I’ve grouped various tools into different  categories (alth0ugh some tools do belong in multiple categories).  Most of the tools listed below are free, some are paid, and many of the paid services also offer a free (cut down) version of the tool as well.

Keyword Analysis Tools

• Google Instant – an often overlooked but very quick and easy way to check for high volume search keywords
• Google Keyword Tool – Allows you to enter trial keywords or a website name. Shows list of related search counts globally and locally
• Google Insights – A great tool for for showing trend data – you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties
• Google Analytics -  Looking at your own analytics data is a good way to see which keywords are already working well
• PPC Data – setting up a PPC campaign and analysing click and conversion rates can be a very effective (and quick) way to get data about high converting (as opposed to high traffic) keyword phrases
• Your Customers – Talk to your customers to see what keywords they would/did use to find your business
• Brainstorming – talk to friends/colleagues to brainstorm related keyword phrases (don’t just rely on the keywords that you think are good)

Many of the “traditional” Keyword Tools used by SEO Pros (such as Wordstream, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker) were felt to be of limited use to Australian users – although they can be very useful for very detailed analysis, because their data is sampled, and largely USA biased, for the most part they were not considered to be useful for Australia based keyword analysis.

Browser Plugins

Firefox was widely accepted as the web browser of choice  for SEOs – largely because of it’s plugin capabilities , with other browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Flock etc) mainly only used for compatibility testing.

• SEO for Firefox – considered one of the most comprehensive (and useful) of the many SEO plugins available
• Chatzilla – useful IRC plugin to ask people for advice suggestions on SEO
• Firebug – possibly for of a developer than SEO tool but VERY handy for debugging HTML/CSS and lots of other web page/ browser based issues

WordPress Plugins

With WordPress becoming increasingly important as a blogging platform / Content management System (CMS) we felt that we simply had to imnlcude some of the many SEO related plugins for WordPress

• All In One SEO- one of the original and still arguably best general purpose SEO plugins
• Google XML Sitemaps – auto generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – easy setup your Analytics code, allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.
• SEO friendly Images – automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images.
• SEO Smart Links – can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
• Sexy Bookmarks – adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast - all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
• And also a number of Search Engine Friendly Themes got an honourable mention – e.g. StudioPress – Genesis Theme, and Thesis

 Analytics Tools

Pretty much the ONLY tool discussed was of course Google Analytics.  Way too much about this tool to cover here, but it is likely to be the topic of a future Meetup

Ranking  Tools

We were pretty pleased to discover that no-one was particularly interested in PageRank, and that even our clients had started to get the picture that PageRank in itself is not something worth obsessing about.  However, ranking reports can be a quick and easy way to monitor the impact of SEO strategies over a period.  Many of the SEO Suite based tools (see below) offer rank tracking tools and

BackLink Tools

• Yahoo Site Explorer – once recognised as the single best way to get fairly decent backlioni data on your competitors site – is now seen as no longer reliable and on it’s last legs as a useful tool
• Webmaster Tools – the most accurate source of backlink data for your own site – not available for competitors though (dammit !!!)
• Open Site Explorer – SEOMOZ’s famous Link Popularity Checker + Backlink Analysis Tool
• Majestic SEO – perhaps the worlds most comprehensive source of backlinks information
• Market Samurai -  a Suite tool (see below) that offers some good backlink reporting
• Backlinkwatch – enter a website URL to get detailed information about quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to the site
• Blekko – a “search” engine with a difference.  “slashtag” capabilities extend the info that Blekko offers – try www.yourdomain.com /seo

Conversion Optimisation Tools

There are hundreds of specialist tools that can be sued for Conversion Optimisation – here are a few that were mentioned :

• Google Website Optimizer – Google’s free website testing and optimization tool makes it quick and easy to implement A/B split testing and monitor and measure results.
• ClickTale - discover everything visitors do on your website. Visitor Recordings, Mouse Move Heatmaps, Heatmap Suite, Form Analytics and more…
• CrazyEgg – simple and affordable heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behaviour
• Screenr – web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web.  From a CRO perspective this is a great tool to record test users behaviour – including their commentary on what/why they are doing thing.

SEO Tool Suites

• SEOMOZ SEO Tools – A comprehensive (and sexy) array of SEO tools : Link Building, Competitor Analysis, Keyword research, Optimisation, and more….
• SEO Powersuite – offer a range of SEO Tools from LinkAssitant – including Rank Tracker, Website Auditor,  SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant
• Raven SEO Tools – Internet marketing tools for SEO and Social media  (tends to be higher end, more sophisticated/complex tools for SEO professionals/agencies)
• Market Samurai – Great general purpose and good value tools for internet marketing and SEO

THE Most Important SEO Tool of All ??

And the single most important tool for any self respecting SEO is of course…  EXCEL.  Excel is critical for Collating, Filtering, Analysing and Sorting the reams of data that most SEOs accumulate in their day to day activities.

Link Building Strategies

Many website owners feel that getting links is very difficult or that their website is not good enough to get backlinks. Link Building can be a time consuming process, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.  Here are some of the Link Building Hints and Tips that were raised at the recent Brisbane SEO Meetup :

1. Make sure that your website is link worthy

One of the fundamental strategies  for getting backlinks (and probably the easiest way to ensure natural, relevant and quality link building) is to ensure that there is actually something on your wbesitye that is worth linking to.

If you stumbled across your site, would you link to it ? If not, why would anyone else bother?  Here are some questions that you should consider to help you determine what type of ciontent could lead to oitheres wanting to link to you :

• What types of sites do you link to?
• What types of things are relevant/interesting/linkworthy for your niche?
• What makes your company unique? (How are you different to your competitors?)
• Do you offer giveaways or competitions?
• Are there any news or stories about the people in your company?

Create pages/posts on your website that deal with the type f content that others will find useful content and they are more inclined to link if you ask – you also might be pleasnetly surprised at how many links you start to get without even asking for them.

2. Directory Listings

One of the quickest and easiest ways to start a link building campaign is to add links to some of the many online business directories.  Theer are many many dirtectories out there, some are general, others might be specific to your niche, some are free and others require a listing fee.  You should be very careful about where you list.  Some free directories are actually quite good, many paid directories can be a waste of money.  Spend some time reviewing the types of sites listed – and also check to see whether your competitors are listed.  when you do searches in your niche you may start to notice particular directories that are showing up consistently – you should consider listing with these.

Some of the Australian Directories worth considering are TrueLocal, HotFrog and AussieWeb.

Some of the paid directorties which have historically been worth opaying for listings are Yahoo Directory, Best of the Web, Joe Ant.

Remember, directory listings may be a good start, but because theye are relatively easy to do, it is likely that many of your competitorsa are also using this – so if you want to sta6y ahead of the pack, you will need to do more than they do.

3. Forum/Blog Comments

Where does your target market go online? Which websites, forums and networks are used by your customers? These websites and forums are the types of sites from which you should try to get backlinks.Adding comments to relevant forums has also long been considered a useful backlinking strategy.  The technique is to find a forum (or blog post) that is relevant to your niche, and leave a comment – along with a link back to your site (whether as a suggested source of further information, or as part of your “signature”).

It is importanat that when you plan to comment on a forum, that you actually add value.  Participate in the forum, get a feel for the conversion, and try to ensure that your comment is informative, helpful or useful.  A comment such as “Come to my website – xyz.com” is likely to be considered as span and could give you (and ytour sitre) a bad reputation amiongst fiorm members, whereas a seroies of helpful, useful and relevat comments and interactions over a period, with a few subtle references to your site is likley to be more successful.

There has been loads of debate over how the “nofollow” attribute may affect your backlinks from forums, but whether or not this has a direct impact, the value of these tyopes of links is considered to be not as useful as it once was.  But there are plenty of other reasons why participating in forums can be of benefit.  Forums where your potential customers hang out are a great place to find out what people are talking about in your niche.  What are their problems? What do they need? What are they saying (if anything) about your business?  Visitors to these forums might also directky follow a link back to your site and become a customer.

It is possble to use “clever” search queries to identify relevant forms to your niche.  Queries in Google (or other search engines)  based on the following can make it easier for you to find places to leave comments :

“your niche keyword” +forum site:.com.au
“keyword” +comment site:.edu.au
“keyword” +”post a comment” site:.gov.au

4. Product reviews

Consider sending out a free product (or offer a free trial of a service) to influential bloggers/users in your niche in return for writing a review on their site.

5.  Offer a Competition

What are a bunch of links worth to you??? Consider buying something “cool” in your niche (or use an unwanted gift) and offer it as a prize in a competition.  Notify relevant websites/bloggers and encourage them to link to the competition.

6. Review your business memberships

Are you a member in a business association? Have your company or your products received any awards? Is there a local Chamber of Commerce? What are the governing bodies for your industry? Check if these websites link to your site and try to find new business associations that might be related to your business.  This can be particularly useful for getting Locality targeted links.

7.  Indirect Competitors

A link from a closely related, relevant website is better than one from a site which has little or nothing to do with your niche.  You probably wouldn’t get a link from a direct competitor, but if your product/service is only avaialble in a certain geographic area, it could be mutually beneficial (and sensible) to exchange links with a similar business in anotjer location.  For exampler,  A Brisbane based BMW dealer, is unlikley to see a Perth BMR dealer as a competitor, but linikinbg to each others websites might be a good idea.

8. Leverage your offline relationships

Offline relationship that you have with other businesses, people and publications can often be turned into online relationships that include links to your website.

9.Write testimonials

If you like the product or service of a company, send them a testimonial. Your testimonial may be listed on the company website along with a link to your site.

10.Sponsorships and social activities

Does your company sponsor any local activities? Do you support relief organisations? If you do, you can get direct links from the organiser of the activity and you can create linkworthy content on your website by writing about your activities.

11. Review your existing backlinks

Analysing the websites that already link to your website (and where they link to) can help you to get an idea of the linkworthy content on your website. You will also learn why other websites link to your site.

12. Review your competitors backlinks

Analyse your competitors backlinks to see which websites link to them – some (but probably not all) of these sites may be suitable backlinks for you.  See what type of content their backlinks go to – and consider creating similar content of your own.

13. Write And Submit A Press Release

If you or your business has done something newsworthy (and linkworthy) then tell the world about it. Write a short Press release about it (including a link back to your site) and submit it via a submission service like PR Web and send it to your local media outlets.

14. Track Who’s Republishing Your Content And Offer Them Unique Articles

Publish articles in various popular article directories (e.g. ezinearticles.com). A few weeks later, Google the exact title of the article and your name to see what sites have picked up the article. Then contact the owner of each website that has published the article and offer them additional unique articles (which of course link back to your site).

15. Offer to be a Guest Blogger

Find an authority site or blog that is related to your niche, contact the owner and offer to write a unique post or article for them. This is a great way to raise your profile and give you credibilty within your niche, and if the post is good, you may be invited to write more.  Include a bio with the post (with a link back to your site of course).

Once upon a time (not so very long ago), simply having a website might have been enough, but these days, with more and more business realising the benefits of the web, and far greater competition for top search rankings, most businesses are finding they also need to ensure their site has been optimised to be found easily ion search engines. The best way to do this is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – which is not simply a matter of popping in the right key words. Keywords are a certainly an important part of it (and probably the place you should start), but there is a lot more that could (and should) be done  to increase traffic to your website.

While SEO can be a full-time job (and is for me) the average small business (and many medium to large businesses as well) probably can’t justify a full time SEO on their payroll.
However, Businesses still have the option of handling SEO on a part-time basis, either  in-house or outsourcing it. There are a number of issues that should be taken into consideration before deciding whether or not to outsource your SEO.  I’ve outlined below,  the main things to consider when planning to outsource your SEO or keep it in house.

When to Outsource SEO?

The main factors that might influence your decision to outsource SEO to an SEO  professional or consultant are:

• Workload – If your staff are already flat out dealing with their normal day to day tasks,  adding another task or responsibility may not be possible. Assigning another task to an already stretched role, is a great way to ensure that it is not done properly – and may also cause a distraction and impact on the effectiveness of tasks that are so far running smoothly. If you don’t have the man hours or staff available to allocate to your website’s SEO then outsourcing may be your only option. Because SEO is so important to the success of your website, and your business, you can’t afford to assign it to an employee and expect it to be done properly if they are making a half-hearted attempt at it in their “spare time”.
• Experience – If none of your staff knows the first thing about search engine optimisation, or only has limited experience, letting them “experiment” on your business website could be very risky.  You are probably much better off getting a specialist SEO company or consultant to handle your website’s SEO needs. Search Engine Optimisation is a dynamic and constantly changing field, and learning and keeping up with what’s happening with SEO can be a lot of work. If your company doesn’t have anyone interested in keeping up to date with current  SEO, trends and strategies, the optimisation of your website won’t be as effective as it otherwise might be.
• Tried and Failed – If you’ve already had a go at handling your company website’s SEO in house and you haven’t seen an increase in page ranking or traffic to the site, letting an outside company handle your SEO needs is probably your best option.

When NOT to outsource SEO

• Limited Budget – If you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money. While outsourcing your SEO doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive, it does cost money.   SEO is rarely a “quick fix” and is likely to take some time to be effective. To ensure it is done properly, you will probably need to engage an SEO consultant for at least  a few months while things are analysed and set up. If you are a medium to large sized company you may be able to re-prioritise, and rework your budget so that you can afford to hire an SEO consultant. But if you are a new or small business, you may not be able to justify, or afford it.  If you really don’t think you can afford an SEO to do everything for you, you may be able to commission a consultant to provide some SEO training, or at least advice on what optimisation steps that you can afford to take, so it is probably worth at least talking to an SEO consultant to see what the options (and costs) might be.
• Inside SEO expertise – If you already have a staff member who understands SEO,  enjoys it and keeps up to date on the changing dynamics, then there should be no need to outsource. Give them the time and tools that they need to keep up with the website’s SEO needs, make sure that they are monitoring, measuring and reporting on the outcomes of their activities, and  you’re ready to go.

Brisbane SEO Consultants

WebConsulting provides a specialist SEO Consulting service to small medium and large businesses in Brisbane, South East Queensland and throughout Australia.  We specialise in Search Engine Optimisation, Conversion Optimisation and Analytics Review, and can work with your existing team or provide training, analysis or advice to help optimise your business website – to improve rankings, traffic and increase your online sales or enquiries.

We don’t typically work on a monthly retainer basis, but provide consulting as and when required.  This ensures that the most effective optimisation strategies can be provided when you need it, and you are not paying for any idle time.

If you’d like to discuss your SEO Consulting or Optimisation needs, please feel free to contact us to arrange an obligation free consultation.

What’s a Content Farm?

Content farms, are essentially websites that provide masses of low quality content – with the primary aim of achieving high rankings for as many keywords as possible (often with the goal of getting clicks and generating revenue through Adsense or similar advertising).  Often the content from content farms is not unique and is just an aggregation of content scraped (by automated tools or manually by workers from low-wage countries).

In many cases, sites that copy the content from other websites can rank higher than the original site and the new algorithm update is trying to address this.

Google’s Matt Cutts has said:

” ‘we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.’

And also :

“The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

What should you do?

If you’re a legitimate site offering high quality, unique content, then you probably don’t need to do anything – and the algorithm may even give your site a boost (as low quality content farms are dropped from SERPs), but if you want to get high, long term rankings on Google, you should :

• Create a high quality website, with unique content.
• Optimise the pages of your website for both users and search engines
• Improve your site trust by getting as many good quality, relevant backlinks as possible

The content farm algorithm update was part of an ongoing strategy by Google to improve the quality of their search results by removing spam. Google is expected  to release many more anti-spam algorithms this year.

Saying that, with the right approach, and a clever strategy, Link Building does not have to be a painful process.

Identifying Authority Backlink Partners

Determining  which sites are likely to be the best ones for you to seek links from, should be an important part of your Link Building strategy.  A few quality links from important (and relevant) websites are likely to be of much greater benefit to your rankings than many links from relatively unknown sites.  Undertaking a Competitor Analysis – where you focus on the sites that are already achieving top ten rankings for your primary keyword phrases, is a great way to start.

As a part of this competitor analysis exercise(which should include an analysis of your competitors backlinks), it is quite likely that a number of important, influential, or authority websites will show up repeatedly.  These sites are probably “Authority websites” and are ones that you should probably be targeting as important sites for you to try and get backlinks from.

5 Backlink Strategies for Authority Websites

Approaching authority websites can be difficult and daunting exercise, but having some specific strategies in place, can improve your hit rate be a lot more effective at getting quality backlinks.  Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz,  in one of his regular Blackboard Friday sessions recently presented : Creative Ways to Get Links from a Reluctant Target (see below).  I’ve summarised 5 of his suggested backlinking strategies here:

1. Testimonials – Most sites are keen to get (and publish) testimonials about specific aspects of the products/services that they provide – particularly if it is not one of those “anonymous testimonials”, but also includes name, position, business name and perhaps even a photo.  Write a testimonial for their site and send it through, saying that you are happy for them to use it if they wish.
2. Get Social – Establish a relationship with the business on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) – follow them, friend them, retweet  them, interact with them, comment on their posts, etc… and over time you will develop a relationship which could very well lead to a link… and who knows what other opportunities.
3. Personal Connection – Start to hang out in the places where you know your target market is likely to go – Conferences, Events, Trade shows, seminars, etc… Get to know them face to face, and try having real conversation.  Note we do not recommend stalking
4. Media Mentions – If you manage to get talked about in the media (Newspaper, Magazines, Radio) and happen to mention the third party, it helps raise your profile with them, and is also a good excuse to contact them to highlight the mention.
5. Compatible Content – If you have (or can create) some content on your own site that could be of benefit/interest to customers of the site you want to get links from, let them know about it, and invite them to link.

Here is Rand’s Blackboard Friday Video :

In particular in the latest batch of updates, Google Places content has been given much greater prominence, and is now (in many cases) taking up a significant section of the “above the fold” part of the page – monopolising much of the area previously allocated to organic results.  Organic search results are now give less prominence at the bottom of the page – and usually below the fold.

At the moment, many of the Place Pages being listed in Google SERPs are still of questionable value, and it is still relatively easy to create a brand new Place Page and have it ranking at the top of the SERPs.

In our opinion there is still a lot of work for Google to do with Google Places results in order to ensure that users get the best possible search results.
I believe that Google needs to get smarter about the algorithm they use to determine Place Pages rankings, and anticipate  that they will continue to tweak and adjust how Place Pages are integrated in the Google search results, but whatever happens, it is clear that having a Google Places listing for your business is now more important than ever before.

WebConsulting SEO specialise in Local Search Optimisation, so if you would like to find out more about Local Search  or find out how you can go about raising the profile of your own website for local search queries, please contact us.

The Call to Action for your site should reflect your overall business goals for the website. i.e. what are you wanting to achieve?  Your call to action may be to provide contact details , to buy a product, or to give you a call, but whatever it is, your website should be focused on achieving that goal.

That’s not to say that a website can not necessarily have multiple calls to action (for different types of users for example), however it should fairly quickly funnel the user to the area of the site that meets their specific needs, and should make it as easy as possible for them to achieve what they have come to your site to do. From your visitors perspective it needs to be clear and obvious where they need to click on your page to get them closer to their goal. If they have to spend time deciding where to look and what to do, they’ll most likely get frustrated and leave your site.

Is your Call To Action Clear?

If your call-to-action is not obvious, your website is not working properly and you are probably losing money. If your visitors can’t tell almost immediately what your page is about and how to get to their goal, you will undoubtedly lose conversions.

Here are four steps on how you can keep your landing page intent clear:

1. Clear headline – Each page on your website must be about something. It must have a clear purpose, which must be spelled out in a headline that spans the top of the page.
2. Clear “action block” – There should be a single place for the visitor to interact with your page, which should be visually separate from the rest of the page. This action block should draw the eye towards the desired activity on the page. The rest of the page should be plain and visually restrained.
3. Action block Headline – The intent of the action block must be clearly stated, with an obvious and descriptive headline.
4. Clear call-to-action – Within the action block, you must provide a single clear call-to-action. The call-to-action should describe what happens next and what the visitor can expect once they click on the button. Avoid general or generic buttons like the “Continue” or “Submit”. The wording of the call-to-action must be from the visitor’s viewpoint, and not your own”.
5. Remove distractions – Take a look at the content and navigation on the rest of the page, and remove as many other “clickable” options as possible.  This may even include the removal of the normal menu navigation for specific Call to Action pages on your site.  Ideally, the only clickable options on your Call to Action Page, are to either proceed with the conversion, or return to the previous page.

By keeping your call to action clear, ensuring it is the most prominent thing on the page, placed above the fold, and written in words that reflect your visitor’s perspective, you maximise the likelihood of your visitors completing the conversion.

If you don’t believe that your website is achieving as many conversions as it should or could, and would like advice about website conversion optimisation, please feel free to contact WebConsulting SEO.

Within the last few weeks dramatic changes to Googles search result pages have been released worldwide, these include Google Instant, Instant Preview and significant changes to the way that Google Places listing are incorporated into the SERPs.

Google Instant – is in some ways Google Suggest on steroids, but instead of just presenting suggested search keywords while a query is being typed, the actual search results are dynamically updated on the basis of the portion of the keyword you’ve already entered.  Google Instant was launched on  8 September.

Instant Preview – provides visual snapshots of the web sites returned in the search results. A preview of the web page is generated to the right of the search results, which allows a fast preview of all the search results by simply hovering the mouse cursor over the magnifying glass icon for each respective result.

For an overview of the changes, and an outline of the opinions of Llew and Andy on the longer term impact the changes may have on the way people may use Google search , and also the potential effect on Search Engine Optimisation strategies, see the Nett article – Google Search Changes.

Hotpot, is designed to make local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy and also includes a new social element – allowing you to share your reviews and ratings with friends.

There are three main elements to Hotpot:

• Google Places – There are currently more than 50 million places listed around the world.
• Places you like – When you rate places you like, Google may suggest other related places you may like as well. Hotpot will try to recommend other local places which are similar.
• Places your friends like – Share ratings with your friends and see the places they’ve recommended.

Combining these three elements could make the hard task of choosing where to go much easier; all you need is to rate places and add your friends.

Hotpot is also closely integrated with Google Places, with hotpot ratings showing up as reviews on Place Pages. A new “Best Ever” ribbon is starting to show up on some Reviews, and Google Places has also recently added the ability to add this simpler, quick Hotpot like star rating to businesses that show in the Related Places area of the Place page.

To make the most of Local Search and maximise the opportunity for your Places page appearing in search results, why not encourage your friends and clients to rate your business/service.

A Google account is required to use Hotpot, but this is easy to setup and is free.  You can set a Places nickname when you start using Hotpot , so you control how you post your ratings. That way, only your friends will be able to see your real name.

The SSAA study highlights a dramatic increase in opportunities for Self Storage Operators to use the internet to market and promote their business online – to increase enquiries and actually make online sales.

What do  Self Storage customers want Online?

The SSAA asked both Potential and Existing storers to indicate what features they would like to see on a self storage facility’s website. Some of the most requested functionality include…

(figures represent the percentage of respondents indicating a feature was desirable)

With the steady increase in eCommerce over the last 5-10 years, web users are not only becoming more confident with using the web for online sales and enquiries – they are actually expecting theses services to be available. It is very possible that facilities not offering these types of services could be missing out on sales and losing market share to those that do.

Self Storage Website Features

Relatively few Self Storage websites are currently offering details of current listing availability and prices.  The primary reason that Storage Operators tend not to include this type of information seems to be the effort associated with keeping this data up to date. An obvious (and relatively simple) solution is to integrate the website with the the facilities management software – then no extra effort is required to keep unit availability and storage price information on the website current.

The most widely used storage management software within Australia is Storman.  Storman’s range of self storage software already has modules that integrate with the operators website, automatically updating  space availability and allowing customers to view their account status, pay a storage invoice , or book (reserve) a space and pay a deposit – all from the operators own website.

Marketing your Self Storage website

Providing a website that offers the types of online services that customers are looking for is a great start – but unless they are able to find the website in the first place, it is of little real value.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) describes a process for improving the visibility of a website – making it easier for the website to be via web searches. Activities designed to improve a sites rankings in the search results, Increase traffic, and maximise online sales and enquiries, are just as important as having a website in the first place.

The two most important elements that are required for good rankings are:

• Good Quality, Unique, Keyword Rich Content – The content on your Self Storage website should describe the services you offer, using the “language” that your customers are likely to search for, and be informative as well as useful to your customers (and potential customers).
• Links to your site – Third party sites that link to you (especially if they are in the Storage niche) are critical to achieve good rankings. You should strive to get links from Industry sites (such as Self Storage Associations, like the SSAA), Business Directories, Industry related Listing services (such as SpaceOut), and possibly even your competitors.

Feel free to contact us here at WebConsulting if you’d like to find out more about Search Engine Optimisation or would like some assistance with the development of a Search Engine Optimisation strategy for your Self Storage website.  We specialise in SEO services, and have a great deal of experience working with Self Storage operators and within the Australian self storage market.

Local Search for Self Storage

The nature of the self storage industry almost guarantees that people looking for storage space, will mostly be looking in a specific area. So when they are searching online they will most likely include a locality in their search query (e.g.  “Self Storage Bathurst”, or “Self Storage Prices Sydney”, or very often even specific queries like “Space for Rent Footscray”).

Again, registering a space listing with online services like SpaceOut (which has a very strong “local” focus) is a good way to improve your visibility for local search queries. Also, forming alliances, and cross-linking with other storage facility websites in other localities (who are not your direct competitors) can also be a very effective mechanism to help raise your own local search profile.

Offering the types of online services that your existing and potential customers are asking for (and may soon be demanding) and ensuring that you are doing whatever you can to maximise the exposure of your website, are critical steps to make sure that your business not only survives, but thrives in the increasingly competitive future online.