Website Launch: TakeAway Theatre

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TakeAway Theatre is a Cape Town based theatre company well known for industrial theatre, corporate and social intervention theatre. Their existing website had the fun element and featured well for the phrase “industrial theatre” but for other relevant topics they did not feature.

Before

Visitors to the website were greeted with a doorway page:

Takeaway Theatre Old Doorway Page

The doorway page, had one navigation option through to a welcome page from which you could then navigate the website.

Takeaway Theatre Old Welcome Page

Takeaway Theatre Old Section Page

The Brief

  • Keep the fun! Make use of existing design.
  • Content management system to enable regular updating/adding of content.
  • Include a blog
  • Make navigation clearer and consistent.
  • Optimise for search engines
  • Have we already mentioned the fun element?

The Result

The existing design and layout was reused as the client really wanted this to remain as is. The result is a fun website but now the content is also engauging and fresh, www.takeawaytheatre.com.

Content management system was provided allowing the client to update website content, create new pages, manage menus, etc. The website makes use of the WordPress CMS system.

Website sections and navigation were reworked to make getting around the website more logical.

  • Breadcrumbs on pages
  • Sub-navigation within sections
  • Full section navigation from home page

The home page was built so that anyone arriving on that page would be able to navigate directly to any page within the website. Also the website sections make use of fun terminology; Favorites=Theatre Types, Ingredients=Themes and Specials=Theatre Packages, the challenge was to clarify these website elements’ meaning without detracting from the menu style of the site.

Takeaway Theatre New Home Page

Case Study: QROPS-Pension-Transfer.co.uk

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Last year we spent a lot of time working with a particular client on a lead generation website, which turned out to be a great success.

The Requirement

The client had produced his own website, making use of free web publishing platforms, and had done a great job of initial SEO by creating hubs on other free web publishing platforms and linking back to the parent site.

QROPS Website Before

The objective of the website was to generate QROPS business leads, through the provision of helpful information to visitors. The information was highly topical on a niche subject, and had done well in the search engines. Visitor volumes were decent, but lead volumes were low; 1 to 5 per month.

So getting as many quality leads as possible was the client’s focus.

The Solution

On a relatively low budget, with no money for propper design, Nook made use of the client’s content to produce a website that would convert visitors into leads. How was it done?

  • Clearly stated call to action
  • Low barrier to entry on the leads form
  • High visibility of lead form
  • Specific break-out of pages for SEO benefit, as well as all other SEO best practices

With the above in place it was time to enhance traffic volumes:

  • Social link submission
  • Enhancing secondary feeder hub sites
  • Directory inclusion
  • PPC Google and Facebook advertising

QROPS Website After

The Result

Website conversion rate: 2.37%

Lead volumes have been the most impressive, with the original website producing 1 to 5 per month, the revised system delivers just less than one lead per day.

The results on the first website were so good that we then created a domestic South African website on the same topic, but on a .co.za domain. For South African searchers this website jumped the search engine rankings quickly to take up position #1 on the topic. This site has had a conversion rate of above 6% from visitor to completed lead form.

Another result was that Nook’s client received an offer from an international financial group to buy the website off him.

New Website Launch:Threadcount.co.za

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It is always satisfying to get a new website out the door, but when it is really quick it can be immediately gratifying. Threadcount is a collective of Cape Town based independent contemporary textile designers and producers, and their need was for a simple online home. One of the members had asked me advice on how to best achieve this using WordPress.com for a free platform.

After discussing the simple requirements, it was decided to complete the project for free. Two late nights and some tweaking after that resulted in the live site at Threadcount.co.za.

Google Analytics New Features Engagement Goals

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The news that engagement goals are now available in Google Analytics is more than a week old, but the value of it is only apparent once you start applying it to your data (or your client’s data).

Being able to se 20 goals in itself is a limitation which a lot of people were struggling with, but now being able to take the time-on-site as a goal, than evaluate the traffic source, landing page, geographic location… and draw correlations truly drives understanding of a website’s traffic.

Lets say you have an average Pages/Visit of 3.5, what does that mean? In the past you would have to delve into each report to see what the average Pages/Visit were for different segments, and even then averages blur the picture. If you know that last week before xyz changes you had 5% of users meeting the 6 Pages/Visit goal, and this week after the xyz changes that number is 10%, you can easily evaluate performance, where your average may only have changed marginally.

Balanced Website Presence Optimisation Approach

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An article I read this morning “How to Market Your New Web Site” on ClickZ highlighted my thoughts behind not wanting to call my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services SEO.

The interview is with an SEO pro, but when asked what keywords they were targeting on their new site, their answer seemed un-SEO, and more content planning. It is interesting that search engine algorythm improvemnts over the years have changed the face of online marketing, to make it more honest; SEO tricks are no longer the answer (even though there are a number that exist).

So to summarise:

  • Make sure you have good/meaningful/relevant content
  • Make sure the SEO foundations are there
  • Network

Focusing on any one of the above to the exclusion of the others would harm a site’s visibility online.

My other take-away is an approach of active site content management and networking, with reactive SEO informed by performance data. Always good to hear other opinions which support our approach.

Posted in SEO

Thoughts: Google’s Search Enhancements

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A week back Google addressed something I have wanted for ages; I want to sort Google search results by date. At the same time they have started something which is to get users to interact with the search space more.

This is not the first, a couple of months ago Google launched searchWiki which allows you to modify how your results are displayed.

This puts the searcher in the driving seat, and I am sure we will see more of this in the future, but what it means for SEO? Search results position becomes more subjective than before, and saying “my site has position #3 for xxyyzzz keyword becomes less relevant”.

Posted in SEO

Microsoft Spring Upgrade Features Newsletter

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Well I got the Microsoft adCenter “Spring upgrade features now available” email newsletter this morning, and am really excited about some of the features, most notably the ad Center Content Ads program coming out of beta today, but the link leads to a file not found page.

A little bit of digging I found a better (working) link for MSN Content ads coming out of beta. You can now tweak control of content ads by:

  1. Loading negative sites
  2. Targeting sites, much like Google’s Placement targeting.
  3. and the points above would be no good without being able to run a placement report.

All of the above sound familiar? that is because you have had these features on Google Adwords for a little while, but good to have adCenter keeping up.