Top 10 Search Engine Optimisation Report

Competitive Edge's Search Engine Optimisation report will provide an action plan specific to your site website, to achieve top 10 results for your desired keyword(s).

This in-depth Search Engine Optimisation Report will attend to the on-page and off-page factors that affect your websites ranking and provide strategies to improve your rankings with Google. It analyses your website against the current Top 10 websites on Google.com.au and provides you valuable insights.

This report provides you with the information required to improve your traffic dramatically and identify major issues with your website.

The aim of search engine optimisation (SEO) is to increase traffic to your website by achieving top 10 rank in search engine result pages via relevant keywords and terms that describe your web page. If you have not implemented the correct strategy, you will be losing potential sales. This free report will identify those issues and provide valuable feedback for your website.
Our Top 10 Ranking report demystifies Google's ranking algorithm and tells you in easy-to-understand words how to optimise and prepare your website specifically for better results in Google.

Suppose you want to know how to get a top 10 ranking for the search term "Marketing Consultants Melbourne" in Google. Our report will tell you how to optimise your website specific to that search term in Google.

Our report is based on in-depth analysis of current, up-to-the-minute top 10 results in Google for that search term and it is specifically for that search term and specifically for Google.

Cost: $120

Please enter your website address and a keyword or phrase for which you want to obtain a top Google ranking

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Enter Keyword or a Keyphrase for which you want to obtain a top Google ranking

Your Domain is a Valuable Asset

I was going to write about marketing and customer retention when we had a meeting to discuss the number of our clients who leave their domain registrations very late, and almost too late.

Your domain for your website is a tremendous gift at only $44 for two years.

For that amount you can buy 12-13 cappuccinos, so it represents great value.

Remember your domain is used by Google to rank your site, and becomes known to clients and is a basis for advertising campaigns on letterhead, business cards, car signs, emails and other corporate image material. If you lose the right to that domain, which is only a lease for two years, and it is transferred to another person, you have lost a tremendous amount of investment and support for your company, brand and corporate image and referencing.

Why would you leave your domain registration so late after you have been notified about renewing it, if it packs such a high value in terms of investment, online presence, is the basis of recognized Google ranking, and costs so little?

To emphasise the point more strongly. What would Yahoo do if it lost its domain name? What would Car Sales do if they lost their www.carsales.com domain name, and were unable to retrieve it for a further two-year lease?

When domain sites are sold for up to $800,000, and those associated with core businesses bring millions of dollars, those in SME organisations should take note and put the valuation of the domain site in our e-world as their highest priority after, or alongside their brand name. The truth is that most of them don’t, and it becomes a last minute item that we have to try to retrieve for them when the truth of what they will lose suddenly dawns on them.

Imagine having to re-brand your website in the e-world with a new domain name, re-brand and re-sign everything in your business, contact all your clients, suppliers etc., and relay a new domain name, go through the process of optimizing and gaining a ranking for your site with Google – all because you couldn’t get around to renewing a $44 domain fee for a whole two-year business period.

Remember, we have no rights as a hosting company, to the domain either. When it is gone, we are unable to retrieve it for you. This goes for support domains as well that play a major role in directing traffic, creating competitive space, and assisting through landing pages and fighting brand sites for alternative or discounted products or services.

We frankly can’t understand this attitude, given that we spend the “hard yards” assisting new excited clients to try to claim great domain names.

In the future, getting a good domain name will become as difficult as buying the best property in Melbourne or Sydney. Frankly, we are running out of good domain names, so if you have a good one, and you have invested in your domain, protect it and hang on to it at all costs. Welcome the reminder, and pay up quickly.

When you sell in our dynamic e-world in the future, the domain name will be an important part of your online presence that will create a good percentage of the value of your business. It is therefore part of your treasure chest or wealth creation for the future, especially if it also contains any brand names or corporate/ trading names which as far as possible, you should have encapsulated in at least one domain name.

David Higginbottom

How consumers are feeling now – A national study of sentiment, emotions and advocacy

At this year’s SOCAP Australia Symposium in Sydney, Peter Gillson, director of SFI International, and David Higginbottom, of Competitive Edge Consulting, presented the results of a national study on ‘Consumer Sentiment, Emotions and Advocacy NOW’, commissioned by SFI International and conducted by Competitive Edge.

Click here to download the Key Findings of the Study

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SERVICES NEED DIFFERENT APPROACH TO CUSTOMER RELATIONS

We all understand that services create intangible benefits that are often hard to convert to tangible offerings for clients.

This is difficult when we know that most of us prefer to see, touch, feel, own products and we often have difficulty parting with money when services are not immediate and consumable at the time of purchase.

Over the last 15 years, some of our major State economies have developed into service economies. NSW has the greatest service economy, with between 85% and 90% of businesses being service based. The service industry is growing, not going away.

How do we, therefore, handle customer complaints and customer relations when we know that the very nature of services creates communication problems because of the inherent tangible nature of the benefits.

Here is a list of things you should consider to avoid the “service trap” that can drive customers away, rather than drive them towards your bottom line.

1. Ensure that they can complain as soon as there is a problem. There is nothing worse than a customer trying to complain about such items as “service attitude, sloppy delivery of service” etc. With a leaky pipe, you can demonstrate it leaks. With service, it is difficult to explain how somebody served you badly or dealt with you by phone two or three days earlier.


The secret is a good customer complaint or customer response section in-store or online, so that the response time is immediate and customers do not “fester” with hate and discontent. A good online contact page with a phone number can assist here.

2. Do not make offers or engage in promotions that, themselves, are sources of complaint or service problems. Coles is currently looking at its loyalty cards, such as Flybys. These “motivators” have now become demotivators and a source of discontent as clients try to convert points, and other clients try to have convenient purchases while being grilled about Flybys.

It is well known that the greatest complaints happened during sales promotions, creating an opposite action to the desired bottom line result.

3. Train staff to expect objections and complaints. I love it when staff ask you if you enjoyed the meal, for example. If you answer that you did not because it was terrible, they are taken aback and are unable to respond because of their lack of training. Service 101 has only taught them to say, “Have a nice day”, and “did you enjoy the meal?” There has been no training for quality problems, requests for salad on the side, ability to handle customers who want to negotiate, etc. Handling service complaints requires training because it is about perceived value in the eyes of the client, and you cannot win by trying to discredit the client who has developed a firm belief about what they experienced.

4. Be careful of telephony. Telephone call centres, especially overseas ones, are usually time consuming, and the operators lack the same cultural understanding about issues such as quality, speed of response, perceived bureaucracy, value for money, etc. Their in-country experience is totally different to Australia.

Try to have a culturally attuned trained workforce to handle calls locally. By doing it efficiently, you actually reduce the steam that builds up, while you are delayed on lengthy overseas calls.


There is emerging in society “consumer rage”. This is similar to road rage, and major retailers and customer relations experts are now recognizing this new phenomena.

If you are service based, you must address what will be a new phase of complaint handling with modern management techniques and training. This requires an understanding that the sentiments and emotions underlying buyer behaviour are being shaped and moulded by a “fast food, convenience” and stress based society where faster response to complaints handled in a professional manner, is essential.

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GLOBAL CITIES PROVIDE A VIABLE CITY-CENTRIC EXPORT OPPORTUNITY THAT WILL HAVE A MAJOR IMPACT ON EXPORTS IN THE NEXT 20 YEARS

1. Statistics show that 20 mega cities in the world account for 75% of the carbon emissions of all cities.

2. Mega cities will become increasingly larger in the future because the world is becoming more heavily urbanized.

3. A recent projection in Australia alone shows how urbanized cities will be. The NSW Govt has announced that Sydney will have approx. 9.2 million people by 2036. This is half of today’s population in Australia, and it will happen in the next 28 years.

4. The world population is moving from rural areas to urban areas. The rate is 30,000 people a day. In the next short term, 500 million people will move into cities in the world, and many of these will be into mega cities.

5. In the past, we used to talk about populations in countries, populations in provinces, states or regions. This will change because the major consumer demand will be in cities.

The implication to exporters is obvious. Over the last 30 years of working with exporters, they tend to concentrate on country populations to carry out their estimates and viability estimates. They tend to look at growth in terms of country growth, and they tend to look at large populations as major draw cards for launching products or expanding their local domestic product or even their international or export products.

This type of thinking has always been a problem for consultants because we always have to “hose down” how people think about markets in order to reduce the target market to a manageable size, and one that can be attacked in terms of traditional and online marketing strategies.

A typical example is America. Many Australians see the market as the USA. Another is China. When they think about going to emerging markets, they will nominate China. Only in some cases will they nominate Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Szechwan or Kumming. Even then, they tend to group 2-3 cities together, without realizing the total demand that will be created if they are successful in that market, and the large costs associated with building a marketing channel, and targeting the market in an efficient and cost effective way.

Obviously large markets take up a great deal of marketing funding, and they have to be well thought out if they are to be harnessed correctly, and if they are to be opportunistic for the exporter.


The new figures on urbanization are therefore sobering and welcome.

1. What they suggest is, that while in the past many exporters have been lucky in terms of going to “countries” or large “regions”, this will no longer be viable or practicable. The large cities themselves represent huge target markets, and they provide a huge challenge in terms of distribution, market reach, communication strategies, consumer adaptation etc. They, themselves, will pose a huge challenge for emerging exporters.

2. On the other hand, it is great news for those who want to plan and execute a proper Export Plan. These individuals or companies will be able to nominate 2-3 large cities in what was an unwieldy and often daunting marketing task, such as “going to the USA”.

They can now concentrate their thoughts, processes, funding, strategies and effort around a more controllable, and more defined market built around a major metropolitan city center. Once they get to understand the distribution, the role of middlemen, the supply chain, how logistics and transport work to and from ports or airports, and how online and information systems work, they are in an excellent position to be able to penetrate these markets without huge costs, with concentrated marketing activities, and with the ability to track and monitor their success or failure more accurately.

From an export point of view, it means that more and more of the teaching and thinking about exports for emerging new technologies, elaborately transformed manufactures, and consumer products, as well as value added agribusiness based products such as wine, dairy etc., can be more properly channelled into these markets.

This represents a great opportunity for the smarter exporters. Taking the US for example, they can choose 2-3 cities that are very close in proximity, and they can choose a region where there is high population growth and movement to the urban cities. They can also isolate those metropolitan cities that have re-defined the bottom line in terms of sustainability, product usage, air quality etc., and they can identify those areas where not only will the product be consumed and be a viable export, but they can identify those where there is truly a contribution to the reduction in carbon emissions, air quality etc. – something which will favour Australia as a country that has always been able to be on the “clean and green” list.

In addition, the economies of having more concentrated distribution systems, direct flights to the major cities so there is not huge costs in meeting distributors and agents over long periods of time, etc. etc., creates greater economies, and with it great opportunities through concentrated consumers in a small areas that reduce distribution, handling costs etc.

Together with the ability to reach the world, markets and individual contacts via Google and other search engines, the cost of planning and executing export development for SMEs is realizable. With the concentration of large export markets in major cities, the vision of exporting is becoming more manageable, and attractive to the more entrepreneurial SME managers.

Web based strategies and platforms, apart from being necessary in today’s world, are a great investment because you are targeting major urban areas with fast broadband capabilities and educated/online focused customers at all levels in the supply chain.

TRADE MARKS FORCED TOWARDS GRAPHIC FORMULATION

In past years the Australian Trade Marks Office has worked closely with patent attorneys and other legal professionals to make the cost of trade marking very prohibitive for Australian companies. This not only worked against the interests of trade marking in this country and the work of the Trade Marks Office, but also made it very difficult for Australians to protect their trade marks internationally because of the expense, and length of time and considerations undertaken by the trade marks examination process.

In recent times, with the growth of the Internet and online practices, the system has become streamlined, and it became very easy to carry out trade marking activities to assist companies to support their business names and branding with proper trade mark registration that increased their intellectual property control, management and wealth.

Recently we have noticed that the Trade Marks Office has started on a process of “knocking back” nearly every trade mark where there is a market name or generic name in the actual trade mark registration. For instance, if you engaged in innovative gardening and you wanted to trade mark the name “Innovative Gardening Activities” or “Innovative Gardening Practices”, or Innovative Gardening Landscaping”, there is a very good chance that the first report that results from the $120 fee from the Trade Marks Office will immediately say that you cannot claim a trade mark and a monopoly through the trade mark of the word “innovative”.

They may even say that the words “gardening” and “innovative” together give you a monopoly, which seems ridiculous given that you probably have the trade name registered in one or more States, and even if you don’t have it registered in all the States, then someone else will register it in another State anyway.

In addition, the practice of registering trade names through the States has become so much out of control that a name such as “Innovative Gardening Landscaping” could be changed to “Innovative Gardening Landscaping WA”, “Innovative Gardening Landscaping NSW”, etc. With a name like Competitive Edge, we have noted the number of “knock offs” that go on at the registration level.

We are now advising clients in our practices to cease putting forward words or names as a basis for trade marking because of the lengthy process and the build up to another costly system involving patent attorneys and the legal fraternity.

Instead we are suggesting that our clients put in graphics that are more eye-catching and visual, closer to modern branding technology and techniques, and avoid reference to words that can be refused by the Trade Marks Office using the pretext that you are trying to monopolise a particular area at the expense of competition.

This means that when you consider trade marking in the future, you are best to try to look for a graphic change that may involve one or two letters in the word, or the way in which you present the wording of the business name.

This could include boxing the wording, changing the slant on the wording, adding a graphic such as a leaf outline or something else, so it has a unique characteristic and cannot in any way be considered to be:

1. Monopolising the wording at the expense of the competition, because there is a graphic involved that is distinctive and unique.
2. Restrictive in that other people cannot develop a different form of graphics that will give them unique branding and as a result, a unique positioning and trade mark in the market place.
3. Preventing others from seeking alternative ways of representing their trade mark in the market place.
This also avoids the costly fee hikes that an examination by the Trade Marks Office and possible legal involvement entails.

Trade marking is an important part of modern business, just as it has always been an important part of ancient business. The signature, through the signature ring (signet ring) carried by early merchants, was their “mark” or their trade mark, and this was used to sign off documents, important shipping papers etc., and to seal deals as far back as the Merchant of Venice-type transactions referenced by Shakespeare.

Today everybody has a trade mark, and this is their signature.

Making it difficult and expensive for companies to trade mark their signature, especially when they have been operating and have a legal trading name in Australia, is restrictive and not to the benefit of Australian business both here and in a globally connected world.

It is unfortunate that this has now become a practice. We know that as the wheels of evolution turn, this will eventually be overturned and there will be a return to normality, and a clear distinction in “fee for service” roles and direct blatant revenue-raising from a registration monopoly, restored to the benefit of globally competitive Australian businesses.

In the meantime, it is a good idea to consider the use of graphics, and to tie these closely to the packaging of your branding, and your unique positioning in the market place.