Month: July 2021

1.Google Mobile Speed Test

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-aunz/feature/testmysite/

What is it?

The Google Mobile Speed Testing tool allows you to measure the speed of your entire mobile site. The Site speed results are based on real-world data collected via the Chrome User Experience Report(CrUX). The CrUX report is updated monthly and is the source of both current and historical data.

It provides a rating for your site and identifies the monthly trend, whether improving or getting slower. What’s more, it offers a series of recommendations and allows you to compare your mobile site vs your competitors and even calculate the potential revenue generated if you were to improve the speed of your site.

What is it used for?

Website load speed is critically important to success, generally speaking, the faster the website, the better the user experience and conversion. This tool is valuable because it provides a list of recommendations for improving speed and can indicate the revenue impact of improving site speed based on real users data.

2.Builtwith

https://builtwith.com/

What is it?

BuiltWith is a great tool that allows anyone to analyse the technology that a website is built on; it provides detailed information via the website and has a handy Chrome extension. 

What is it used for?

Built with allows you to quickly analyse a competing website’s technology platform and identify essential tech like –

Content Management System

eCommerce Platform

Email Service

3.Semrush

https://www.semrush.com/

What is it?

SEMrush is a digital marketing tool that is predominantly focused on SEO.  

It includes a massive range of helpful information for analysing Organic Performance like Keyword Rankings, Keyword Research, Traffic Analytics and even Paid Advertising.

What is it best used for?

Semrush is best used to view the keyword ranking data – with a publicly available account; it is possible to see keyword rankings over time. The graph below shows the rankings for the top 20 keywords over the past two years. 

Note, if keyword rankings haven’t grown and a business is working with an SEO agency or consultant, this would indicate a problem.

4. Similarweb

https://www.similarweb.com/

What is it?

Another Digital Marketing tool that can be used to identify traffic volume per channel and compare versus competitors. To provide indicative data, this tool uses a combination of algorithmic data and cookies.

What is it used for?

While only an indication, this tool is best used to compare performance versus competitors. 

5.SEO Peek

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seo-peek/lkkpfhgjmocgneajknedjhodkjkkclod?hl=en

What is it?

SEO Peak analyses a website page to display the Meta Information in a simple format. 

Meta Information is the code behind the page that can impact what keyword your page ranks for. It is used by Google (and other Search Engines) to understand what a page is about and how it should be categorised. It includes things like:

• Page Title 
• Meta Description 
• Meta Keywords 
• H1 Tags

What is it used for?

While Google is getting significantly better at understanding what content is on a page, providing Google with additional instructions through metadata is critically essential.

Pictured shows a brief example of a site that has limited metadata.

6.Google Trends

https://trends.google.com/trends

What is it?

Google Trends graphs the interest in a search term or topic over a period of time, which can be filtered by region. The graph below shows the Beauty topic in Australia over the last 5 years – the graph shows the topic is gradually becoming less popular.

As per Google – Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

What is it used for?

Google Trends is an excellent tool for understanding how popular a topic is over a period of time. An increase in popularity would indicate more searches occurring. This is great for understanding seasonality and year on year growth.

SEO isn’t only about driving additional Organic visitors to a website, it’s also about improving the User Experience which can improve the results of every other channel. 

One example is that SEO may include the creation of additional Sub Category or Landing Pages to service new customer segments. These new pages can improve user metrics such as Pages Viewed & Time on Site but most importantly Conversion Rate which affects all traffic arriving on your page (and site).

For example, creating a page with content for your range of red midi dresses may help to rank in the organic results for the keyword “red midi dresses” but that same page can also serve as a landing page for campaigns featuring red midi dresses across Paid Ads, Email, Social and Display Ads.

How easy it would be to convince your management to invest in SEO if you’re working at a tech-forward company that understands the value and importance of SEO. But what if the situation is otherwise? Let’s discuss significant reasons for SEO investment and explain how SEO will bring your company higher revenue and help them reach their business goals.

Step 1. Show the outcome

Consider showing the intended result to the management. Make sure to connect your outcome to business goals.

Quote: “We can achieve [outcome] in [timeframe] by investing in SEO.”

Propose a specific outcome and don’t pull it out of thin air. It needs to be realistic. 

Step 2. Explain the logic

The next step would be explaining how and why you believe investing in SEO will lead to the proposed outcome.

Using data at this stage is very important.

If you work in eCommerce, you dig into your Google Ads account and find that you’re bidding on 25 keywords for $15,000 per month. Google Analytics shows you traffic that is responsible for $50,000 per month in sales. And if you can rank organically for these keywords with SEO, you can get that traffic for ‘free’.

Most web pages that rank organically in the top 10 for a popular keyword also rank for 100 of other keywords, which is better because ranking organically will probably drive more sales than ads.

Prepare the top-ranking page for each of your target keywords and check the Traffic Value metric. You could estimate the potential revenue increase from investing in SEO — then present that to your boss. 

Step 3. Create a roadmap

The success of the previous two steps brings you to this level – which is to understand how to achieve the promised results. It’s easy to get confused with SEO jargon here, so try to stay focused on the big picture.

Try to keep things simple. 

Communicate two things here:

1. What you’re going to do and why 
2. What will you need for resources (tools, employees, agencies)

Resources usually include freelancers, employees, freelancers or tools. In other words, anything you’ll need to execute your SEO plan.

It is also worth considering who will manage and train new employees and freelancers. Demonstrate to your management that you have everything planned and that your plan is realistic.

Step 4. Talk about the figures

There won’t be any green lights for a project that’s unlikely to generate a return on their investment. Now’s the time to answer that question.

It won’t be as effective to list a bunch of resources without showing their cost. The process is pretty straightforward: price up all the resources in a spreadsheet. SEO tools and software usually shows public pricing pages. Just pick one that’s right for you. 

It is a good start, but it still doesn’t tell your boss anything about ROI. Check on how to calculate your ROI.  It is harder to figure than it sounds because your SEO efforts will continue to develop after the initial project.

For example, the projected cost of your project is $6,000 per month. SEO takes time, and it is safer to be pessimistic and assume no revenue increase for the first six months before gradually increasing to $40,000 and eliminating the need for ad spend. Remember to use conservative numbers here. 

Step 5. Face myths and dispel them 

By this stage, you will probably still have a few questions and concerns. 

Let’s look at a few of them.

“Doesn’t SEO take forever?”

Surely, SEO does take time. Rankings don’t happen overnight, and anyone that says otherwise is likely selling “snake oil.” We all know that there’s no silver bullet in marketing, so explaining that something takes time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

“What if we get a penalty from Google?”

Indeed, Google updates and penalties are scary and quite risky. But if you’re following “ethical” SEO best practices, manual penalties aren’t something you need to worry. Google does update its ranking algorithms multiple times a year. It can negatively impact your traffic, but they’re unlikely to wipe you out completely. 

What makes the organic channel so attractive is the ROI you can get from a much smaller investment than paid campaigns. In paid campaigns, the price is dictated by the competition, and you pay for each click to your website. It detracts from the amount of revenue you can make and often leads to spending much money per conversion.

Although SEO is a long-term investment, it is a strategy worth considering as if you are ranking very well for your set of chosen phrases, you can explore reducing specific campaign budgets as you will essentially be getting those clicks for free. The investment with us will be fixed, will not change, and will quite often be much lower than your AdWords spend, so investing in SEO is a fantastic way to generate conversions and a strategic way to save money from other channels. Check out our SEO services page.

Book your strategy session with LION to determine how to make your organisation one of the most recognisable in the organic space.

In the previous article related to website speed optimisation, we concluded that it is essential to have a thorough website analysis to identify the exact reasons that affect performance. Here we will cover some general tips and guidance to improve your site’s performance.

So, what can you do to increase the speed of your website?

Optimising server response speed: changing hosting/server

Very often, it’s crucial to pay attention to the very base of your website – its hosting/server. One of the tell-tale signs of poor performance is the server’s response time on your website exceeding the recommended maximum.

If the server in your location is inefficient, shared hosting will be, too, generally. To fix that, you might want to switch to VPS. If your website is “heavy”, – take a dedicated server. If your online platform is more on the simple side – change the hosting to a local provider.

Here are some additional suggestions that might genuinely make a difference:

1. Reduce the number of requests to the server. Use Google Chrome’s Network Panel to find out how many requests your website needs to load a page, and which files (especially images) are the heaviest. Then you have to decide which images to compress and which ones to erase to reduce the number of requests.

2. Turn on server-level caching and configure client-side caching

Optimising content loading

Regarding the optimisation of content loading, let us restate what we said in the previous article: there should be a balance between the quality of your content and its loading speed. Don’t sacrifice quality over speed: try to keep your images clear and detailed for the customers’ convenience.

Here are a few simple things you might consider following:

1. Use Screaming Frog or Page Speed Insights to check the weight of the images on your website

2. Try to compress the images to about 200-400 kB (or at least not use images above 1 MB), and then check the quality

3. Connect your website to LazyLoad

4. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for images on your website. Pay attention to what kind of CDN you’re using: a nonoptimal CDN can have an adverse effect and slow down the loading speed, which is something we want to avoid.

5. Change the file extensions to WebP, a compressed image format with higher image quality than JPEG, GIF, and PNG for the same size.

Optimising content rendering

When it comes to content rendering, it’s essential to tell apart the necessary and unnecessary processes on the website. A few things you can do:

1. Use LazyLoad for the site to not render the parts of the page outside the user’s visibility. The program will split the content and load it into chunks

2. Hide the elements that are not needed in the mobile version of the site

3. Set up asynchronous loading. Transfer scripts to asynchronous: everything from the head to the footer

Regarding the rendering speed indicated on the Page Speed Insights tool – it is a great tool, no wonder it’s popular, but it might not always have the depth needed to identify all the issues. Therefore, we suggest it only as a free, good entry-level tool.

Additional rules

There are also some additional rules to follow to speed up your website that don’t have anything to do with the server, the content loading, and rendering:

1. Use a 304 Not Modified response code to indicate that the search engine can use the cached content.

2. Get rid of things that might slow your website down unnecessary web fonts, redundant CSS and JS

3. Disable unnecessary plugins and modules that create additional load on the server. This might often be true for WordPress sites.

4. Optimise your use of DOM (Document Object Model)

5. Optimise your databases: most of the brakes are associated with them

These are some general rules to keep in mind when working on optimising your website speed. However, even though the things we suggest are widely applicable and might take your website several steps ahead, there can be hundreds of different reasons why your website is slow. Many additional website features can always give an immense boost to your online platform’s performance. 

Here at LION Digital, we are driven by growth and innovation and have a voracious hunger for success. We provide premium eCommerce marketing services to successful Australian eCommerce companies. Our team of experts will tackle any problem you might be having with your website and deliver the best possible outcome. Drop us a message today and let our team of experts set you on the road to success. 

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Australian online shopping dipped 10% year-on-year (YOY), which is unsurprising considering the pandemic restrictions in place at the same time last year. However, if we compare to May 2019, online shopping is up 47.5% YOY.

April saw the first significant spike in online growth. Food & Liquor items and Home & Garden purchases more than doubled compared to 2019 and were the only categories that saw a triple-digit increase twice in 2020.

All significant categories saw a decline when compared to May 2020. According to Australia Post, we expect purchase volumes to remain steady through June 2021, as we’ll measure against easing retail conditions akin to those seen in 2020. 

Here we share with you data from Australia Post, the results are worth attention as they reinforce the change of the reasons for online shopping among consumers.

What is ROI/ROAS? Why is it important to measure both?

What is ROI?

ROI or Return On Investment is the revenue (or return) generated divided by the investment. ROI can be calculated across the entirety of digital or by individual activities/channels with granularity the beauty of digital marketing. 

REVENUE / INVESTMENT = ROI

Ultimately, it’s a calculation of how much you’re generating for every dollar you spend. 

Let’s look at an example: If you invest $5,000 and generate a $25,000 return, your Return On Investment is 5 times, or $5 for every dollar invested.

What is ROAS?

ROAS, or Return On Ad Spend, is also a measure of the Revenue (or return) generated divided by the Investment; however, in this case, it’s an investment into advertising, in digital most commonly that’s Google or Facebook.

REVENUE / AD SPEND = ROAS

Let’s look at an example of ROAS: If you invest $5,000 into Advertising and generate a $25,000 return, your Return On Ad Spend is 5 times, or $5 for every dollar invested.

Why is it important to measure both ROI & ROAS?

You’re probably sitting there thinking it’s the same thing. It’s not. The difference between ROI and ROAS is that ROAS calculates how much you’re generating for every dollar spent on advertising. Now it’s important to remember that you’re most likely paying a service fee, a retainer (or a staff member) to manage the advertising. 

So let’s revisit the example: $5,000 Advertising Spend, plus $5,000 management retainer to generate $25,000 in Revenue.

ROAS = $25,000 / $5,000 = 5

I.e. your Return On Ad Spend is $5 for every dollar spent.

ROI = $25,000 / $10,000 = 2.5

Return On Investment (that’s the total investment) is 2.5.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) is prevalent in measuring Return On Ad Spend. However, it’s critically important also to measure the Return On Investment. Remember that Return On Investment is the total invested while ROAS is only a measure of advertising spending.

With the hustle and bustle of everyday life, today’s consumer has very little patience, so as soon as a user visits your website, your brand is being judged. Poor user experience can lead to a frustrated consumer, leading to higher bounce rates (visit with no interaction) and a direct effect on the site’s ability to convert. 

With that being said, there is an abundance of tools out there designed to help you establish the issues with your website’s performance. We would personally recommend Google PageSpeed Insights; it’s an easy-to-use free tool available to any serious online business owner.

Website load times can be affected by a plethora of different issues that ultimately aggregate and cause a bad user experience and lower visibility in Google. As a topline introduction, we have outlined 3 below:

Server response time

Server response time is the time that it takes the server to respond to the user’s query. As soon as a user visits your website, it starts the chain of page downloads, building the page as the user sees it. With cheap server setups being the main cause, the time it takes for the server to respond can take a lot longer than needed, already putting the site at a huge disadvantage. With this, if you aggregate the server delay with inefficient high data elements to download, you can create a poor performing site. 

To avoid this, monitor the server response speed of your website using any server response tool, for example, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Speed Test or GTmetrix. 

Unsure about what would be deemed an adequate time? Drop us an email, and we’d be happy to give you direction and advice. 

Content load speed

Content load speed is affected by the requests to and from the server to download all the on-page elements. A common trend that we see is with images, typically uploaded to the website as they are in all their glory but unfortunately happens to be a huge drain on the web page’s performance. 

Having good high-quality images is important, but you do need to strike a balance between a good quality image for the user and download efficiency. We would recommend, in order to save image data, uploading images that are the correct size for the page, saving them for ‘web’ using tools such as Photoshop and using compression software aiming to get each image down to around 200-400 KB. 

The content loading speed is affected not only by the weight of the content itself, but also by the location of the hosting or servers. For example, if someone from Australia wants to visit a website hosted in the US, the content loading speed for this person would be pretty slow as it has far more space to travel to reach the end user’s computer. If the server needs to stay in another country for example, then we would recommend making the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which can greatly improve the download speed of the pages as well as improving the site’s security and reliability. 

​Rendered page speed

Websites usually consist of different content: images, texts, videos,  scripts and so on. When visitors load the website, all content appears the way the webmaster intended it. This is what is known as a rendered page. Resources such as Javascript and CSS that are unnecessary to fully render the page can directly delay the page to its full contentful paint, meaning it expands the time it takes to fully download a webpage. Inlining CSS/Javascript or removing CSS/Javascript entirely, such as unused fonts and style, can greatly improve the download of a page.

We’ve covered some top-level issues to watch out for, but we’ve only really scratched the surface. Web page speed is very dependent on each website, the platform and its ability to download resources quickly and efficiently. 

Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights are great at diagnosing causes of slow page performance, but it can be difficult to interpret that data and practically use it to fix the site without a good working knowledge of website development. But saying that, why not give these tools a go, it’s an absolute must, and it’s really worth taking that first step, especially as Google is continually pushing the boundaries of what websites should be capable of.

In our next article, we will talk about Google’s Core Web Vitals and share some super handy tips to bring your website up to scratch to stay ahead of the curve. 

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