Gold Coast web design professional since 1999
Search marketing specialist via SEO & SEM - AdWords Management

David Thatcher
Hard Web SEO SEM Web Design
Gold Coast Qld

How will I get you more leads?

Search Marketing is advertising on search engine results pages or SERPs.

The answer is by making you a Google friendly website that will rank highly in Google searches for your targeted keywords, this is called SEO or search engine optimisation.

Also if you choose I will set up a Google AdWords campaign for your website to get immediate "clicks" (visits) while the SEO strategy is building.
This is called SEM or search engine marketing.

Together they are called search marketing and the link is that you are advertising your business on the search engine results page (or SERP).

SEO is free advertising and SEM is paid advertising.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engines are a vital component of marketing your business online

I love doing SEO as it is very satisfying to see visitor traffic grow as a result of my work and if my client has a good business they will make a lot more money from the new customers that this low cost form of advertising generates.

I have had some great SEO results for my clients which have lead, in some cases, to dramatic turnover increases for their businesses.

SEO is the practice of raising a website's organic rankings for a targeted list of search words and phrases.
Organic results are also called 'natural', 'not paid' or 'free' listings and are not to be confused with the 'paid' or 'sponsored' listings.

I have done SEO on both new sites that I have designed and on pre-existing websites that I did not design and I believe my SEO work is amongst the best and cheapest on the Gold Coast!

Being able to use the Google Analytics tool to accurately measure the visitor traffic and record which search queries that the visitor used to find your website is one of the major reasons why I am good at SEO.

Being able to test different SEO (or SEM) practices and then see if they work or not defines a new "scientific" testing method behind the advertising dollar spend.

The so-alled "new advertising" which is basically online advertising is made up of SEO together with SEM with the most globally successful SEM product being Google AdWords.

The future of advertising is online because of user volume and it's superiority as a method of advertising lies in it's ability to measure it's results and use metrics such as ROI (return on investment) in a more meaningful way.
A new advertising metric called cost per conversion essentially tells an advertiser how much it cost to get a sale which is pretty much the holy grail of advertising.

David Booth asks us the question "If you sell a product for $10 with a margin of $2 and your Google AdWords cost per conversion is $1 then how much would you budget to spend on Google AdWords?".

The answer is that you would budget an unlimited amount or as much as you could afford to spend - because every dollar you spend on Adwords gives you $1 in profit.
This would be subject to the law of diminishing returns but I hope you understand the amazing potential of being able to accurately apply this metric to an online business.

Ring me now on (07) 5526 2939 to discuss how I can improve your rankings for the big 3 search providers, Google©, Yahoo© and Bing©.
NB. Because of the dominant (< 90%) percentage of search engine user market share of Google's users in Australia, getting a ranking of say 4th or 5th in Google will generate a lot more visitor traffic than even the combined traffic generated by a #1 rank in both Yahoo and Bing.

My knowledge of what works in SEO (and what doesn't work) is based on my own SEO strategies that have been refined and ultimately proven successful for me and my clients over the last 14 years.

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Social Marketing for business - 1

Google+

Having a good Google+ business page has massive repercussions for the way Google sees you on SERPs (seach engine results pages) including both your AdWords listings and your organic listings. The boost that you get is from an extra line in the SERP which outlines who has publicly recommended your business, see an example from a customer of mine below.



Your Google+ page is also very important because it handles reviews of your business and your Google map listings which are still being administrated by your Google Places account but the map listing leads to the Google+ page.

Your Google+ page is separate but linked to your Google+ personal profile which is also very important and can enhance your Google SERP listings with a profile picture and article byline as this screenshot below shows.

There are many other reasons why you should have an optimised Google+ page for your business and a properly linked Google+ personal profile page, please conatct me to find out more, call 07 5526 2939.

Social Marketing for business - 2

Facebook

Facebook is the world's leading social networking website and has changed over time to accomodate business interests.

I recommend you have a Facebook business page linked to your Facebook personal profile and you can treat your Facebook business page as your business blogging page where you make announcements and offers.

You can however opt to just have a Facebook business account without linking it to a profile.

Please visit the Hard Web Facebook page where you can see the page but you can only interact with the page and for instance, 'like' Hard Web...but only after you sign in or sign up to Facebook which is their way of enticing you to join Facebook.

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Social Marketing - personal

Facebook and Google+ don't require you to have a personal profile linked to your business page but I advise that you do link your FB or G+ personal profiles to your business pages.

It will increase the functionality, trust and the way that social marketing works in general requires a link between personal and business to get the most out of them - yuck, that sounds wishy washy, sorry, I will try to fully explain this in the future.

My web design clientele & portfolio

See my portfolio of websites designed and/or optimised by me.
You may contact them for any reviews or references.

See also my cheap web design prices which are very competitive.

My typical web design clients are people who need a website that is optimised for search, professionally designed and needs it fairly quickly.

I design websites for the business sector in areas such as manufacturing, professional, service related, retail or tourism related but I have also made webpages for schools, clubs, individuals and other non-business customers.

About Hardweb

I have been a self employed full time web designer since 1999 and currently work from a home office at:
25 Savoy Drive Broadbeach Waters
Gold Coast, Qld, 4217 Australia.

Previously I web designed from premises in Surfers Paradise (4 yrs) then Broadbeach (1yr).

More about David Thatcher and Hard Web AdPad.

Please call me now on (07) 5526 2939 to find out how I can grow your business by generating new leads from good search engine rankings for your website!

SEM - Google Adwords Management

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and refers to paid advertising on the internet. I have been certified since Dec 2010 in Google's main SEM product: Google AdWords. I am individually qualified in two of the three "specialist areas" of AdWords namely Search Advertising and Reporting and Analysis, the other area of study is Display Advertising.

This means that I am able to professionally manage your AdWords campaign and be able to maximise the Adword's campaign's effectiveness.
My aims as your Adwords manager are many but the basic aims are to try to make your AdWords dollar spend go further by targeting the campaign more accurately to prospective customers of your business and avoiding clicks by non-prospects.
I will also try to reduce the CPC (cost per click) which on a fixed daily budget, means that you will have more prospects clicking on your Ad for the same spend.

Typically other parts of the job of AdWords management might entail:

• Setting up automated reports that verify the effectiveness (or not) of the AdWords campaign
• Making sure the keyword lists are right for you and that the keyword "match type" is the best for your needs
• Making sure the Ad text is compelling and contains keywords
• Making sure the landing page and also the text of your Ad contain the keywords we are bidding on so the Quality Score (QS) is raised which in turn will make your Ad show higher on the SERP and also lower the CPC (Cost per Click).
• If necessary, to split the Adwords Campaign into multiple campaigns and/or Ad Groups which helps analysis of the effectiveness
• Setting up a "conversion" or "goal" activity that denotes a desired visitor behaviour such as buying or enquiring
• Making sure the the geographic targeting is right for you - this is more difficult than you think because most of us living on the Gold Coast are treated as living in Brisbane by the geographic auto detecting ability of AdWords which may be the fault of Telstra rather than Google - I am not sure.

For more about AdWords Management for Gold Coast business.

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Bloggy bits

Here is a new video I made about using Google Handwrite to search on a mobile phone which recognises drawn letters on the screen with your finger.

I am a member of the Google Engage for Agencies program (Australia).
I get to regularly listent to top speakers such as Mr. David Booth of Cardinal Path which is a large online marketing business in the U.S.A.
He has been a keynote speaker of the Google Engage (Australia) Master Classes which began in November 2011 and then came back three times to Brisbane in 2012 on 25th February, 11th July and 7th Nov.
The Google Engage seminars are really top knotch and I have learnt a lot from David Booth and the other speakers such as Stasia Holdren most of whom are not Google employees.
I always learn a lot from them and there is always 100% new material being presented which shows the huge growth and I must admit the complexity of the tools and products that Google continues to offer.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?
On these 23 pages (link above to introduction and below) I explain the 23 categories of tools within webmaster tools. What they do and what use they are. Also screenshots and information about each category and tool within the webmaster tools suite.

Google Places
Another page I researched about Issues with Google Places for business listings and implications for SEO.

Self hosted video
See some of my self-hosted streaming videos that are easy and cheap to embed on your website and are less fuss than Youtube.

Here are some free web design tools I have been using lately.

Here is a javascript program that shows what the character codes (or unicode character entities) in the &#nnn format from &#1; to &#999; render in your webpage.

AdPad targeted online advertising

My new business name and logo for the AdWords Management side of the business is AdPad. The new AdPad website is in a blog format using Wordpress and the theme creator Thesis by DIY Tools.


Author: David Thatcher

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