The Brief
Tom Griffin is a business professional with many years of experience, many of which have been at senior management level. Tom had a website on the Wix platform, but he found that it was inflexible and no longer met his requirements, especially as he had recently re-branded.
My brief was to move the website to a more flexible and robust system and one which would allow Tom to easily edit himself. The website should carry his new branding, contain a blog, be responsive to all devices and be search engine friendly. The website would showcase Tom’s services and position him as a leader in his field. Tom would be trained to edit the website and manage his blog.
Our Approach
We generated and carried out a plan for achieving Tom’s goals. We did the following:
=> designed and built the website on the WordPress platform, while carrying the branding through all aspects of the website. WordPress is robust, functional and secure, so it suited Tom’s needs perfectly.
=> conducted research to determine relevant keywords which were being used often in Google searches. We then looked at the Google Adwords competition for these keywords and selected keywords which were used often but for which competition was not too high. We populated our pages with these keywords, while keeping the text easy to read.
=> conducted extensive on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make the site as visible and easy-to-navigate as possible for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
=> set up the blog with categorisation similar to the previous website
=> set up hosting on a local server for SEO purposes, since Tom’s business is generally local and ensured that his e-mail account was unaffected
=> ensured that the site was secure and loaded fast. Fast loading of pages is also important for Google
=> provided detailed training to Tom on managing the website and on generating blog posts to achieve 4 goals:
– to position himself as an expert in his field by demonstrating his knowledge
– to offer advice to those looking for answers to problems that he is well positioned to solve. This builds trust which in turn generates business
– to get found in a Google search for his chosen keywords
– to have content which he can share on social media and get conversations going. The goal is to get people talking positively about his services.
The Result
Tom was happy with the overall layout and design of the website and his brand is immediately recognisable to visitors.
He now also has visibility of the behaviour of the visitors to his site through his new Google Analytics account and knowledge of any indexing problems (by the Google search engine) through his new Google Webmaster Tools account.
Tom offers a very valuable service to business-owners and Managers in terms of Project Management, Employment Services, Operations and Audits/Training/Mentoring.
The Feedback
As part of a re-branding exercise, Noelle Leahy was commissioned to examine our website and bring it in line with a new brand image. I can honestly say that it was an excellent decision, because not alone did Noelle successfully introduce the new brand image in terms of logos, banners and colour styling, but she also reviewed all of the content and carried out a full SEO analysis.
As our site was hosted outside of our core market she managed the transfer to a more appropriate hosting site and handled all of the associated communication with the various providers.
She ensured that all related functions such as e-mail accounts and blog sites were fully coordinated. What impressed me the most was Noelle’s ability to quickly understand our requirements and implement them on time and with the minimum of fuss. Quite simply once the job was done it was was exactly as agreed and as expected.
I would have absolutely no hesitation in recommending Noelle to any prospective client, she is thorough, professional and a really nice lady. It was a joy to work with her!