depending on the website and niche.

If, for example, your business is about selling ice creams, capturing every possible search for ice creams is key. This could centre around ice cream flavours, manufacturers, points of sale, ingredients of each, and so on. Every topic has a vast array of potential traffic that needs to be captured.

Local and GEO Targeted Focus

A recent analysis by online marketing firm, Chitika, showed that over 40% of search terms are local or geo-targeted. It’s mainly people looking for businesses or services in or near a local area. This figure increases year-on-year as more and more people perform searches on their smart phones when they are in or around an area.

Being visible in the search engines for local search terms is now a very important aspect of SEO.

Get in Touch

Get in touch with me and together we’ll go over your SEO efforts so far and what improvements you can make to your website to attract more targeted traffic and customers.

SEO Consulting

My SEO Consulting service is used by businesses who already have their own internal marketing and webmaster staff who handle the online marketing activities of the company but want or need some external professional support and guidance.

I work together with businesses to equip them with all the knowledge and understanding they need to maintain and grow an highly effective online marketing campaign.

Keeping up-to-date with all the latest search engine algorithm changes and how they affect different websites is what I do every day and then advise my clients accordingly on how to adapt their online strategies to meet these changes.

SEO is not a one-off task, it is a continuous process which needs to adapt to a constantly changing dynamic online environment.

As a consultant to your company you can rely on me to guide you through algorithmic changes, updates and filters to ensure that you business continues to enjoy a great return from your website.

Spying on your SEO Company

Some of my clients rely 100% on their websites for their entire business. Some have long-standing relationships with SEO companies and they use my consultancy services to ensure that what their SEO companies are doing isn’t going to harm their websites in any way.

It seems crazy that this should be necessary but if you’re totally dependent on your website to run your business then getting a second opinion from an SEO professional (yes, that’s me!), brings some peace of mind that the changes being made to the website aren’t about to cause it to be penalised by the search engines and dramatically affect your business.

Link Building

Link building – Two words that send shivers down the spines of most webmasters. Every website needs external links pointing to it so that it ranks well in search engines.

Each link pointing to your site is like a vote of confidence for your website. The more “votes” the more your website seems popular and therefore, the higher it ranks.

However, getting other websites to link to yours is the most time consuming and frustrating part of the whole online marketing experience. But if you want to rank high in the search engines then you generally need a lot of links, also known as backlinks.

I’m here to free you from the whole link building agony and frustration.

How do you do it Justin?

Before I give you an idea of how I go about getting links for websites, let me tell you what’s needed for a link building campaign:

Good quality links from good sites
Diversity of links – Different types and different sites
Link text diversity
Acceptable rate of link acquisition – Need to avoid tripping search engine filters
Avoid link farms and dodgy websites
Don’t pay for links – Google doesn’t like it

Getting links has become increasingly complicated. Google’s view is that you should just have great content and people will automatically link to it from their own websites.

The reality is that this just doesn’t happen that way in the majority of cases. Normal businesses have to go out of their way to get links as no one will naturally just link to their websites.

For example, if you have a website selling floor tiles, no matter how well you write about floor tiles it is unlikely that anyone is going to link to your website, unless there is a floor tile fanatic out there with a popular blog!

I work with clients to generate a broad spread of links from a variety of sources to create what can be described as an acceptable link profile and one which will push their websites to the first page of Google search results. The process tends to be long and slow but the results are definitely worth the wait.

Best not to rush it

I’ve lost many of my test websites when I’ve accumulated hundreds or thousands of links to them in a very short space of time. Google tends to frown upon “sudden popularity” so it’s best that a link building campaign be spread out over 6 to 12 months for the best and safest effect.

If you do want more rapid results I can get you the links you need much quicker, but at this point you have to realise that there is a risk involved in doing this.

Remember, Google owes you nothing, they are doing you a favour ranking your website. So don’t upset the big G.

What’s all this about a Penguin?

Penguin is the name given to an extra algorithm that Google uses to filter out sites with questionable link profiles. When the not-so-cuddly penguin grabs hold of your website it can really negatively impact your traffic and therefore, your business.

That’s why creating an effective and progressive link building plan over the course of 6 to 12 months is the best route to take to try and avoid the Penguin effect on your website.

Let me get you the links you need

Every website and niche is different and subsequently the number and types of links required to rank well can vary greatly.

Large complex websites will require significantly more link building work than a small local computer shop.

I’m here to free you from the whole link building agony and frustration.

Conversion Rate Optimisation – CRO

It doesn’t matter what your website is about, you probably want someone to take an action when they visit it.

It could be that you want them to phone you, fill in a form, buy your product, download a free guide, like your Facebook page, whatever it is you want them to do, you can get more people doing it from just your current level of traffic by improving the conversion rate of the landing pages.

CRO focuses on increasing the number of actions taken on your website without the need to increase traffic. Every website can benefit from this.

Quick Results

The main benefit of improving the conversion rate of your website is that the results are pretty much instantaneous. As soon as you make the necessary changes to your website you can begin to enjoy those extra phone calls, downloads, bookings or whatever it is you want people to do.

Sometimes the simplest of changes can have quite dramatic effects whilst other times improvements are made in small increments to test the impact of each change.

Every website and audience is different so every conversion optimisation strategy is unique to each website. Pretty quickly after looking at your website I can tell you if it needs work to improve its conversion rate.

It’s a bit of a no-brainer to do this. If you have a website with traffic why wouldn’t you want more business out of it whilst waiting for all the SEO and link building strategies to take effect?

Social Media Marketing

Having established and run two large social websites aimed at expats over the years, I have a an in-depth understanding and experience of what makes a great social marketing campaign.

Most people tend to focus solely on Facebook and Twitter as their social strategy but being social is much more than just those two websites.

This is a big subject and one where often businesses can struggle to appreciate or calculate the ROI based on the amount of time that needs to be invested. I’m here to make it all that little bit clearer and help you plan and execute an effective social marketing strategy.

Reasons to be Social

Many businesses struggle to understand the need to be social online but the fact is that the internet is becoming increasingly more open and the days where you could just have a website and people would just enquire about your service, or buy your product, are more or less coming to an end.

People buy from people and so when they visit your website they want to know that there is a real person behind it. It makes it even easier for people to buy from you if they have already gotten to “virtually” know you. This is the point of social media – Create relationships.

You don’t have to be the most popular person online with the most Twitter followers or Facebook likes, it’s more about giving people the confidence to trust you and your business.

Social media sites, forums, blogs, press releases, being quoted in the press and writing for other websites are all forms of social media.

There is no one-size-fits-all. Every person and business is different and therefore a social marketing campaign can be specifically adapted to the needs and goals of the business.

Email Marketing

I am a massive advocate of email marketing and I’m often astonished as to how few companies even bother to do this, and even more astonished when those that do bother don’t seem to put any real thought or energy into it.

Having accumulated a decent sized mailing list a few years back it really saved me and my business when Google (mistakenly) removed my website from it’s index. Without that list I wouldn’t have had any income to live off.

Email marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of generating leads and business online.

Email Overload

I know that often businesses are a little averse to sending out email on a regular basis to their customers or potential customers, feeling that they may be annoying them too much as we all suffer from email overload already.

That is just not the case.

Yes, the purpose of every email that you send is just trying to sell people something then they will get annoyed and either start flagging your emails as spam or unsubscribe from your list.

But, you may be surprised to hear, most of the time people will be happy to hear from you if what you send them is useful to them.

Information Marketing

Give, give, give, give and give some more and then take a little bit. Information marketing is about sending useful information to your clients, information that they can use and feel grateful for receiving.

If you are an accounting firm do you send your clients updates about changes in the law that may affect how much tax they pay? If you are a hairdressers do you send your clients updates of the latest trends in hair fashion?

I have been effectively using email lists to generate most of my money online. They have more often that not generated more revenue that all my website put together

Keeping in Touch

They say it’s something like 10 times easier to sell to an existing client that to attract a new one,and my own data supports this 100%. Regular email contact with past (happy) customers can yield excellent and very quick financial rewards for a business.

Ignore the potential of your existing customers at your own peril!

Email marketing, the holy grail of internet marketing so often ignored.

Let me show you how.

Website Issues Assessment

What do you do if you start seeing your website traffic slowly start to decrease? What do you do if the wrong pages of your site are outranking the pages you actually want appearing in the search results? What do you do if a website that stole your content is ranking higher than the same content on your website?

There are many issues that can affect the performance of a website and for a business owner it can be a very worrying time, especially if the website is the main source of leads for the business.

My website issues assessment service is designed to review and identify the root cause of these problems and create a recovery plan for the client’s website.

There are many issues that can affect the performance of a website and for a business owner it can be a very worrying time, especially if the website is the main source of leads for the business.

My website issues assessment service is designed to review and identify the root cause of these problems and create a recovery plan for your website.

Surprise Surprise

Sometimes clients are not even aware that their website has a critical problem that is affecting its performance on the search engines. It’s only when I start digging into the website that the problems start to surface.

This service is beneficial to many business owners to ensure that their website is in the best of health.

One of the methods for detecting issues affecting a website is looking at the data for the website in Webmaster Tools. How often do you log in and check the health of your website according to Google?

Be Healthy

Without resolving critical website issues, your efforts in other areas such as SEO and link building, can be in vain as these issues can be affecting the website in making the progress that it needs to.

A good healthy website is not difficult to achieve, it’s all in the detail.

Online Reputation Management

Businesses (or individuals) can often find themselves with a distressing problem online – negative or malicious comments posted about them. It’s becoming increasingly common and easy to get negative comments about a company on to the front page of Google search results when someone searches for a company name.

My online reputation management service is a very effective method for “removing” those negative comments from the first few pages of results.

If you’re a company suffering from negative comments on Google then don’t worry, I can sort it for you.

My online reputation management service is a very effective method for “removing” those negative comments from the first few pages of results.

If you’re a company suffering from negative comments on Google then don’t worry, I can sort it for you.

How I do it

Most of the time it’s impossible to get another website to remove comments and pages about your business from it. Many websites, particularly scam exposure websites, charge several thousand Euros to remove comments posts on their websites. Most business can’t afford to do this and anyway, what’s to stop that person from posting those comments again under a new user name?

It can be, and is, a nightmare time for businesses.

The way to handle this is to replace those negative results on the first couple of pages of search results with the results we want the search engines to display.

To accomplish this task takes quite a bit of work so get in touch with me and I can explain in more detail the process involved with this.

Google Penalty Recovery

There is nothing more distressing for a business owner than to find that Google has flagged your website up as spam and penalised it in search results. This means it could be totally wiped out of their index or demoted several pages in the results. Either way, it means you’ve just lost the majority of the traffic to your website and maybe even impacted the ability of your business to survive.

There are many types or penalties that can be applied to a website and very different methods that need to be used to recover from each of them.

Is it really possible to recover?

Over the years I’ve had many of my own websites penalised by Google as I push the boundries testing what’s possible. At the same time I’ve implemented various techniques to subsequently recover those websites and get them ranking again.

However, for some websites which have a considerable number of critical issues that are causing the penalisation, it may require some extra, and not so white-hat methods, to get them ranking again, if the usual acceptable techniques fail to achieve the desired outcome. Going down this route is really a last resort.

But to answer the question, yes it is possible but depending on whether it is a manual or algorithmic penalty, it can take quite a bit of work and time to recover a website. Some are quite simple to resolve and can be recovered in a couple of weeks whilst others can take many months, for example, if it is required to remove as many bad links pointing to the website as possible.

It’s never terminal

It is very distressing when your website is penalised by Google but it isn’t the end of the world.

There are ways to recover a website, I’ve done it many times myself, but you may need a little patience or go down a riskier route if you just don’t have the time.

If your website is currently suffering some sort of penalisation, give me a call and I can discuss with you how we can get it recovered back into the search results.

I have recovered many websites over the years that have been penalised by Google. If you’ve been affected then get in touch, I can help.

Website Design and Development

Although I offer this service through my site, it’s not a service I actually carry out in-house. It’s contracted out to some very good website designers and developers that I work with.

So why list it here?

For two reasons. Firstly, my clients trust me to manage the development process of their websites. This takes the worry out of them that the web design company may not be doing everything correctly.

Secondly, working closely with the designers and the developers during the early stages means that we can ensure that all the important SEO considerations are addressed from the very start. Correcting badly coded or SEO’d websites post development can be a costly exercise.

Site Structure Importance

Frustratingly, I tend to be called in to work on the marketing of a website after it has been completed from a design and functionality point of view. At this point the structure of the site, and more importantly the indexing structure of the site, have been set.

These structures are usually not optimal to achieve good search engine rankings straight out of the box. Generally web designers are not SEO professionals.

Correcting these sorts of mistakes is tricky as it often involves redirecting many pages to what they should be, changing the structure, adding new sections to the website, etc, tasks which can delay the most important part of the whole project – getting the website ranking well.

That’s why it’s important that I get involved at an early stage in the development of a website to ensure everything is how it should be.

Let Me In Early

So, if you need a new website or are planning a redesign, get in touch with me, I can recommend some great people to do the work and I will project manage the whole thing for you.

At least that way you’ll know it’s in the best and safest hands.

Website Usability

An often overlooked but very important aspect of a complete online marketing campaign is website usability.

How easy is the website to navigate? How well does it work on mobile devices? How quick does it load? Is there a set path for visitors to take through the site?

There are many considerations that need to be taken into account when assessing website usability. I complete an assessment of your website in this regard and provide you with a report detailing what improvements need to be made. Most of the time these improvements can have a very positive effect on the returns generated through the website.

Short Attention Span

I’m sure you’re well aware that when online, people tend to have a very short attention span. If anything about your website frustrates them they’ll simply hit he back button on the browser and go to the next site in the search results list.

For example, if your website takes too long to load or the colours you use make reading online difficult, visitors won’t hang around for very long. These are just two examples but there are many aspects of a website which can adversely affect its popularity.

The Mobile Factor

We’re in an era now of increasing internet access on mobile phones. It’s become so important that you need to ensure that your website is perfectly usable on the various platforms and screens of modern mobile devices. There are methods that we can use to assess how differently your visitors interact with your website when accessing it via a normal PC or via a mobile device.

By the way, 40% of the traffic to this website comes via mobile phones and tablets. What’s the rate for your website?

If you would like me to carry out an assessment of the usability of your website then give me a buzz and I’ll go over it for you and detail my findings.

Don’t overlook the importance of good usability, you may think everything is ok but you may unwittingly be driving people away without actually knowing it.

Content Writing

Content, content, content. Whatever you want to do online you always need to have content and plenty of it. You need content for your site, for other sites (to get links back), for your blogs, and so on.

Not everyone is a gifted writer and often it’s best to leave the writing to those with a natural ability for it. It can also be time consuming.

I don’t do the content writing myself but I have a team of people that I myself use. They write incredibly well on just about any subject and their rates are very good.

You need content for an effective online marketing campaign and my content writing service takes the hassle out of that for you.

You Can Never Have Enough

For those that hate writing, online marketing must be a real problem! Most marketing online requires some form of writing to get your message out there.

The problem lies with badly written content. If you write badly, write like a five year old or write with loads of speeling mistakes, then people just won’t take you seriously.

Your writing style online is a direct reflection of your business so you need to do it well.

Talk to me today about my writing services and see how good and cost effective they are.