July 13th, 2007
Today we got a letter in the mail - not email, but by post. It came from the Anglican Church of Kenya c/o Tear Australia as an accompaniment to our yearly giving summary.
Before you read it - know this about Kenya and Australia (from Wikipedia):
- Per Capita Income (PPP)= US$2600 - an average, which means a few are earning a lot lot more, but lots are earning even less. Per year, not month or week.
- Australia’s PPP = US$39,320 and we complain about the cost of McDonalds.
- Kenya is ranked 152nd on the Human Development Index (a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries worldwide)
- Australia is ranked 3rd and we think we look too old.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Mt Kenya Christian Community Services (CCS)….. we serve a region with a population of around seven million.
…We have worked in partnership with TEAR Australia for the past seven years….
We have worked with 500 households that are caring for people living with HIV. These households are visited weekly by a team of 52 volunteers trained with support from TEAR Australia. Families have acquired skills for nursing people living with AIDS, resulting in better care and longer lives. Training in nutrition has enabled those on Anti Retroviral Therapy to benefit more from the medicine.
…Kamwangi supports about 2000 orphaned children, and 150 children who had dropped out of school are now attending regularly.
A real impact from real money. Really easy - and you don’t even notice the difference. What an opportunity to make a real change in people’s lives with a business. There’s two of us in Brown Box - we have been a part of helping 500 households in Kenya.
October 18th, 2006
Search Enginge Findability (SEF): How easily can people find you when they are searching for your service or product?
Brown Box helps businesses like Australian Opal Cutters increase their findability through search engine placement.
What terms to target?
One of the questions I have had to ask for Australian Opal Cutters, “what will people look for?” The obvious answer might be a simple description for the industry or product you offer. For their website it could easily be opal. But you could also describe with terms such as wholesale jewlery or opal cutters. Not so easy to pinpoint and how much competition will there be on a word like opal?
Diversify and get searches
The more the competition, the harder it might be to get into the top page of the search engine results pages (SERP). Take a look at the SERP opal for Google - it returns around 19.4Mill results. If I target something like Australian Opal, then with less competition (1.12Mill) it can be easier to return a higher search engine result. Our lesson here? Diversify your possible search terms.
Australian Opal Cutters was found in September through 558 different search terms; which shows us that people aren’t just going to look for opals or some other short variation of that term. I often wonder what people are thinking when they find the site with terms like:
- pendant sterling wholesale setting findings;
- australia opal code 1603 bracelet;
- huge black opal -ebay -e-bay;
- australian rainbow stone;
- claire sanders sydney; and
- j71628.
Some are obvious, but some like j71628 make no sense to me at all but with 558 different search terms that return Australian Opal Cutters the findability of the site is greatly increased.
Increase searches increase sales
Think of your site, how many search terms do people find you with? 5? 10? 20? Increase those and be found! The best way to do that is to provide lots of good content related to your business or related to the website. It will take time, but in the end it will translate into more traffic and the possibility of more sales. I am glad to see as a result of my work that in April there were only 273 search terms that resulted in a click through to Australian Opal Cutters, compare that with 558 in October and I think we can classify that as an increase in findability which has resulted in an increase in sales by 1800%. There’s always a lot more work to go, and search is not the only way to gain traffic. But it is a good start.
October 12th, 2006
Does your website provide the means for your customer to find what they are looking for? Most users will be online and online for a reason. They might be looking for the perfect present to buy for Christmas, or that holiday they’ve been saving for. If your website doesn’t show them what they want to find out - how will you sell them anything? The customer is your king. An easy way to get someone to buy something is to get them what they want.
