We’re Hiring – 2x Marketing Roles

We’re hiring again and have two new positions available. Background: we’re an online marketing agency that provides hosting, SEO, Adwords, website support and a range of other online marketing services to small businesses and online retailers. About 70% of our clients are Australian with the rest scattered throughout the world. We currently manage the online…

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Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins (Free and Paid)

Contact Form Plugins For Wordpress

Creating a WordPress site requires a certain amount of meticulousness –  you need to implement a variety of elements for your site to work properly and seamlessly.  Caching plugins, security plugins, drag, and drop page builder plugins, live chat plugins, image optimization plugins, eCommerce plugins, you name it! There’s plenty of them to think of…

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“Eighty percent of success is showing up” – Why SEO should be important to you…

I love this quote from Woody Allen: “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. So many small businesses get sucked into the old “I need a fancy website mindset” which is completely wrong. At the end of the day, what you really want is the result a website can bring, more leads, more enquiries, more sales,…

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How To Fix Hacked WordPress

If you have a WordPress website, it’s important to be prepared for the possibility of being hacked. Unfortunately, hacking is becoming more and more common, and even well-protected sites can be compromised if they’re not careful.  If you suspect that your site has been hacked, don’t panic! In this article, we will walk you through…

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How To Configure WP Rocket Settings For Maximum Speed

As your website grows and you start getting more and more visitors, you’re likely going to see a lot more lag and even a few crashes here and there. The reason behind this is that your website is optimized for a certain number of visitors, and it can’t efficiently accommodate the expanding numbers. In order…

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GeneratePress WordPress Theme Review – The Best Choice in 2024?

GeneratePress review

GeneratePress is considered one of the best WordPress themes that you can find nowadays. But why exactly do a lot of people seem to favor this particular theme over all other WordPress themes, and why has it received such high praise? The easiest way to explain this would be to simply say that it’s a…

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Set an Out of Office reply or Vacation Responder in Google Apps email

Here’s how you setup an Out of Office reply in your Google Apps email hosting: Login to your webmail (either goto webmail.youdomain.com or http://google.com/a/yourdomain.com) Click on the wheel/cog in the right hand corner of the screen and goto Mail Settings Click the ‘General’ tab on the new screen that appears. Scroll down to the Out…

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Small Business Web Design: Unique Blasting & Coatings Perth

This week we pushed a new website live for Perth based Unique Blasting & Coatings who specialise in wet abrasive blasting, high pressure cleaning and protective coatings. The business was brought under new management in 2013 and the work is part of a broader online marketing project to grow the business and generate new leads…

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Easy SEO Traffic Wins: Bing Places now available in Australia

There are 2 new changes with the search engines you need to be aware of, both pretty easy traffic wins especially if you’re a small business or retail business where people come to your premises, shop or office. Click play on the video above to learn more. 1) Bing Places has now gone live in…

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The 4 different types of hosting you need to be aware of…

When thinking and talking about hosting for your website there a four separate elements to consider, most business owners lump them together as “website hosting” which is actually wrong and this can potentially lead to problems down the track. 4 different flavours or components to your website hosting that you need to be aware of…

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WPEngine SEO – Making it better

WPEngine SEO

We love WPEngine. More than half the small business websites we work with were on rubbish hosting initially. Many of these businesses were paying a premium price for their hosting but the hosting was such poor quality it’s to the point where it’s hurting the SEO rankings of the site and negatively impacting Adwords campaign…

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How to do Keyword Research + New Google Updates

We’ve just published a new Business Marketing Show episode on all things keywords and the keyword research approach we’re using with clients – scroll down to the bottom of this page for more. Google have been rolling out a bunch of changes lately, there are three that you should probably be aware of: 1. Four…

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How To Fix Slow Wordpress Hosting On GoDaddy

Slow Godaddy website and how to fix it

Contents Some Important Remarks Regarding Godaddy Hosting: Optimizing the speed of our customers’ websites has been something we started as part of our agency, and it ended up with the creation of a whole new business focusing on WordPress Speed Optimization – WPSpeedFix.com. Offering this service, has allowed us to see and optimize hundreds of…

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The most important search term you should be ranking for

Here’s a quick tip that will serve you well along with an update with what’s been happening the last couple of weeks. Business owners are often so focussed on ranking for a certain search term or obsessively looking at competitor websites, that they’re blind to the important stuff that actually makes a difference. One of…

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How to get Google Places reviews

The Search Engine Shop

Generally speaking, having 5 or more reviews on your Google Places listing will help you rank higher in the search results. Before you ask, yes you will absolutely get penalised if you try and do your own reviews so don’t do it! Instead, here’s the strategy we have our SEO clients implement that has worked…

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Converting your Ecommerce website to Wordpress & Woocommerce or Jigoshop

We’ve done a lot of work this year converting customers from older legacy ecommerce CMS systems or platforms across to a Wordpress powered platform. Quite often these customers are completely happy with the design and layout of their website but the features offered by their ecommerce platform are no longer good enough in todays online…

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Finance and Accounting Tools

The Search Engine Shop

Counting the Money — Finance and Accounting Tools The world of small business accounting has come a long way from the days where Myob and Quickbooks were the main players in small business software market. Today there are a ton of finance and accounting tools that make it easier to get paid and keep your…

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What gets measured gets managed!

Really enjoying meeting business owners in Perth & country WA as part of our Achieve More Online seminars. I can’t go on about this enough – “what gets measured gets managed”. It’s important you use analytics tools on your site to ensure you know how you and the site are actually performing. One great advantage…

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Cheap website hosting:What does it really cost you?

Great blog short blog article here from Fitzy at The Frontier Group about the value of a good website hosting provider and plan This is a really important area of your online marketing strategy that is largely neglected and just an after-thought for most people. A lot of small business owners shop around hard when…

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Adwords & SEO, Paid vs Natural or Organic Search Results – what’s the difference?

Below on a Google Search for “didgeridoo stand” we’ve highlighted the Natural or Organic Search results vs the Paid or Adwords Search Results in Google for our client Didgeridoo Breath in Perth, WA (click the image to enlarge)   SEO or Search Engine Optimisation helps you rank higher in the organic or natural search results.…

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Redefine & The Search Engine Shop have merged!

We’re proud to announce that Redefine and The Search Engine Shop have merged! The goal of our merger is to leverage each others strengths and provide an all-round stronger solution for our clients from both a design and technical point of view. If you’re an existing Redefine client you’ll have a new phone number to…

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How to get more customers – 2 new ideas for 2024

2 new ideas to get more customers

I’ve been talking to quite a few businesses lately about what they can do differently this year or what other things they should be doing to help them get more customers. In the the video below I’ve shared 2 new ideas that most people haven’t heard of that can be a great way to get…

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Best Elementor Themes

The best themes for Elementor

Elementor is one of the more popular page builders out there, which is why it has quite a lot of third-party add-ons and integrations available, as well as a number of themes that are specifically designed to work well in tandem with its functionalities. And when it comes to choosing the best themes for Elementor,…

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Cheaper, Fast, Easier & Measureable: 5 alternatives to yellow book advertising

Wow, huge response via email to the last post “Yellowpages is dead” and a lot of questions from visitors to the site so we thought we’d put this quick post together for small business owners. Here’s 5 ways to market your small business online that are cheaper, faster, easier and more effective than yellowbook print…

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How to Fix Slow Wordpress Hosting on Network Solutions

How to fix slow website on Network Solutions

Important Note on Network Solutions as a Hosting Provider: Through our web agency work we started optimizing customer sites for speed and it ultimately ended up a new business of its own that focuses on WordPress Speed Optimization –  WPSpeedFix.com. Since we started we’ve now optimized over 2000 sites so we’ve worked on our fair…

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Two important search engine updates you should be aware of…

There’s been 2 new search engine layout updates in the last month that you should be aware of so you  can take full advantage of them, check it out: Bing search now showing a “one-box” Bing have recently started showing a “one-box” in the search results very similar to Google – you know, that box…

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Why Wordpress is our preferred CMS platform

(Note: I wrote this blog post a while back because we we’re explaining the virtues of Wordpress so often that I thought it would be worth putting on the web! Today in 2015 Wordpress now powers roughly 20% of the top 1 million websites in the world, it leads the market by a huge margin,…

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12 Fantastic MailChimp Alternatives (Some Cheaper, Some Better!)

12 Fantastic Mailchimp Alternatives

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing services, built with small businesses in mind. But like every service, Mailchimp is not perfect and has its limitations. Especially after the company changed its pricing plans and removed its direct integration with Shopify, more and more people are looking for Mailchimp alternatives.  If you’re one…

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Small Business Web Design: Links Surveying Perth

Last week we pushed a new site live for Perth surveyors, Links Surveying. The website is built on Wordpress and heavily leverages photography as part of its design. The site has a fantastic warm feeling. On this project we worked with our photography partner Photography Project and design partner 485 Design. Visit the site at…

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Improve your conversion rate using commercial website photography

Matt from Photography Project is our goto-guy whenever we need any help in the image or photography department – we love working with Matt and the end result he produces is amazing! We worked with Matt recently on a new client website for APMS Group, a specialist welding and metals fabrication company and with a single…

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Wordpress Small Business Website – Quicksilver Limousines

We’ve just pushed a new site build live for Queensland business, Quicksilver Limousines. The new site is built on Wordpress with the goal of bringing the look and feel of the site up-to today’s standard as well as ensuring the site is smartphone friendly through the use of a responsive design. Check out the before…

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How To Update WordPress Safely With Visual Regression Testing

One of the most important aspects of properly maintaining a website is making sure that it’s always updated so you can be at ease, knowing that you’re working with the most optimized tools you have at your disposal. A lot of site administrators frown on any sort of changes to their site for one of…

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Next round of Perth Small Business Workshops

Next Small Business Workshops in Perth – 31st May & 2 June We’ve locked in the dates for our next round of workshops in Perth. We’ll be hosting full-day workshops on Thursday 31st May and Saturday 2nd June. Thursday’s workshop will cover the cloud, technology and a whole bunch of different tools you can (and…

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How to Fix a 504 Gateway Timeout Error on Your WordPress Site

How to Fix 403 Access Denied Error in WordPress

Error messages are unpleasant sights – everybody knows that. Regardless of whether you’re just casually browsing the internet, or running a site from which you draw your basic income, you definitely don’t want to encounter one and compromise your online experience or your online business.  But error messages do happen, they happen frequently, and there’s…

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9 Best WordPress Mobile Themes (2024)

As people of the 21st century, we can confidently say we live in a hypermobile and hyperconnected age. Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and downright indispensable for a functional daily existence. Mobile phones and other such tools have become the new pocket computers – they’re becoming more and more powerful, with ever more programs, gadgets,…

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Best VPN Services for Australia

If you happen to be coming from Australia, you certainly appreciate a good VPN! Australians regularly rely on VPN networks for various reasons: from access to streaming services (some of which aren’t originally available in Australia) like Netflix or Hulu, to concerns for privacy and security, for which VPNs provide some degree of relief –…

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The Best Ecommerce Platforms in 2024 (Free & Paid)

There is no doubt that ecommerce is booming! Statistics tell us that the Global ecommerce sales in 2019 exceeded $3.5 trillion, with an increase of 18% from the year before. It’s expected that ecommerce sales will nearly double by 2024. Choosing which platform to build your online store on top of is an important choice…

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Yellowpages in Australia is dead

Yellowpages is dead. Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually opened a Yellow Pages phone book to find a business? Now, how many times in the last week have you used Google? …beaten by Google, Facebook and Bing Yellow Pages & Sensis business model is dead – they didn’t move quickly enough to…

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Perth Small Business Workshops – September & October 2012

Dates for our next round of business workshops have been announced. These workshops are being held in conjunction with Fremantle Chamber of commerce at 16 Phillimore Street in Fremantle. The list of September and October workshops is below. There’s no cost to attend this series of workshops (and no its not a pitch-fest). For full…

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Cloudways Coupon Code & Configuration Guide

Cloudways Coupon Code & Configuration Guide

In this article, we’re going to cover two things. First, we’ll share our Cloudways coupon code with you, it is: FASTHOSTING Use this coupon code when you signup and you’ll get $25 credit (so 3 months or so FREE on the base plans!) …and in this post we’re going to show you how to configure…

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