Author: Bassendean Means Business

Sustainable Office
Marketing Strategy

7 Ideas for a Sustainable Office

Business owners across Australia and the world are transitioning to sustainable operations to reduce their environmental impact and carbon footprint. Even small businesses like digital marketing agencies with apparently negligible environmental impacts can make minor changes to become more eco-friendly. And they aren’t hard to do!

Unfortunately, though, a lot of people avoid implementing sustainable office strategies because they simply don’t know how to. In the rest of this article, I’ve explored seven of my favourite ideas for making your office more sustainable. They include:

  1. Encourage Keep-Cups and Reusable Water Bottles

Many offices have some sort of water cooler, complete with plastic or styrofoam cups. While this is very convenient, it’s also a great way to add to the amount of waste your office sends to landfill. Think about removing all single-use cups and other items from the office and encourage your employees to bring their own reusable alternatives instead.

  1. Reduce Printing

Printing is one of the major contributors to office waste. Luckily, though, the days of having to print everything and file hard copies are long gone. There are numerous highly-secure online storage tools available now, which means you can store sensitive documents online without a worry in the world.

  1. Turn off Devices at Night

Ask yourself this: Is there any point leaving things on at night when no one is in the office?

The chances are that your answer will be no – of course it isn’t. Save electricity by turning off as many devices and lights as possible at the end of every day.

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By Bassendean Means Business
Hiring An SEO Agency
Marketing Strategy

The Advantages Of Hiring An SEO Agency

If you are a business owner, and your business has a website, you probably already know that if that website is to be of any benefit to you, it needs to rank highly on Google, and the other search engines. You may also be aware that the way that is achieved is with SEO best practices.

While most business owners know WHAT needs to happen, very few of them know HOW to make it happen.  That is why the clever ones turn to an SEO agency and hire them to do all the SEO work for them.

If you are considering doing likewise it may help you to know, that while better search engine ranking are certainly an important benefit of using an SEO agency, there are other advantages that their work can provide you and your business.

The first advantage might be regarded as a personal one but it does have benefits for your business too, The fact that you employ an outside agency to do your SEO means you are free to get on with what you are good at and that is running your business.

It is no secret that following SEO trends can be a time-consuming process, which means you would have less time to do other work, plus trying to take care of each element of it yourself, can be stressful.

An SEO team will likely have experts with individual knowledge and therefore no single person has the weight of expectation on them. which you would have, were you trying to go it alone.

Next, we need to look at the cost involved with hiring an SEO agency versus trying to do it yourself. Obviously. an agency will cost you a fee and to some that might seem like a negative but let us consider that.

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By Bassendean Means Business
Blogging Tips
Digital Marketing

7 Blogging Tips To Enhance Your Website SEO

Google loves quality content and one of the most effective ways of producing it is with a blog. However, it is not enough to simply bash out a few crappy posts, and then sit back and wait. That is not going to work. Instead, help your blog to enhance your SEO by implementing some simple techniques, like those below.

Include Longtail Keywords That Chime with Readers

It is no longer enough to simply use keywords that the ‘planners’ tell you to use. Increasingly, Google is looking at the user experience as a factor in ranking websites, and this can be done with your content. ideally, you want to use phrases that match the intent of the reader.

Optimize Images Using Alt Text

For all the billions that have been spent on the technology that Google uses to crawl and analyse websites, we are still not at the stage where it can ‘read’ images. In other words, if you embed a photograph of a dog in a blog post, Google will not see the dog, and therefore that image is not helping your SEO.

To resolve this, the image should be given an alt-text, such as ‘beagle dog’. Then when Google comes calling it associates the blog post with beagle dogs thanks to the image’s alt-text and thus your blog post should rank higher for that term.

Ensure Your Blog Is Mobile-Responsive

A short and simple tip, but a particularly important one. Google prioritises mobile searches over desktop searches nowadays so you must ensure your website design is mobile responsive. If not, your rankings will be adversely affected.

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By Bassendean Means Business
Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategy

3 Things To Consider When Developing A Digital Marketing Strategy

If you don’t have a clear digital marketing strategy for your business, you need to get one. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is or how much you spend on marketing each year, the chances of succeeding without a clear strategy are small.

However, it can be hard to develop a clear, well-defined digital marketing strategy including your Google Ads campaign, if you don’t know what you’re doing. With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the three most important things to consider when you’re developing a new digital marketing strategy for your business or website. They include:

  1. Think Carefully About Your Target Audience

It’s extremely important to make sure that you’re thinking very carefully about your target audience when you’re developing a new digital marketing strategy. Identify the people and groups of people who are likely to be interested in your products and services.

Although this can be a little difficult to begin with, it’s worth spending the time to get right. Knowing your audience will help you create highly targeted advertising campaigns with a decent return on investment.

  1. Don’t Confine Yourself To A Single Marketing Stream

Similarly, you need to think carefully about what sort of digital marketing you’re going to use. There are numerous options available, including:

  • Social media marketing, which includes both paid advertising and organic networking via your business’s page or profile.
  • Search engine optimization, or SEO, which is a great way to drive organic visitors to your website. Although it can be expensive at first, SEO is usually a good long term investment.
  • Ads marketing, which basically involves paying for your business result to appear at the top of the search engine results page for specific search terms or on specific websites related to your niche.

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By Bassendean Means Business
Website Design

5 Web Design Tips For Complete Beginners

Building a new website can be difficult, especially if it’s something that you’ve never done before. There are numerous things to think about, including web design, content structures, hosting, and branding.

Unfortunately, effective web design is one of the things that people often get wrong. Without a professional design from professional web designers, you will find it hard to create a successful website that people want to engage with.

To help you get started, www.slinkywebdesign.com.au put together a short article outlining some of my top web design tips for complete beginners. These include:

  1. Use Professional Quality Pictures

Unfortunately, a lot of people make the mistake of using poor-quality images when they’re designing their first website. This is a very bad idea, as it can detract from your overall design, create an unprofessional feel, and generally discourage people from engaging with your site.

Wherever possible, I’d recommend getting professional photos of you, your business and/or your products taken. You can use stock photos if you have to, but these tend to be a little generic and are best avoided if you can.

  1. Consistency Is The Key

Another thing that a lot of web design beginners do is changing their design throughout their website. Once again, this is a bad idea because it makes it hard to build a strong brand. It can also confuse people when they’re trying to navigate between pages.

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By Bassendean Means Business