Case Study – Proofreading.ie

David Hayes is a retired school principal and set up Proofreading.ie in mid-2012. David provides proofreading services to businesses, state-bodies and academics.

Today, I was looking through his website on Google Webmaster Tools and noticed a significant increase in site impressions for his website. According to Google Webmaster Tools, site impressions are:

“The number of times pages from your site appeared in search results, and the percentage increase/decrease in the daily average impressions compared to the previous period.”

Notice the jump in the number of impressions on Google on the 3rd February:

What does this mean?

Since the 3rd February, the number of times that proofreading.ie has appeared in Google search results has jumped from approximately 100 per day to over 550 per day, on average.

On the above graph, the red line shows the number of times that people have clicked through to the site from a search results page. It is hard to tell from the graph, but the average clicks through to the site have increased from less than 10 per day to approximately 15 per day. That means, on average, the site is getting 15 potential leads each day.

How were these results achieved?

Proofreading.ie’s online marketing strategy is based around one thing – adding quality content to the website on a regular basis. Each week, for the past 4-6 months, they have updated their site with a new page. In this instance, they have a section called “Top 20 Mistakes in Everyday English”. Each week, they added a new common grammatical mistakes, along with examples.

This is an effective online marketing strategy for a few reasons:

• It is aimed at their target market
• It is original content, that gets shared regularly via social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn
• The website is being updated regularly

All of the above tick the boxes for Google’s search ranking algorithm. This is a direct quote from Google Webmaster Tool:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

Here’s an interesting article that goes into more detail about how Google’s search algorithm works.

Would you like to learn more?

Contact us today to see how we can help you with your online marketing requirements »

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Google Analytics

Setting up Google Analytics is the most important item on this checklist. It’s free to set up, takes minutes to add it to your website code and will give you valuable information about your website. How did your visitors find you? Google? If so, what keywords did they use? How long did they spend on the site, and what on what page did they exit the site?

All of this information will help you make informed decisions about your website – do you need to spend more time on getting your site to rank higher on Google? Do you need to improve the content of certain pages to entice your users to stay on your site longer?

Google Analytics will provide you with all of this information.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is almost like an add-on to Google Analytics. It is also free to set-up. It provides you with complementary information to Google Analytics. In fact, you can link both accounts to make them even more powerful.

Google Webmaster Tools will provide you with the following information:

• How well you rank for certain keywords on Google
• If your site has any problems, such as broken links, or has gone down
• How many pages on your site are indexed by Google
• If your page titles and descriptions are unique
• How many other websites link to your website

SEO – Titles & Descriptions

Each of your pages should be optimized for targeted keywords prior to launch. A quick way to do this is to ensure that the page title and page meta description are present, unique and optimized on each page.

If you have a WordPress website, I would recommend a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast, which will give you excellent feedback on how well each page is optimised. It recommends the correct character length for the title and description tags. It also rates each of your pages for a certain keyword.

Submit your sitemap to search engines

The quickest way to get your website indexed by the major search engines is to let them know about your new site. The best way to do this is to submit your website sitemap to the search engines. The sitemap should be in XML or XML GZ format. The latter is a compressed version of an XML sitemap.

As the previous sentence suggests, sitemap creation can be a technical process. However, if you have a WordPress website, I would recommend downloading a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This excellent plugin automatically creates both an XML and XML GZ sitemap, and automatically submits them to the major search engines. Additionally, each time you add a page to your site, the plugin re-submits your updated sitemaps.

You can also submit your sitemap manually via Google Webmaster Tools.

Set up social media buttons

Search engines reward websites that allow users to easily share the website content. The best way to add this functionality to your website is by having social media “Share” buttons on each page of your website. You can add buttons easily by going to a site such as AddThis.com, and copying the Buttons code onto your website.

Don’t forget your favicon

A favicon is a small image that appears next to the website address in the browser address bar. Favicon is short for “Favourites Icon”. You can create a favicon easily online. Upload your image to a site like this, and it will create a favicon, which you can add to your website root folder.

A favicon will help promote your brand, it adds a professional touch to your website, and will differentiate your site from your competitors.

Change your test email addresses

If you have contact forms on your website, you may have changed the email addresses during testing. Make sure you change them to the correct email address prior to launching. Same thing goes for your WordPress CMS email address.

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When you go to a website, it should serve a purpose. Whether that is providing a service, selling products or just informing people about certain things. We at Webspring Design have been surfing the net for a few years now, looking for resources, whether they are solely for web design or general business related. We have come across some useful websites and online resources over that period. Here are our top 5 resources, in no particular order…

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage facility that allows you to store your important files and documents amongst multiple devices. This facility essentially is a USB key on a cloud, allowing you to access your files whether your on your mobile phone, iPad or computer.

We, at Webspring Design, use Dropbox religiously to share documents with our clients and vice versa. Rather than clients sending us multiple emails with images and text documents, then can just drag and drop those files into a Dropbox folder that we have shared with them. Dropbox is a free tool to start with and you get additional space if you refer people to download it. It’s definitely worth a look.

WebAppers

WebAppers is a fantastic resource for us to see what the latest coding inventions are. There are some extremely talented developers out there and WebAppers is a platform for those developers to showcase their work. Have a look at their website here.

Web Creme

Whenever we’re looking for some web design inspiration then Web Creme is always the first port of call. There are a few thousand of the best websites on the net on here and it definitely stirs the imagination. Some wonderful designers portraying their work. Updated on a regular basis, Web Creme is a site you could spend hours surfing.

Invoiceable

Formerly known as Invoice Bubble, Invoiceable have rebranded in recent days and the result is a fantastic free platform, not just for website designers, but for business people in general, to issue invoices to their clients. A sleek dashboard display and a very user friendly interface ensures that issuing issuing invoices is more enjoyable than ever before.

Toggl

A useful time-tacking website where you can manage your hours, minutes and seconds. Useful for anyone in business that bills their customers on the basis of time. They also have apps that you can download for both Androis and Apple devices. Have a look here.

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