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The goal is to transfer the RWD authority and action to the best local SEO agency in Albury or keep work local for other towns like Beechworth SEO and Yackandandah SEO to cut out city-based agencies, overseas players and to leverage skills within members of RWD.
As of today as we grow Regional Web Developer's online organic profile we have a ranking of no. 3. Leveling Up from absolutely nowhere in particular in 30 days to a top 3 competitor with very little in the way of Domain Authority. Yes, some of the success lies in the Keyword Difficulty but still there's volume here and from my tier-based SEO article getting ranked in Albury we can see a lower volume can snowball your Authority in a particular area.
As of today, we have now five articles targeting SEO in the Albury area.
Building a search engine optimisation profile around a root keyword like "Albury SEO" and clustering several articles to see the content strategy in action has been excellent fun. Today I received a report from Google saying well done you've increased click-throughs by 200%.
A lot of this authority though is very, very volatile and can rock your rankings at a moment's notice. So by the time you read this who knows I might not be on Google ranking anymore. 🙁
Beechworth Victoria Web Designers and Agencies
Up front let's say the purpose of this article is not to take work away from the local economy in Beechworth. It is to simply identify those truly local people in the industry doing good work and to hook them in with some others in the area through the RWD network. Interesting RWD doesn't even have one. location page for Beechworth because we cut off at 20k population. I've listed Beechworth and Yack because I love these areas so much and admire the people that live here. If you have. website project and live in the Beechworth area you're spoilt for choice, keep your work local.
Let's talk about the area of the Indigo Shrire, I'm not by any means a local to any of these areas but spending loads of time down and around the Victorian border, south of Albury specifically for the purposes of mountain biking at Yackandanda I can tell some stories around the area. If you're a keen mountain biker this is the no.1 place to visit in my opinion with three distinct trails and a new trail called the epic indigo trail recently opened in 2021. I've ridden XC throughout the world and can tell you these trails are my favourite in Australia. There's a great review on Flow mountain bike recently about the Epic trail I'm planning on riding with the coming weeks with friends.
You can do Yack in a day and head to Beechworth for a Ned Kelly pie at the Beechworth bakery or better still go to the brewery that has some of the best pizzas I've also tasted with one of their Beechworth ciders it's a great day out.
SEO Strategy & Local Beechworth Agencies
Enough about the area, let's start with the best agencies in Beechworth and help some of these local businesses out. If your a small business in Beechworth you have a couple of good options but clearly knowing what their strengths are is also essential.
Beechworth is a small town of only 3,859 and is not an area where you will expect to get lots of web design business through SEO. In a small town like this, it's all about word of mouth and it's only big enough for one designer to live the ideal lifestyle. Satellite towns from Albury like Beechworth can be expensive with a lot of people looking for a quiet life.
WWWART - I've been tracking these guys for a long while now and are the quiet achievers that absolutely can. Their strength is design although they claim web development which I think they are capable. I would say their current website doesn't do them justice in today's industry but who's does? They are also affiliated with fishbowlpr.com a collaborative approach to creative services. Love it! Especially because fishbowl is local Beechworth,
They clearly target North East Victorian area with some other area-based SEO keywords.
They have a cracking Domain authority (DA) of 25/100 also higher than almost all Albury agencies partly due to age and also backlinks. Heaps and heaps of referring domain backlinks. Here's a list of their top 10 target keywords a little disappointing they aren't utilising their authority to good effect. More planning needed I'm guessing for content strategy in articles:
Let's have a look under the hood to see 25/100 backlinks look like as from the outset this should be doing more for them in the Albury space.
I had a look at their top 10 backlinks but didn't want to share the secret sauce here. If you are an SEO agency around Albury then perhaps use your own tool to do a look like Moz, SemRush or my favourite AHREFs
They have a good set of case studies worth checking out. Some of them a few years old but still good. One that stood out to me was reset therapy even though it is Brisbane based it shows how a little agency from Beechworth can do great things.
Their site ticks a few of my technical boxes you will find few agencies doing in Albury, such as providing a lead capture in the way of free resource signup, they actually have a content blog generating traffic with useful articles. Also, love the use of Wistia instead of just using a Youtube or Vimeo embed.
I also love the mentoring services she offers. Pixels and GA4 in use for analytics. Cloudflare and PWA for speed, caching and security. I think her mentoring site is a separate WordPress instance. This one scored a "B" while the base site scored a "C" on GT Metrix.
I must say I'm a bit excited for this group to see where this takes them if Fiona from WWWART ramps things up with her site and fishbowl she could dominate the Albury area if she's willing to expand the team. OGA is probably the only competitor with a similar DA.
They aren't currently ranking in the top 10 organically for anything "* Albury" which I would consider giving them good traction. Perhaps they just don't need it though. As I said at the start Small towns like Beechworth it's all word of mouth. Fiona has been doing her thing for over 20 years clearly knows how to do it well. Expanding isn't always the end goal for many freelancers and agencies in regional Australia. Sometimes it's just. enjoying what they do.
I look forward to touching base with WWWART in 2023 to see if they are open to partnerships with the local out town in Wagga and to see if I can help be part of their story. I'm always down that way and I do love the Cider at the local brewery and am happy to buy you one if you wanted a chat.
Red Sally Studio What a cool name, I'm imagining Sally is a red head but I could be totally wrong. Dam, I'm glad I'm in Wagga, not Beechworth or Albury. Did you read before population 3,859, but wait theirs even more agencies and designers yet to come.
Impressed it's WordPress and not SquareSpace or Wix, I can take the site seriously, quirky design the owner of Red Sally strength is absolutely 100% design. Check out her Indigo Shire Community Profile portfolio item . I would engage these guys for Branding work, many agencies and freelancers lead in with "Full service" but if I really pushed hard here with the analytics and SEO side of things Red sally would struggle Likewise you ask me to do some logo work and you may as well get your five your old to do it. I have no doubt red sally is doing good work here.
Gracebook vineyards is one of their sites and is a bit simple, lacks messaging for me despite the slideshow. I do like the logo work. St Annes Primary is the next example site as I felt they needed a second go. I've done a few school sites myself which tend to be designed by committee your beautiful creation never stays that way for long. Usually a school will see the website as a place to put information rather than a marketing tool St. Annes Primary North Albury is no different. Prospects are almost considered a given from the Catholic faith so why bother?
Overall Red Sally, if you need logo or brand I'd get a quote but not from websites. At least not the ones I saw.
Flat Elephant I'll be up front I contacted Tom a while back, and unlike many others, he actually responded. He's a white sheep farmer and I also have a customer who is also a white sheep farmer so had something to talk about. Anyway Tom's site attracting more traffic than many of the bigger teams in Albury. He's clearly doing something right and I'd totally give him a try.
What I love about his site is it's clean design, his logo is super simple, mechanical and a psychological bender. I'm sure there's a story there. 🙂 His portfolio page is steller and tells his story from Melbourne to Rutherglen to Beechworth.
Tom has a WordPress site as well, so big tick there; his work on Adaptology, helping people become innovators, is fantastic. Straightforward messaging, empathy, and you're the customer is the hero here. Donald Millar from StoryBrand would be happy. UI/UX is good and not over complicated. "A" grade speed performance.
Tom appears as an all-rounder, personally, I'd prefer to see a specialist approach to share the work rather than burn out but I have no doubt he can do all things to a higher standard if you after your following new website.
North East Web Co and the agencies and freelancers just keep on coming for Beechworth why you'd ever need to use a Sydney or Melbourne agency or beyond me.
Martin from North East has a great portfolio of work and is another professional in the area. I would say his strength is web development in the Northern Victorian areas. Looking at his work on fallscreek.com.au this is quite a nice design but just not enough message or story.
I do like the simplicity of Ride Republic some of the visuals could be using better photography but sometimes this can be hard with a client budget.
North East Victoria Co Web Design Technical Facts
North East Victoria Co (NEV Co) Web Design Marketing facts
I'd love to see guys like Martin team up with WWWART collective in order to provide more assisted throughput for WWWART. Focus on what NEV Co is good at and leave the rest for WWWART and associates. The problem can sometimes be creatives agreeing on who does what and the technology used. Who get's to make what from Web hosting as an ongoing and care packages? I totally get it, we all have to make a wage for the family at the end of the day.
Other location or areas from the South of Albury that would also use Albury SEO Services includes bright and Wangaratta SEO.
Next week we'll be looking at some of these other locations and creative businesses in these small towns.
If you’re looking for a fresh start with a new website or want to update your existing site to look its best, pick from one of the above or contact RWD to hook you up with a local.
The last little bit of advice is it might sound strange. Jase you're an IT guy, you went to uni and studied IT for three years in the 90s. Don't choose an IT company in Albury to host your website. Websites are marketing tools.
Key to this claim because there are three layers of online management and your web host an IT company will choose will only look after the first layer, you need a website company that does it all.
Most IT companies in Albury will simply outsource the layer 1 of hosting a site and charge the same dollars for it.
There are many great web designers and marketers in Albury Wodonga. The range and quality are impressive; just search "Marketing Albury" or "Marketer Albury" or should you? Marketing services Albury, maybe?
At the end of the day, you want someone local to your area. You want a guide you can trust to transform you into your business's aspirational identity by setting achievable goals.
The purpose of this article is NOT TO GET YOUR BUSINESS as a small/medium business in beautiful Albury Wodonga, I want to see local agencies flourish and deliver quality marketing services to the area. I want to see agencies follow a best-practice approach and use StoryBrand to take businesses to the next level.
Let's start by saying you want someone local who knows what they are doing and can deliver you outcomes. For me, it's always about outcomes and not just marketing fluff. Web Designers and creatives in particular, can be really excellent at fluff that takes six-twelve months to cut through but I shouldn't pick on just them. They are exactly who we need to develop something that is going to be aspirational to your customer's identity in a beautiful but meaningful way.
Keeping work local and jobs in regional centres like the Murray area is really important to me. I'm in the sister town of Wagga up the road and have no affiliation with any of the agencies we're going to be talking about. I will start by saying that I do have some bias towards agencies that work differently to an IT guy who also might know something about building a website but nothing about planning, strategy, content and a customer persona. for this reason, I would avoid "agencies" that have IT in their name.
It's funny because I was that IT guy, I studied IT at uni and used my trade for many years, delivering functional results for the Australian Army in the way of a web-based database system that solved a problem.
Let's also be clear about setting expectations; I'm a 20+ year web developer, not a copywriter, not a designer, not a photographer. So my perspective on what agencies should or shouldn't be doing to grow your business whether it be in Albury or Wagga will be different from that of the rest. However, as I mentioned, I am outcomes-focused and have the need for clarity in communication.
Unfortunately, none of the agencies I've seen in Albury have really implemented StoryBrand in their portfolio.
Be aware that one of Regional Web Developers' primary goals is to see marketing companies in regional Australia do marketing better, better than some of the agencies in the cities.
This leads me to the next point if you are a marketing company in Albury or Wodonga, I would expect part of your services would be websites. SEO and websites are my specialty. I work with agencies mainly design-based throughout the Riverina area from the Murrumbidgee to the Murray in Albury. I am part of the RWD support network if you need web development or SEO skills met.
What experience have I had with a marketing business? I have operated a separate business in Wagga for the past 15 years, where we have worked with many big-name national businesses with millions in revenue. Over 200 businesses rely on my web development and operation skills to keep their businesses online daily.
The first thing they will want you to do once you are onboard is to understand your business better and make some discovery processes. You may or may not have a marketing strategy already, but this will start the process of going down the rabbit hole to define how to communicate to your ideal customer, where they are, and what tactics to use with them etc. etc. how will you transform them into their aspirational identity and solve their problems?
I like to outline processes and do SOPs for clarity and brevity so below in an ordered hierarchy list is some of the key terms your going to come across.
As a business owner, you don't need to know too much detail behind each but you just need to know enough so you know the marketing agency you're speaking to is legit.
Marketing Strategy - Part of your business plan - how to achieve marketing goals - sometimes confused with a "Marketing Plan". It is however more strategic. Will you trust a third-party company to contribute to your business plan? I ask this question because usually a business engaging a marketing person isn't expecting this engagement. They are expecting they need a website, some social media work or a logo. Tactical problems fulfilled. A graphic designer will attempt to switch from a task based solution to a strategic solution because their's more value in this than simply moving pixels around. They become an adviser or consultant instead of what you really wanted them to do in the first place. The later thought is exactly what you as a business owner needs but have you got the right web designer or agency for the job?
A goal could be "Build strong brand", "attract engage delight", "attract your ideal customers"
Marketing Plan - It includes details about tactics to the ideal customer identified in the marketing strategy, timelines, budgets even a SWOT. This could be a yearly plan with milestone goals and reviews against those goals.
Digital Marketing Plan - Look at your marketing channels or avenues to build a strong brand or promote your product or service more effectively. (Annual)
Multichannel Marketing Plan - How will you engage audiences differently on different content social media channels. includes the ideation behind content marketing. Scheduling etc.
Marketing Campaign - It's about executing the tactic from the plan. How to promote an event or launch a website. "Who", "What", "Where" and "How" it is done.
Content Strategy Plan - Oh, the term sounds so fancy, so complicated it's even a bit scary, but wait it's really not really that hard!
Let's start with what is a "content strategy" start with your goals, and figure out what sorts of tactics might be able to achieve your goals.
Say for example you want better brand visibility. An SEO-type strategy could be still considered content-based as the content that brings in the customers is set in the short META that is displayed within the SERP. This is also what is known as an inbound strategy. But wait, this doesn't sound like something I'd get my web designer or graphic designer to do. It's more copy related isn't it. The answer is in the goals and the best agency will engage the entire team to be on the journey and have the same mission not isolating this to the "creative team" alone.
They all have different strengths and weaknesses. You need to align to the one that is going to bring you results and services you best.
Start with word of mouth recommendations and reviews to know who rather than just doing a google "Marketer Albury".
Here's why:
Paid Ads
- bark.com
- upwork.com
- oneflare.com.au
Google My Business
A great place to start and the best thing about these guys are they "should be local" and "trusted"
- Starfish Marketing - I'd put this one to the top of my list. She seems to value community and I'm on the same page as her with a lot of my values. She's local the only question i would have is do you outsource overseas?
- Digital Marketing Bee - Strong on SEO and fast becoming one of the best in Albury. Again I would ask the question do you outsource or do you value your local community and jobs to stay here in Albury. The answer may be we just have basics done overseas but I personally would stick to an agency that I know is all Australian.
- Platform Marketing - These guys are in the growth phase and new to the market in Albury. Their approach is almost perfect and someone I'd want to engage for my "brand". they are small and use SquareSpace to compete which is why I probably hadn't heard anything from them compared to marketer bee.
- Albury Wodonga Creatives - A collection or collab approach to providing services from Aimee Chan. An excellent place to start for Photography and video. Note their site is also SquareSpace.
"Public Relations" Albury is another area or search term worth considering that probably isn't as heavily SPAMed with redundant out-of-town Albury marketers that said..
morispr is one such agency that aligns its services to Public Relations - These guys are not in Albury and market themselves as a celebrity directory that is cheap.
Your first click will take you to a contact page "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" like it's some sort of award. Interesting is they present themselves in different industries hoping to grow this way listing the following service areas many of which are completely different you wonder how they hope to specialise in such a diverse range of areas.
Public Relations Service Areas
It seems like you can add the letters PR after just about anything and make a job out of it.
What do you think about these service areas? How do they relate to your Digital PR in Albury? Are they a clear match for your needs?
One thing I like about Googleing "marketer Albury" is it isn't quite as heavily littered with search results from people trying to make money from the Albury market from outside of the Albury Area.
Compared to "Website Albury" this is probably a better term to search for as an end consumer.
Also by now your probably seeing a theme; I'm not a fan of Squarespace. A DIY tool for the end user to do their own website marketing work. What could be better for a bricklayer, a finance broker or another non-marketing type person that knows nothing about marketing and doesn't specialise in the area marketing? You can probably see what I'm getting at. Do what you do well and leave the rest to those that specialise.
Mass market tools like upwork, usually send your work outside of Albury and Australia and sometimes but not always overseas. Personally, I would avoid and dont' forget that what you pay the person isn't what they receive. Is it sustainable for them to stay in business if they donate 25% to the gig network providing the work?
The portfolio is high on my priority of checks you can find what websites an agency has built by using a tool like keywords everywhere and checking backlinks. These sites may not be the ones they want you to see which is a good thing. Let's be transparent about what work we have or havne't done:
Starfish media - Site: https://www.candovasolutions.com.au/ - For me it doesn't tick my boxes although it might for some people. This site is targeted towards VA services and presents with a problem and solution style approach. From that perspective it achieves the goal.
Starfish media - Site: https://fletcherplumbingandco.com/ Again while it sells plumbing services and runs a WordPress style framework. Some technical problems here with text size and formatting.
Digital Marketing Bee - https://bordercafe.com.au/ & https://rhixseven.com.au/ I'm a fan of these guys staring only a few years ago DMB seems to do quality work but I am cautious about any use of external overseas services. The Border Cafe website is very nicely designed and laid out. It reminds me a bit of my work with Pulse+IT news. https://kdec.com.au/ is also quite a nice example of sites they have built that aligns to a StoryBrand approach
Platform Marketing involvement with https://tonkin.com.au/ appears positive and professional. UX, messaging and the use of PWA technology sees this website is next level compared to many of Platform's local competitors.
Web Design Albury - Albury Web Design is dominated by Darren Harris from a local GMB profile to a strong Domain Authority and good SEO he has grown his portfolio throughout Albury and the Wagga area. I'm not a huge fan of his work but he has done a good job of his SEO.
By interviewing an agency you can ensure your getting the right services and team to fulfil your goals. Don't waste their time and yours if you expect you won't use them regardless of if they fit the profile. Small marketing firms in regional Australia do not have time to waste on tire kickers who have no intent on going with you regardless of the outcome. Remember, sometimes you'll find companies promising you the world with no intent of following through.
As you've seen from my listing above their area lots of choices in the area but if you are looking to improve your brand agencies like OGA who don't even show up on a marketing Albury search shouldn't be so quickly disregarded. I've always thought OGA is the best in albury along with Webmatrix
We specialise in providing leads to these agencies, including web designers so that regional businesses can grow and the communities they are in can also grow.
We're all about supporting our local Wodonga agencies and freelancers by providing top-quality web design services.
Our network of talented local designers will work with you to create a website that reflects your unique brand and vision, ensuring that your visitors stick around for long enough to learn more about what you can offer.
Finding a quality web designer in Wodonga can be challenging. Nobody likes to be ripped off and find a web designer who is results driven and shares your "why" for business is where you need to start.
Understanding your goals looking for a new website or changing an existing one can require a deeper understanding of your business goals.
Examples of goals that may not even include growth in revenue include:
Make sure when you get an agency or designer to build not only your website, this is specifically to achieve business goals and provide valued outcomes.
Suppose your agency or freelance web designer isn't asking questions about your market. How do you expect them to put together a strategy that will speak on behalf of you ask effectively as you would to your Albury Wodonga area?
Design services is one thing, but rarely will you find a designer that builds websites but also knows the right copy to use to convert your customers. On-site SEO and conversion are all about creating a clear message for your customers to relate to and to engage with. if you put in only an hour research Google "Storybrand marketing" and you'll be blown away. I could go on and on about how effective messaging Storybrand provides you the clarity you need for prospects to subscribe to your "why" and get on board with your mission.
Resources:
Using StoryBrand to clarify your message and get more conversions
What works better, talking to someone about themselves or talking to them about you? Of course, you need to tell people about your Wodonga business services which are about you but paint a picture of where they are in this story, provide them with those services and that transform them from unhappy customers to happy customers. This stuff is exciting and comes with realisation of "why" the customer should not only choose you but also "why" you and your staff get out of bed every day. Consider a retreat that centres around a Brandscript or mission that turns you from a manager to a leader and your staffs jobs into careers.
Looking for an Albury Wodonga web designer who believes in building quality over just making a quick buck will ensure that they want to understand not only you but understand your customer and provide empathy for them in their strategy to get more leads.
Again it's one thing to have a web developer in Wodonga who knows how to code up websites to be fast and optimised. Having one that creates clear messages and has the ability to influence an audience is maybe not something that you will get but is something that you need to be effective. If you pick the right web design agency in Wodonga from those listed on our Wondoga page you'll hopefully get a team that knows how to put a villain in your messaging. This sounds weird, a villain really!
A villain could be "back pain", "someone that wastes money", "high fees", or "dodgy web designers in Albury". Anything that stirs an emotional response.
Being empathetic to the problem and defining a solution in your services is important. If you choose an agency that simply looks at putting images and text onto a page or template, then you've gone to the wrong place. Use a local Albury or Wodonga web designer who is more in tune with your problems as a small business owner. You want someone that doesn't just want to build a website just for their portfolio but someone that wants to solve your problem and build a small business.
This article is the third focused in a series or cluster where we target the primary keyword "Albury SEO". We've also extended into "web designer Albury" as well using a tier 1 tactic to get the lower-hanging fruit. I can and have achieved a top 3 result for SEO Albury in under 30 days for the previous keyword and now again volume sub 10 per month we're hitting web design Albury. Let's snowball the growth and engage customers with local quality web design services like Oga or web matrix (neither of these I have any affiliation with)
As of today, 26th December, we rank no 3 for this keyword as a tier 1 keyword. This article is designed to target a related keyword "web design Wodonga" & "web design Albury" both tier 1, that we hope to rank in the top 10 for. Once we have established this, we can then move on to greener pastures with tier 2 and 3 where we can make a real difference.
Search Engine Optimisation, not just for speed and performance but for many aspects of being found online, is super important to the business that may engage with this article.
Resources:
Albury SEO / Tier 1 / Levelling up your SEO for local ranking
It's going to cost a lot but if you pick the right marketing agency in Wodonga or Albury, you're going to have someone local you can trust and someone that is on board with your mission and statement. Consider a care plan with this entity that is ongoing in value and has specified deliverables, so you know what your money is being spent on.
How do you measure success or failure in building a new website in the Murray Albury area?
Location Pages:
I believe if you've searched for web design Wodonga or found this a critical keyword, then you're probably a web designer or agency yourself. Agency-based website design will ensure that you have all aspects of your website built to the highest quality and that it's not just pretty but something that performs for all aspects of your keywords in SEO Albury.
You may not find that one local agency or freelance designer can provide you with all of the skills you need to build a small business website. You may need someone who specialises in advertising Google Adwords. Someone that specialises in Website Search Engine Optimisation in order to drive traffic to your site from Google's organic listings. Having an agency-based approach to getting these services is a good start, but often local agencies, even in Albury Wodonga, will outsource their work for local web design.
In brief, goals can be defined as:
Those agencies are driven to deliver high-converting websites for businesses and organisations in regional Australia.
So if you’re looking for a professional, high-quality website that will help your business stand out from the competition, contact one of our local Albury / Wodonga Agencies today.
If you are an agency or freelancer in the Albury Wodonga area, please sign-up to our location listings and be part of our network.
You probably won't select someone on their ability to use Google Adwords to get their own business ranking for "Albury SEO"
You probably won't select a business you haven't heard of from other friends, family or colleagues that has proven results.
You probably won't select an SEO company in Albury that isn't actually from Albury. Unfortunately, searching "SEO Albury" on Google provides you with most companies that aren't local to Albury Wodonga. You want someone local who you can deal with face to face and who knows what they're doing. If you want us to find you, someone, then you can use our SEO page enquiry to get in contact. I'm up the road in Wagga Wagga so happy to work with an agency or travel down to meet direct.
Check their phone number and address location first, and check online reviews on Facebook and the Google My business profile. Are these reviews legit? What other Google Marketing channels are they using?
Talking to friends can help you find you a digital marketing company in Albury that has proven capabilities in achieving business goals, especially for getting traffic. Pickings are going to be slim, though, and their is only going to be a few that know what they're doing with search engine optimisation (SEO), that's why talking to friends and families can often be the best source of finding a legitimate company
The local Albury Business chamber is a great source of knowledge when trying to find local Albury-based businesses that can support your digital marketing needs and know enough about different SEO techniques to give you results.
Again checking out a company's website for testimonials can be tricky as you never see people put up bad reviews on their site for their services. Google My Business or Facebook is probably a better source of truth when it comes to finding out what a business. is really like.
Once you've made up your mind to contact a local SEO company in Albury, then you already have expectations on what they will do for your business. It's just checking that your expectations are in line with their processes. You don't want the detail, you just want to know that the SEO services they use to get results are white hat solutions that will increase sales. Part of this. is getting traffic and the other part is conversion.
If there isn't anyone listed, then you may need to choose someone by figuring out your own key priorities and expectations on what these services are going to achieve and how and what is going. to be offered to make these goals achievable.
It's easy to tell everyone your the best but are they actually practising what they preach? Most Albury businesses offering SEO services will also be targeting Albury web design as a service. so do a search and if they are ranking for "Web design Albury" as well then this is probably a good indication they can get you ranked.
If your SEO agency Albury tries to get you to use paid advertising, that's fine as a quick start to get traffic but what you really want is organic rankings, and in order to get organic rankings you need to choose someone who can describe the difference and at least some of the factors to how Google will rank your site to bring organic traffic.
There are many different strategies that agencies use to get a business ranked higher on Google. Most can be taken care of short term and don't require an ongoing SEO package to get some quick wins.
If you ask a local Albury agency to measure your rank over the six months, they do a campaign and to report against their results and they are reluctant to then you know the agency are not outcomes-based and could just be after your money. It's. not hard to measure a ranking for a keyword such. as "web design Albury" over time to see if improvements in the above tactics have had any results. My article on SEO Tier based tactics notes several tools that can be used to track performance.
Set these goals with your Albury agency up front and measure them as you go. Beware of anyone who is vague in their answers to why your business isn't achieving its business goals through their online tools.
There's local, and then there's "local". How local is local. Be aware many Albury agencies may try to outsource search engine optimisation work overseas to save money and increase their margin. You want affordable SEO services packages for your business, but you don't want to have a middleman who takes most of the profit for themselves while paying pennies to some poor smuck in the Philipines to do the hard work.
Quality will be compromised and if they are outsourcing the ongoing mind-numbing tasks then shouldn't they be employing a junior to help with these and to build them up before sending work overseas?
Keyword research can identify opportunities for clients and how their website may need to be structured in a way that it gets crawled more effectively. Understanding the search volume and trends of various keywords can help inform a website's content strategy. Keyword research can also identify related terms that may be worth targeting, as well as competitors who are ranking well for specific terms. It's important to note that keyword research should be done regularly in order to keep up with changing trends and to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Additionally, it's important to use a variety of tools in order to get an accurate picture of what is and isn't working. With the right combination of research, analysis, and implementation, clients can create content that resonates with their target audience and drives more organic traffic to their website.
While we don't want to copy what our competitors are doing because your business has it's own set of unique offerings a competitor analysis can help establish some goals and benchmarks. Start by researching your top 5 competitors, what services they offer and their prices. Analyzing their website, social media presence and customer reviews can give you a better idea of how they are positioning themselves in the market.
Once you have gathered all this information, compare it to your own business. What are you doing differently? What could you do better? How can you stand out from the competition and make sure that customers choose your business over theirs?
A competitor analysis can also help identify areas where you can improve your products or services. By looking at what your competitors are doing, you can get ideas for new features or services that you can offer. You can also look at the pricing strategies of your competitors and see if you can offer something that is more competitively priced than what they are offering.
Finally, use the competitor analysis to create an action plan for your business. Look at the areas where you need to focus on and develop a strategy for how
Content creation is time-consuming and is something best suited to a copywriter together with a subject matter expert in order to provide clarity around the content and value. Content creation is the process of creating content such as blog posts, articles, press releases, video scripts, infographics and other forms of multimedia. It involves researching topics, gathering information and data, developing ideas, and writing and proofreading the material. Content creation also includes formatting the content for various channels, such as print, web, and email, and ensuring that the content is optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).
Content creation can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. To help streamline the process, start by following these five steps:
1. Define Your Audience: Who are you speaking to? What are their needs and interests? Understanding your audience is key to creating content that resonates.
2. Research Your Topic: Do your due diligence before diving into content creation. Research your topic thoroughly to ensure accuracy and credibility.
3. Develop Ideas: Brainstorm ideas for creating content, such as blog posts,
Search Engine Optimisation ranking is highly dependent on the on-page optimisation of web pages so that they load quickly and work on different devices. This includes optimising the page's code, images, videos, and other elements.
Additionally, SEO ranking also depends on the use of specific keywords throughout the text, as well as the structure of the page. Off-page SEO focuses on building relationships with other websites and generating backlinks to a site in an effort to build its authority and improve its search engine rankings. This includes using social media platforms and other link-building strategies. Ultimately, a successful SEO campaign requires the integration of both on-page and off-page SEO practices.
Google Analytics is the industry standard for reporting on a website and is easy enough for any freelancer or agency to install via their preference SEO tools. This will provide you the metrics on visitors and your most visited pages on your site. Google Analytics will also provide you valuable insights on how users are interacting with your content, what devices are being used to view your website, and from where they are coming from. This can help you optimize your site for conversions and better understand your customer base. Additionally, by using Google’s Search Console tool, you can analyse the performance of your pages in search engine rankings and figure out ways to improve them. Last but not least, the use of social media analytics can help you understand how well your posts are doing and how engaged your followers are. All of these analytics tools together can provide invaluable insights into how to make your website more effective and successful.
Related articles worth a look:
ALBURY SEO / TIER 1 / LEVELLING UP YOUR SEO FOR LOCAL RANKING
ALBURY SEO, BEECHWORTH, YACKANDANDAH, WODGONA DIGITAL AGENCIES
The best locals Our SEO Specialists
I am always learning about the moving beast that is SEO, and recently I came across a newish methodology that I thought I'd try out here in this article called SEO tier targeting. We are attempting to rank for the specific tier 1 keyword "Albury SEO", which has a volume of only 10 per month.
Let's first take a step back to look at how SEO services and SEO agencies may start out with a traditional SEO strategy.
The traditional SEO approach would be to rank your website on a search engine by picking keywords that they think you can rank for and also have good volume and have an easy enough keyword Difficulty.
As we know, there are hundreds of factors that Googe and other search engines consider when ranking your site this can add up to a Domain authority metric. I'll cover some of these factors below.
Our RWD website as an example | Some SEO metrics on this which affects my ability to rank for Albury SEO include:
About the keyword Albury SEO:
Yes, it's a bit of a sad analysis, but the site is only 12 months old and is regardless on its way to achieving its business goals through some other tactics.
The one thing that is most useful here in our list is that I can confirm I've got a successful rank for keywords that have a volume of 10 or fewer. It's pointless for me continuously targeting keywords with volumes of hundreds at least right now.
So how does search engine optimisation work with tier targeting if we know the data, then, can we be more purposeful in picking keywords we know we can rank for?
I intend on creating five articles between now and mid-December to see if we can move the needle and go from a DA of 7 to something else bigger, say 12 would be nice and in turn maybe even get into the tier 2 bracket for some of my local keywords.
Tier 2 will hopefully get some recognition by agencies that there's value to be had in getting backlinks from RWD and perhaps become members for that and a range of other reasons,
By no means should you forget about your overall goals to rank for the bigger volume keywords? This is where keyword clustering comes in handy where this article is of course, all about SEO for which I have some general targetted keywords of "SEO marketing strategy"(90) or "SEO digital marketing" (140). These are well above my pay grade or rank grade but one day just maybe I'll be in tier 4 or 5 and be able to rank for these.
Also don't forget it's also about being helpful with Google's search algorithm for its potential searches. I created an article hoping to get volume a few months back on this. Not a tier 5 site so tanked that attempt but not to say that it might be useful in the future..
Taking a step back, I did some training around what I should be targeting to get keywords that are low-hanging fruit essentially for my site's current ranking profile. Ok, so knowing that search engines use all sorts of metrics to figure out how to rank your site, I never really considered beyond domain authority how the actual average volume related to my own traffic.
Getting tier 1 and being able to target this area with confidence is the first step in knowing where your site profile sits and what to do next. It's a snowball approach by the time you get SEO tier 5 authority.
My overall site goal is to link a quality local digital agency with a customers looking for these services. Perhaps in the process, help other members to work together against dodgy options in cities or overseas that could waste regional business money and kill community growth.
Let's first understand what tiers there are and how they work.
According to SEO experts such SEO Journal there are 18 tiers as outlined below, affecting search engines ranking:
| Tier | Organic AVG Volume |
| 1 | 0-10 |
| 2 | Oct-20 |
| 3 | 20-50 |
| 4 | 50-100 |
| 5 | 100-200 |
| 6 | 200-500 |
| 7 | 500-1,000 |
| 8 | 1,000-1,500 |
| 9 | 1,500-2,000 |
| 10 | 2,000-3,000 |
| 11 | 3,000-4,000 |
| 12 | 4,000-5,000 |
| 13 | 5,000-7,500 |
| 14 | 7,500-10,000 |
| 15 | 10,000-12,500 |
| 16 | 12,500-15,000 |
| 17 | 15,000-25,000 |
| 18 | 25,000-50,000 |
From my avg a sad 0.75. Yep, I'm clearly in tier 1, therefore, with a bit. of keyword research we should be able to rank for Albury SEO top 10 without too much effort.
One other thing to consider before chasing it down just because it has low volume and fits the profile is keyword difficulty this keyword difficulty(KD) is only 20/100. I use a tool called RankTracker to get my KD.
We are set and good to go and so the next phase of getting ranked for this keyword is ensuring not only we hit relevant contextual related keywords but also tracking this keyword over the next two weeks.I've loaded this keyword to my RankTracker SEO app and also my Siteguru but you could simply use a spreadsheet and manually check over time.
But unfortunately, I have some competition for this keyword, and it's worthwhile having a look to see how they have approached the keyword difficult metric to achieve position 1-3.
Current positions (without linking to any of these):
I have no affiliation with any of these marketing businesses.
Maybe not what you expected above if you were to simply use the DA as a guide for ranking.
Let's look closer:
Source: keywords everywhere
Having an on-page difficulty of 75/100 is great but what would be better is 100/100 for this keyword. Our top rank doesn't even have exact match but has probably gone after something else related such as "SEO agency in Albury Wodonga" an interesting tactic if it was purposeful but probably more accidental because this keyword has zero volume. Similar to what we're doing here it's building a profile for tier 1 SEO while not really expecting too many people to find it the keywords establish some authority to start building towards tier 2 and 3 and own the Albury SEO rankings.
Rank no. 2 is an exact match 100/100 for all things Albury SEO. Everything from title, URL, meta description all includes Albury SEO in the wording. Their DA is even higher than that of the no. 1 ranking site. I feel like we're missing something here that gives us the answer on why they rank lower. I think maybe it's to do with the overall keyword density of Albury in general across the site ranking no.1 being much higher.
Source: keywords everywhere
Last month I did an analysis on Albury, which was really interesting, using the keyword "Albury website design". I've done the same thing for all 40 regional locations.
M!nk They have diverse SEO keyword profiles targeted at Albury SEO, swapping between this and Albury SEO and Albury SEO. They structure their page very similarly to how I would expect from a StoryBrand or lead page perspective. It's all good in love and war.
Source: keywords everywhere
Again not what you expect just from the numbers.
For our website Regional Web Developer, in case you missed it, we used a hyper-location page focus for SEO strategy to bring in customers organically with the goal of giving them great choices in their local areas for freelancers and agencies . This page also includes a list of digital services but no mention of SEO until today.
What I've done in the past to rank. I've chosen keywords with low enough keyword difficulty, high enough volume and put these on my location pages in titles and in headings primarily. I thought would rank while building up a stable list of white-label backlinks. Like a scatter gun hoping to hit something on Google that would give me a ranking and relying on my authority mainly from backlinks. Didn't work.
It's important to measure your SEO outcomes, I don't necessarily have goals at this point other than ranking these 40+ location keyword combinations into the top 10 positions. I know what the potential volume is for each of these could bring in via search engine organic traffic. I could, however, utilise some SEO services from a specialised SEO agency that could employ all sorts of SEO services to gain momentum quickly but that could also be volatile seeing fluctuations next month requiring an ongoing spend. No thankyou!
As of today, the 20th of November 2022 I have only been successful in ranking top 10 for a handful of locations. Some keywords Google identifies me for have a high volume but low click-through rate, including the keyword "population". Of course completely useless to me at this point.
I have, however learnt a valuable lesson today, and that is my attempt to rank RWD for Albury SEO may also completely fail given my business profile is in Wagga. I may see my ranking come in at position 4. 🙁
On the 20th of December, mark it in your diaries we're going to check our rankings and see if we've been successful in ranking using the tiered approach. I intend to use exact match to keep up with those already targeting this keyword and to score at least a 50/100. Let's see how we go.
Clearly, "Albury Wodonga" is a keyword location that I have targeted here in this article, but it's not actually the primary keyword I'm going after today is "Albury SEO". While the generic "Albury Wodonga" has a huge volume of search traffic, I'm hanging my head and saying I'm a "tier 1" site and require search engine optimisation (SEO) in this space first in order to move the needle and first prove that I can get into the top 3 for Albury SEO first. I've seen above how keywords like Albury population result in zero click-through and zero sales.
I'm not an SEO agency per-sa but I do want those agencies in Albury Wodonga to join RWD and deliver quality SEO services to local businesses in this area.
Albury SEO competition is usually a tier 2 ranking for most keywords. Digital marketing in this area is competitive, with pay-per-click being used by the evil Sydney-based and India-based SEO agencies to get leads. It can cost up to $30 for a single lead which may not qualify and is super expensive for the regional agency without the budget to waste.
At the very least, I hope that some city-based agencies be pushed down the list for this keyword.
Not knowing where a site is at with its ranking doesn't give us a baseline to measure against. If we know where we are and where competitor sites rank we can figure out the key differences before putting to work some Albury SEO tactics.
SEO is an expert area and while an agency might say they are "full stack" in regional Australian towns like Albury this is often not the case. Ask for examples of their work and make sure they have a clear plan that is in plain english.
I think it's obvious SEO is a shady area for people to engage with the online business. There are too many people out there practising "SEO" who move the dial a little bit initially, but from there nothing blaming Google as the corporate scapegoat for not listening to their improvements. Engage with an SEO professional locally you can trust and see their work.
Take the first step in making your life easier, getting the backup you need and being part of a national team. Join now, our plans start from as little as $29 per month.
Around a week ago we heard that Google’s “Helpful” update was coming and was going to shake up the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) world.
For those of you who haven’t heard much about SEO, there is an entire industry structured around getting your customers' sites to rank better and to provide them more leads. The problem, which seems to be simple from a customer's perspective, is so complicated behind the scenes specialists are needed.
I’m sure you’ve received that SPAM email, "Rank no.1 on Google for your keywords". A bold promise and one that tempts you to hit that “reply” button for a nanosecond. Maybe that’s not a problem for those targeting the simple unique keywords where competition is low, but there are hundreds if not thousands of factors involved here.
You can employ an SEO “specialist” for month after month and see no movement in your rankings despite them doing SEO “stuff”. It’s a tough area and one that I’ve avoided because it can be so hard going all your hours and efforts seem fruitless.
Combine SEO with paid campaigns or PPC and then an SEO specialist has at least “some” control to get those results they promise. Still, It’s not a matter of just throwing money at advertising, and they will come.
So now we’ve established a little about the industry and what SEO is let’s look at the latest update from Google and what you should be considering especially if you're pushing the boundaries on content generation. (and perhaps laziness)
Guidance from Google according to search engine journal is that this update focus on the question “Will your websites content help to people or is it designed to help search engines?”. Another term I’ve heard used is “people-first”. For a very long time content has been king and in saying that I mean quality content. We can never miss the one clear goal for Google to provide a better search experience for their user and the one they don't talk about as much, "to make as much money as possible for the evil empire."
Over the past three years we’ve seen a surge in what is called GPT-3 content generators. You input your keywords or topic and make some visual selections and these will generate a blog article for you quickly and easily. Being an average writer I was extremely excited about these when I first heard about them. I bought a few and was somewhat disappointed with what it produced.
There are however some good ones available that focus on improving your writing first and then helping with the depth of information you could be lacking. Writerzen is my favourite and not only will it allow you to do some initial keyword research up front to find topics worth writing about, it also generates a few sub-topic heading ideas to help with structure.
While we're on the topic of improving content I'll also mention some well known grammar tools which I'm in desperate need of. Grammarly by far is the next level and premium spelling and grammar checker. If you don't like ongoing, which none of us do, there's an affordable alternative Life Time Deal (LTD) you'll find on AppSumo called Linguix. I'm using Linguix right now to help me along my way.
Back to the main concern from Google, if you use a text generator simply for gains in SEO then it’s not necessarily focusing on helping humans but just getting leads to your site. In the past you could easily identify content generator content, but today it’s not as easy. Google think they have it beat in order to make good content rise to the top of rankings, and maybe they do.
At the moment little is known about the exact impact or penalties of the update. You may remember the Penguin update 10 years ago that crushed the industry overnight. For most people this update is minor unless you’re paying an SEO consultant to write blogs to get you ranked higher. It’s the dodgy practices that you should steer clear of wherever possible, which has always been the case.
The update may drop your rankings or increase your them by just a couple. Unless you’ve been super obviously dodgy to get rankings I don’t see this doing much harm.
According to Search Engine Journal, it’s also not too late to get your "rank on" and the update is a continuous improvement for Google analysing sites' content to be “helpful” to humans or not. So update your sites and be helpful and make sure it’s readable by humans.
One quick tip which I'm going to try is to fix my FAQ page to have schema attached so that Google can see I'm trying to be helpful and answer my customers questions. What I'm hoping from this is that I might get what is known as a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) feature.
Firstly, it’s not an overnight impact; we’re looking at rankings over the next couple of months to see if sites are effected. For RWD we use a tool called Ranktracker, but you may use something more well known like Moz or AHREFS.
The above tools will help you to check your ranking over time for specific keywords. I thought I'd also mention some other tools to check on the health of your site and even if your content is Siteguru. This tool is pretty low cost and simple for most people to use. One thing that often gets missed by designers or copywriters is that content is everywhere on a site. It's not just the written words on a page. Think META, alt title, image names, site architecture and hierarchy. Siteguru will work with you over months as a personal assistant to identify what to do next to move that needle.
As many of you know, RWD is about getting local leads for local marketers to improve and support business in regional Australia. We have therefore targeted our locations based on keywords that had low competition or what is known as the golden keywords.
Out of the 34 locations we’re targeting at the moment, we’re ranking in the top 10 for 3 of these locations. It’s a good start seeing how we haven't been going all that but what we’re now doing is monitoring these pages to see which ones have been effected and which ones haven’t or have improved. There’s always lessons in our failures that we can celebrate; we need to take away these and apply them to others to play the game.
As to be expected, "Helpful" is a hot topic at the moment, featuring on thousands of websites but not all of them are worth checking out.
Here are a few of my favourites you might like to check in with:
And lastly, to throw in a bit of a dad joke, I hope this article has been "helpful" to you humans.
This is a post for the SEO specialist or Web Developer who knows a thing or two about Schema. For those of you who don't know or think about what this is all about, I'll give a short intro.
Because Google uses it to help with creating better-structured search results. The problem with spending any time on anything website related like this is the customer doesn't see the results straight away so it's harder to justify. If your competition or your customer's competition is using it, though then you'll want to make sure you've got those boxes ticked and the configuration is done correctly.
Yes, partly this is truly good content as has always been the case but good content with the correct keyword balance and strategy will produce some results. Adding schema means you're most likely to be given featured rich snippets for your website results on Google which are far more likely to be clicked.
Sorry, the news isn't good. While they do produce some automatic schema markup it's far from correct most of the time. It's a super simple schema on these platforms and hardly worth them including it. The same as adding Alt tags to images if you've ever tried to do this with Squarespace. Oops, you can't.
SEOPress includes this under the structured data area where you can configure things by post type. You can therefore set your service pages as service pages and your blog pages as blog pages. Ever notice how some search results have a picture and an authored date. This is most likely coming from structured data included in the WordPress Schema.
SEOPress is relatively inexpensive for WordPress at around $50 per year for the pro version and can be used on unlimited sites. At a bare minimum, consider this as your go-to for structured data.
If you want to flex, then look at something more customisable like Advanced Local Schema by Rank Fortress or another excellent recommendation by the same people who make METABox(A custom field plugin) is SlimSEO which is an LTD for around $250 USD.
For the less popular Drupal users out there the free module schema will get you started along with the METATAG module. Not the options you'll find on the WordPress side of the house but you know the quality with any Drupal module is going to be good and well maintained by the community. Simply checking the uses of the module shows around 6k worth of installs and support for D9.
I use a Google Chrome Extension called Open Link Structured Data Sniffer which will give you an idea of what's been added for what pages on your competitor's pages. It's free but don't get too excited you'll probably find that most of them aren't doing squat. That's a win for you if you can sell your customer between one and three hours to setup. For more comprehensive work with keyword analysis and mapping, you should go for a 1k discovery at a minimum and look at their META for each page.
Each schema type has different fields available to be filled out and delivered via a linked JSON file. A full list can be found at schema.org but the main ones your look at are listed under the hierarchy of Creative work, webpage and article page.
Within these two you will find the expected about page, contact page etc. Now that you know where to go and given that these are changing it's best to go and have a look for yourself. I find using the tool to see what people are using than using the schema as a reference before trying to see what SEOPress has to offer. You can also hand-code your Schema for those of you that are hardcore but given the complexities here I wouldn't recommend it.
There's a long list and it's getting ven longer from Articles, people, video faq, events to name a few.
26th November Add-on - Currently working on owning this keyword for Albury SEO & Tier 1 with a low enough keyword difficulty I have also gone the extra step further and used FAQ and Video Schema data on the below link.
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