NZ Web Design Articles

How to use Chat GPT to write a marketing email campaign

jason@fueldesign.co.nz (Jason Carr) — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 23:29:41 GMT

Writing a persuasive marketing email campaign can be a challenging task, requiring you to grab your audience's attention and prompt them to take action. But with our helpful tips, you can easily create a compelling marketing email campaign using a combination of creativity and personalized content.

Our approach utilizes a variety of techniques, such as defining your target audience, crafting your subject line, writing your email, personalizing your email, and testing and optimizing your campaign. By following these steps, you can ensure your email resonates with your audience and drives conversions.

For example, let's say you are targeting fashion-conscious men who value both style and sustainability for your new men's tee shirt range for 2023. We recommend defining your audience and their pain points before crafting your subject line. A few possible subject lines could be: "Upgrade Your Wardrobe with Our Sustainable Men's Tee Shirts," "Introducing Our New Men's Tee Shirt Range for 2023," or "Soft, Comfortable, and Eco-Friendly: Our New Men's Tee Shirt Range."

After crafting your subject line, it's time to write your email. To save time and improve your results, you can use Chat GPT to write the body of your email quickly and easily. Begin by introducing the new men's tee shirt range, highlighting its key features, and explaining what sets it apart from other brands. Next, highlight customer reviews of the new men's tee shirt range and prompt customers to purchase the product with a clear call-to-action.

Personalizing your email is crucial to a successful marketing campaign. Use your digital marketing platform to personalise your emails based on your audience's interests, location, and other important factors. For example, if a customer has previously purchased eco-friendly clothing from your brand, highlight your commitment to sustainability in the email.

Finally, test and optimise your email campaign using your digital marketing platform to test different subject lines, email copy, and calls-to-action. This will help you determine what works best for your audience and optimize your email campaign for maximum impact.

Remember, crafting a successful marketing email campaign requires skill from the marketer to know the target audience and to get a feel for what is going to work and what is not. With these simple steps and your digital marketing platform, you can create personalised, effective marketing emails that resonate with your audience and drive conversions. Try it today and see the results for yourself!

Professional vs D.I.Y Website Advantages

jason@fueldesign.co.nz (Jason Carr) — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 01:25:19 GMT

While it may be tempting to try and create your own website using a DIY website builder, hiring a professional web designer and developer is the better option for s everal reasons .

Professional-looking design: One of the biggest advantages of hiring a professional web designer and developer is that they will be able to create a website that looks professional and polished. They have the knowledge and expertise to create a visually appealing design that will impress your visitors and help to establish your brand.
User-friendly functionality: A professional web designer and developer will also be able to create a website that is easy to use and navigate. This is important because if your website is difficult to use, visitors are likely to become frustrated and leave without taking any desired action (such as making a purchase or contacting you).
SEO optimization: A professional web designer and developer will be able to optimize your website for search engines, which is crucial for ensuring that your website appears at the top of search engine results pages. This will help to increase the visibility of your website and drive more traffic to it.
Customization: While DIY website builders offer a range of pre-made templates and design options, they are still limited in terms of what you can do with your website. A professional web designer and developer, on the other hand, will be able to create a website that is completely customized to meet your specific needs and requirements.
Ongoing support: When you hire a professional web designer and developer, you will have access to ongoing support and maintenance. This means that if you encounter any problems with your website or have any questions, you will be able to get the help you need.

In conclusion, hiring a professional web designer and developer is the better option for creating a website that is professional-looking, user-friendly, optimized for search engines, and customized to meet your specific needs. While DIY website builders may be tempting, they are limited in terms of what they can offer and do not provide the same level of support and expertise that a professional web designer and developer can provide.

Page Experience Will Be A Google Ranking Factor In 2021

jason@fueldesign.co.nz (Jason Carr) — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 04:02:41 GMT

Prepare Your Website Now!

Google Page Experience was announced on May 28, 2020, as a ranking factor that will start affecting the search giant’s algorithm sometime in 2021.

Here is how Google defines page experience : “Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.”

Essentially, Google is taking existing signals and lumping them under the single label of ‘page experience.’

Google hasn’t announced when this ranking change will officially go live, but does promise to “provide a 6-month notice before implementing these changes.”

Additionally, Google says the update will “incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility. Google continues to support AMP, and will continue to link to AMP pages when available.”

This latter change begs the question: Can publishers let go of investing time and money in Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? Can publishers instead focus exclusively on really good content and page experiences that value site speed without investing so much in AMP? Whether it makes sense to continue it has no easy answers yet.

What we do know is what the page experience signals include and how much weight Google is giving them. Here’s what you need to know.

New Google Page Experience signals include:

Core Web Vitals : Released in May 2020, these metrics measure real-world user experience for speed, responsiveness and visual stability.

Mobile-friendliness : Many websites are mobile-friendly nowadays, but in case you're curious as to whether your sites are, you can easily get a report by entering a URL into Google’s mobile-friendliness test.

Safe-browsing : Google looks for malicious or deceptive (e.g. social engineering ) content; you can easily get a security Issues report for a URL and identify and fix problems in this area.

HTTPS : Encryption via SSL is something Google has pushed for a while and is now automatically included by many sites builders for free. In addition to the benefits HTTPS brings to SEO, it also ensures you avoid generating warning messages for end users on browsers like Chrome.

Intrusive interstitial ad guidelines : Interstitial ads can make websites difficult to engage with for visitors. These guidelines are used to determine whether the content of a site is considered easily accessible. The easier it is for an end user to access and engage content, the better.

A NOTE ON INTRUSIVE INTERSTITIAL ADS & PAGE EXPERIENCE

Most of the components of the new page experience signal are fairly straightforward on their own (i.e. your site is either encrypted with HTTPS or it’s not) or rather easy to address with help from one of Google’s many site testing tools, but intrusive interstitials warrant a little more explanation since this is the only page experience signal that doesn’t have a specific report attached to it.

Google admitted as much in an interview in Search Engine Journal when John Mueller , webmaster trends analyst, said of interstitial ads, “It’s one of those things that we use in the ranking algorithms where we will try to take that into account and essentially rank the website a little bit lower. But it’s not like there’s a flag in Search Console, or you see a warning, or anything like that.”

In the same interview, Mueller also said that intrusive interstitials are a “softer factor” in ranking: “And it’s something that wouldn’t be applied across the whole website. In particular, if people are still looking for your brand name then I wouldn’t expect to see any ranking change for that.”

Google gives three examples of intrusive interstitial ads that are dinged in mobile search results:

Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.

Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.

Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content is inlined underneath the fold.

Here are some visuals to give you an idea of what these look like:

Google also offers three examples in which content will not suffer a penalty for interstitials:

Interstitials that appear in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.

Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible (like the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome).

Again, here are some visuals to help you understand what will fly and what won't:

Additionally, there are few other things that are not penalized for being interstitials:

Desktop popups: as Google points out, interstitials is about mobile search results.

Pages that aren’t accessed through search results. “Google is not looking to penalize all pages with interstitials, only the ones that searchers could land on from search results. It’s still OK to display an interstitial when a user navigates from one of your pages to another,” explains Smash magazine .

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM GOOGLE’S PAGE EXPERIENCE RANKING SIGNAL

Experts in the field say that Google page experience doesn’t feel like a big change since these factors already are measured and matter in Search rankings. However, this update deserves your attention and Google has lent credence to this by providing developers with the tools to measure these signals, along with tips for fixing issues.

So how much will Google page experience affect rankings? This remains to be seen and there really is no way to tell until the update is fully live. However, Google has indicated that, though content is still king, page experience is growing in importance .

According to the search engine, “By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.

While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritise pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”

HOW TO START OPTIMISING WEBSITES FOR PAGE EXPERIENCE

The bottom line is, even though this new algorithm might not completely upend Search results, it’s critical to address Google page experience. Start now. Run the reports on Core Web Vitals and check out Google Search Console to figure out how your site speed looks. Some of the issues with sites will require your developer’s time to fix, and you’ll want to get an early start and spread out the workload. However, if you’ve worked with a dedicated website ours, you’ll likely have a head start as many of these updates will (or at least, should) be handled by your platform.

With Google now laying out so many specific measurements in free reports, now is a great time to light a fire under any naysayers on your team who have been reluctant to address site speed issues, mobile-friendliness, and user experience problems. In fact, the same experts that refer to page experience as more of a rebranding exercise also believe that it serves as great ammo for getting performance issues fixed.

Don’t wait to prepare your sites for Google’s page experience updates. 2021 is just around the corner.

Top 10 Google Ranking Factors To Consider on your website

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 01:23:09 GMT

Did you know that there are more than 200 Google ranking factors that go into determining which websites land at the top of SERPs (that’s ‘search engine results pages’ to you who are new to the SEO world)? If you really want to get into all 200 Google ranking factors , you can do so; however, familiarising yourself with all of the factors that are taken into account by the search giant’s algorithm is much less important than identifying which ones are the most important for search success.

Not all Google ranking factors are equal. While some are absolutely necessary to implement, others, though valuable, can be considered a lower priority in the broad landscape of search engine optimisation.

SEO requirements continue to change and evolve over time. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to rank your website on Google. If you want your website’s search engine results page ranking to go from mediocre to the top of the list, you’ll want to go through this updated list of ranking factors to consider through 2020 and beyond.

Google prefers search engine and end user optimized sites meaning that your content is so good that it both ranks highly on Google and offers a great experience to users. The more optimized a website is, the more leads it can generate, sales it can complete, and traffic it can attract on a consistent basis. Without SEO, searchers will not be able to find your website, let alone explore it. So now that we have some background out of the way…

Here are the top ten most important Google ranking factors of 2020:

Backlinks
Schema
A Secure Website
Website Speed
Keyword-Optimized Content
User Experience
Social Signals
Image Optimization
Consistent Business Listings (NAP)
Domain Age

BACKLINKS

Backlinks are easily one of the most important and evergreen Google ranking factors of all time. The relationship between backlinks and organic traffic makes it more than worth the time and effort to incorporate them into your SEO strategy. The relevance and domain authority of a page can increase exponentially when it is linked to from a trusted URL.

Links from the most relevant and similar-minded pages, blogs and websites hold great value in the SEO world. Similarly, backlinks from strong or well-established websites have the additional benefit of driving organic traffic directly to your website as well.

Just think about it — would a link from Forbes.com or The New York Times result in some decent traffic to a web page? You bet it would! These are incredibly high ranking domains that carry a lot of value on the SEO front and readers would see your site as a trustworthy source. It’s fairly obvious why Google finds backlinks to be such an effective search ranking factor.

SCHEMA (STRUCTURED DATA)

Schema markup enables robots (like Google’s) to crawl your website more easily and understand the content on the page in a language that makes sense to them. Schema does this by giving a structured way for robots/crawlers to define the types of information present on the page.

A SECURE WEBSITE

Google wants to surface websites that match the needs of the searcher and offer a secure experience. In 2014, Google announced that HTTP S encryption was included as a ranking factor in its algorithm and the search giant has only doubled-down since then.

WEBSITE SPEED

PageSpeed is another evergreen ranking factor in the world of SEO. The aim of Google in measuring this is to improve the overall user experience.

In July 2018, Google announced an algorithm update that focused on how quickly website pages load, particularly on mobile devices. This made clear that if the website does not load quickly, it could lose ground to competing sites .

Google had good reason for this update as the majority of people today use their mobile devices while on-the-go for literally everything. If your site fails to load at an acceptable speed, users will simply head over to a competitor’s site to find the information they are looking for.

In fact, according to one statistic, “users spend 70% more time, and have 60% more page views, on websites that load quickly.”

If you are dedicated to increasing your site’s speed, the best option is to use the Google Search Console to diagnose any issues. There is also an entire section dedicated to tips and techniques you can use to improve your site’s performance, including pagespeed.

KEYWORD-OPTIMIZED CONTENT

Why is original optimized content such an important factor for search ranking? Well, in short, your website can have the best layout and design in the world, but if it doesn’t have good content that users are looking for, it’s not worth much to searchers or Google.

Google crawlers rely on keywords to understand what a website has to offer. Short tail keywords (search terms of one to two words) and long tail keywords (search terms of three or more words) are what searchers use when looking for information to answer a question or meet some other need. Targeted keywords and phrases increase a site’s ranking by providing the search engine with a good indicator of what the page is about.

This is not to say that any form of keyword packing is good and acceptable — it isn’t. For example, you should avoid using any expired or duplicate content. For rankings to be as close to the top as possible, fresh and compelling content works best. This means you will have to invest some time (and maybe some money) into content research and crafting unique and engaging pieces that people will find useful and Google will love.

USER EXPERIENCE

What exactly factors into Google’s ranking algorithm can be a bit of a controversy. For example, here are some of the top signals claimed by SEOs that Google looks for when crawling web pages to measure user experience.

Click-through rate (CTR) — CTR is the number of people (in percentile) who click to open your site after it appears on a Google search results page.
Bounce rate — The bounce rate is the number of people who click through to your website but exit immediately from the page either because they didn’t find what they were looking for or the page was too confusing for them.
Dwell time — This is the time your visitors spend browsing or taking a specific action on your website. Whether they are simply navigating through your website or just reading your blog posts, all of it is considered to be dwell time.

Additionally, we know that Google will soon start to include page experience as a Google ranking factor sometime in 2021. Check out this for a full breakdown on these new Core Web Vital metrics.

SOCIAL SIGNALS

Having a significant presence on social media channels is another way to rank higher on Google search results. A study of 23 million shares determined that there is a definitive link between social media activity and Google rankings.

While Google does not count backlinks from social media pages in its ranking algorithm, it is still a very important ranking factor to consider.

Why is this?

A social media presence on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or a combination of these makes it easy to share compelling content among target audiences and amplify your chances of driving heavy organic traffic. The overall surge of traffic to a specific site URL can help increase its SEO juice.

IMAGE & VIDEO OPTIMIZATION

A picture is really worth a thousand words. Optimized visual content is a very important factor that leads to higher search rankings on Google. Images and videos send signals denoting relevancy through their description, caption, and title.

How would you optimize an image or video? Well, some website builders such as ours do this automatically. If you’re building a site from scratch, however, you will need to ensure images are in the right file format and save for the web, which is typically at a lower resolution quality. Also, you should compress videos so the file size is small but the quality is still high. Use alt text on images and short titles of videos.

CONSISTENT BUSINESS LISTINGS (NAP)

Business listings are also referred to as relevant citations. Search engines rank websites that they believe have expertise, are authoritative and trustworthy (an acronym known as EAT describes this). The more established and successful your brand appears online, the more visibility your website is likely to receive. Thus, having a business listing of some kind with a consistent NAP (name, address, phone number) is an important factor for Google rankings.

DOMAIN AGE

This final factor we will consider here is not something that you can control but it plays a great role in improving your site’s Google rank. Domain age in general is the age of your website, how long your website has been in existence.

Even though Google has been rather ambiguous about this specific factor, some people suggest that your domain’s age plays a crucial role in ranking your website. It also plays a role in requesting backlinks as well.

BOTTOM LINE

Now that you know the most important Google ranking factors of 2020, it is a good idea to think about which areas your website is doing well in and where there is room for improvement and optimisation.

One thing to keep in mind, a complete overhaul of your search ranking will not happen overnight. Improving search results rankings takes time and consistency. There are billions of websites online and competition can be stiff. Focusing on the most critical Google ranking factors, LIKE USING A WELL OPTIMISED CMS is key to moving a website higher in SERPs.

Schema Markup, What is it?

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 02:24:35 GMT

Schema markup can be one of the most confusing components of the SEO world due to its inherently technical nature. It’s not something that can be seen on a webpage by visitors, nor is there an easy way to know if it’s working correctly once in place. Let’s try and demystify some of that today.

Here is a summary of what schema markup is and how you can add it to your website:

Schema markup is microdata that makes it easier for search engines, crawlers and browsers to understand what is on a webpage
There are 1000s of types of schema markup designed to represent different kinds of ‘things’ (including individual nouns and verbs) that may be searched for online
Implementing schema effectively requires 4 steps:
Understanding of the type of data you can represent on a webpage
Using a tool to generate the schema markup
Embedding the schema markup on a specific page
Testing it with Google or Bing structured data testing tool

Now let’s dive in...

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP?

Schema markup, as it’s used today on the web, enables robots that crawl your website to more easily understand the content on the page in a language that makes sense to them. Schema does this by giving a structured way for robots/crawlers to define the types of information and data present on the page.

When a robot (like Google) crawls your website, they have a hard time understanding the content within the webpage. This is because of the way websites are designed and built today. This may come as a surprise to some, but HTML and CSS actually make for a very unstructured system. However, this makes sense if you think about it — designer websites are built for humans and not for robots.

Schema is an open-source initiative by the web community to help define commonly represented things with a structured, predictable system. You can read the many types of schema at schema.org . The website is confusing and you’ll quickly get lost in the minutia of it, or just get bored and leave.

WHAT SCHEMA MARKUP SHOULD YOU USE?

There are 1000s of different types of schema that exist on the schema.org website. One common misconception about schema is that it’s intended to represent everything that could be searched for on the web — but this is not true.

Schema.org only attempts to find a structured way of representing the most common things that are used or searched for on the web.

One point of clarification: when people use the term ‘things’ in relation to schema, they are referring to types of information that schema looks to represent. These can be nouns (people, places, or things) or verbs (actions). As an example, schema can represent a hospital or a travel agency. Or It can represent an action, like listening to a podcast. It’s confusing, and honestly, I think most people should ignore all that complexity and different types of schema that exist.

Additionally, I strongly recommend that any website only uses schema where it has an impact . Today, that only means influencing search engines like Google and Bing. Both Google and Bing understand & read schema. They use it to be sure they understand the content on the page and then they use that certainty to display special features on the search results page.

An example of this is events. You can use schema to inform Google and Bing of upcoming events. Once they have certainty about the information, they can present those events directly in the search results page. Here’s an example from Google:

You’d likely have the same data on a webpage, but this allows you to surface it quicker to the searcher.

The best way to figure out what types of schema you should use is on the search gallery pages of Google and Bing . The most common ones are:

LocalBusiness / Organization : This tells Search Engines facts about the business, such as hours they’re open, address, phone numbers and more
FAQs : A list of questions and answers about the website or content on the page
Product : This is great for eCommerce websites, where products are marked up with the price, quantity in stock, reviews and other important details
Breadcrumbs : Breadcrumbs give search engines a better way to understand how a specific page fits into the overall structure of the website

HOW TO IMPLEMENT SCHEMA MARKUP ON A WEBSITE

You should follow these steps to understand how to implement schema markup:

Understand the type of data you can represent on a webpage with schema
Use a tool to generate the schema markup
Embed the schema markup on that specific page
Test it with Google or Bing structured data testing tool

So that’s the overview; here are the details...

The first thing to understand is the type of data you can represent with schema. I recommend you browse through Google’s gallery of supported types to find one that matches. Note that schema should only be implemented on a single page and any schema you implement should represent something that is displayed on the same page .

After you know what type of schema you want to implement, we recommend using a tool to generate the schema markup.

*Note about schema flavors or vocabulary: There are different ways to represent schema like RDFa, Microdata and LD+JSON. We recommend you focus only on LD+JSON because it’s the easiest to read and update. It’s also the most modern.*

Here’s a run down of different tools to use:

Google’s Structured Markup Helper . This tool allows you to choose the type of schema you want to create and then helps you visually select the data from the webpage you want to grab it from. This is great if the website is already live and you want to simply select the data on the website. That being said, it is a bit clunky to use.
Merkle’s Technical SEO Schema Generator : This is one of the best tools to use. You can quickly select the type of schema you want to generate and then it’s easy to use text fields to fill in that data.
Rank Ranger’s Schema Generator: This is another simple tool to generate schema quickly by entering a range of text input boxes.

After you’ve selected the type of schema you want to use and filled in the correct data, they give you an option to copy the code. This code embed will need to be placed directly into your website CMS. Here’s an example of filled-in ‘Local Business’ data and the generated schema code:

After you’ve copied the code, you’ll want to embed this within a web-page of your website. You can do this by logging into your CMS and including it in the markup of the page, usually in the header or footer HTML section.

It should be noted that each CMS is different here. It does not matter where in the page (such as header or footer) you place the code.

After you’ve installed the schema markup, you should publish or deploy the changes and test. You can test with Google’s Structured Data testing tool by entering the exact page URL and having Google find the schema they see.

SEO is a big, complicated subject that's only getting more complex. I hope you've found these tips useful for preparing your website for the increasingly structured-data world. If this feels out of your comfort zone, talk to us and we can discuss the best way forward for your website presence.