HOS – House Of Sparkles Website

April 17, 2019/in Google, Google Search, Hosting, How To, SEO, SEO Company Review, SEO PR, SEO Service /by chameleon

It is great to read about the HOS Home – House Of Sparkles success and this is what inspires others to go for it and set up their own business.

Mandy Hale’s quote is great here “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.”

The website HOS – House Of Sparkles setup by Layla Chapman back in 2016 with according to the Sun News Paper for just £40 is now a booming success with a turnover of £10.7 million. This is great to read and we really hope that people feel inspired by this but also understand that it takes a huge amount of hours and personal sacrifice with added luck to succeed. Previous failures often come before achieving success and the road to success is often difficult and we always admire success stories.

Successful people have a ridiculous level of persistence in making their dreams comes true and we see people here at Chameleon on a daily basis that want to make it online and we create a plan to achieve success for everyone from what we do, but often people never realise how much work is involved once you make it. We think it is easy to read articles like this forget this fact and it is important to have this in the back of your mind so not have false hope.

If you look at the likes of Sir Alan Sugar, he worked so hard to achieve the success he has today and he often refers back to his routes, even today in a tweet as he is attacked for being successful:-

The road to success is a journey and you will never stop learning. Successful people learn new things every day improving a little and the snowball rolling effect makes them become great. This website success has been helped along due to celebrities such as Amanda Holden and Peter Andre and this is fantastic. We are sure that with the positive publicity the business it will grow even faster now as a result.

We thought it would good to look to into this website further from an online marketing perspective because often success comes and businesses miss the basics. The growth of this company could come from hardwork, luck, organic growth, paid online advertising or something else and identify and help HOS achieve more growth from what we find.

When a business comes to us and asks us to audit a company we look into everything to understand and identify how success has been achieved.

We take a look at everything to understand what is good and what can be better, there is always something that can be better and we have been in the industry since 2001 and helped grow some of the most successful websites online today.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website

The website HOS is currently looking lovely:-

Back in December 2018 which is not very long ago at all the website didn’t look as nice and it very important to look at how a website develops and move forwards. Often changes are made a result of research to improve conversions or simply to improve the visual look. The HOS Home website looked like this:-

The website in 2019 looks in-line with the competition and when we look behind the scenes at search engine optimisation aspects of the website it is missing vital information for Google to help it rank organically and this is something that HOS Home online development need to look at. Normally we would run and audit using our in-house software and then make positive changes after looking over the results.

The website is built using Shopify a hosted shopping website platform with multiple themes which requires very little programming experience. The website is using MailChimp for Shopify, Automatic Discounts, Searchanise, Covet Pics, Product Reviews Addon and MageWorx usage statistics as an example of plugins/extensions installed.

The website is hosted in Canada and on a server that is hosting websites we would not recommend to have in the same neighbourhood. We look at hosting as this is part of the search engines algorithm.

We found hoshome.com is hosted with over 1,000 other domains hosted on the same web server which uses IP address 23.227.38.32 and this web server is hosting web sites with explicit content. To show examples of the websites our system detected a simple ping command can be used to check the hosting to confirm this problem:-

There is a possibility that all of the web sites on this web server may be affected as far as being blocked by web filtering software. Search engine rankings for all web sites using the same IP address may be affected as well. We always recommend looking at the IP address and ensuring a website is hosted correctly with a unique IP address and SSL certificate.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website SEO Report

We have a complete SEO PDF report you can download here:

When you carry out a Google search can see the company is paying for Google Adwords for its brand name to protect it presumably. However, this will result in people clicking on this and adding additional costs to the business when visitors are already heading to the website.

The home page www.hoshome.com meta title for example is <title>HOS Home | Luxury Furniture</title> and then the meta description is <meta name=”description” content=”Welcome to HOS Home. Affordable luxury furniture specialists. High end glamorous furniture at high street prices. A brand you can trust.“>

This could be improved but is in line with what Google is looking for in terms of the title and description.

If we then move to an internal page for example www.hoshome.com/collections/living-room we find the title is <title>Living Room Furniture | HOS Home</title> and the meta description is <meta name=”description” content=”The living room is where we spend the most time, create the best memories, and relax. For this, you need the perfect furniture for your living space. From sofas, coffee tables, media units & more. We have everything you need to design your living room interior.“>

This page could be improved to help tell search engines like Google what the content is about, but is a great starting point to achieve online success. It is clear that from only looking at a couple of internal pages they follow the same pattern. This shows that what we presume this is automatically generated meta titles and descriptions and the job is partially done right.

We scrapped the site to look to see what the Google spider would find and for example, we quickly found broken links on the website using our in-house developed scrapping software.

For example www.hoshome.com/pages/returns-policy we found a link created wrong:-

You can see the coding is has been built as follows:-

<a href=”customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

In the screenshot, you can see also that another link has been built correctly, so this is a simple coding error when the page was created.

To fix this they need to add the “mailto:” which would create <a href=”mailto:customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

As we carry on looking into the site we spotted the site has been built with an error using two rel=”canonical” tags across the site.

If you look at the homepage for example:-

A website should only have one canonical tag.

A canonical tag is the method used to inform search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

This is probably because it is being generated by Shopify and also by a second extension adding SEO data.

A very important factor of ranking online is the power / trust a website has and this helps search engines determine whether or not to trust the website content and also it helps to identify the business links the website may have and the subject content to help place the website in a category.

Looking below we can see out of 100 the website scores 11 in trust and 18 in citation.

To compare that against another website for a reference we have used WayFair.com and you can see below the trust is 54 out of 100 in terms of trust and 63 in terms of citation. The higher the trust the better:-

To increase the trust carefully selected backlinks need to be found and this is a subject in the SEO world that causes many issues. Here at Chameleon, we identify only the perfect links to try and find that will add value and we help clients create links organically by creating content that can be shared adding value to the users.

Looking at the link text known in the SEO industry as anchor text the links can be seen below and the geographical location of the links:-

If we take a look at the traffic the website is achieving it is attracting a large volume of visitors already, but the traffic cost is low and this is due to the keywords ranking:-

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Ranking Keywords

When we look at what keywords the website is ranking for it appears to be attracting its traffic via the brand name “house of sparkles”:-

So from what we can see the website strength isn’t its online rankings for keywords, it is something else which points us to Social Media as the main growth point of this business.

In the footer of the website there are links to the following social media accounts:-

https://www.instagram.com/hoshome_/

The Instagram account has 116K followers, but when we look at the sharing of posts this is relatively low which makes us think this is a lot of bot type accounts.

https://www.facebook.com/houseofsparkles/

From what we can see with the linked Facebook page being broken / hidden we think that actual FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/ is in the process of being merged.

https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/HOSparkles/

It appears that this business has grown as a result of Facebook and then recommendations from friends, family and celebrities which shows the power of social media.

So What Would Chameleon Do Next?

We would look at the website and hosting, ensure all the site is Google friendly and fix all broken links. Ensure that all touch points are working, for example the Facebook link going to a dead page is not good.

We would carry out on-page SEO across the entire website and make it fully search engine friendly and increase the trust of the website to help search engines like Google rank the content and grow the traffic to the website for keywords that are not brand related. The website could then take the power of Google and increase business turnover without spending on advertising.

We would look at the images and get these ranked in Google search results for window shoppers to find by mistake and this would result in higher conversions because if people are actively looking for the products that are being sold by image then the very fact they click on the image to view it means they more than likely like what they see.

Download a PDF report –

If you would like to understand more about this or wish us look into your website or a competitors, please get in touch.

Google RankBrain: The Complete Guide (Everything You Need to Know & More)

April 11, 2019/in Google, Google Algorithm Update, Google RankBrain, Google Search /by chameleon

Today we’re teaching you everything you need to know about Googles RankBrain algorithm.

From how RankBrain works to how it effects SEO. Find out everything you need to know and more here in our complete guide.

What is Google RankBrain?

Google RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm which uses artificial intelligence to help sort search results. After being named Googles third most important signal for search queries, RankBrain has become a core part of Googles algorithm. Its main role is to understand users search queries and deliver relevant results based off the words searched.

Machine Learning vs Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning (ML) is the capability a machine has to analyse data and in turn, teach itself. This can be as simple as learning what a user is really looking for when they spell their search query wrong or as complex as analysing a search query and working out what the user really means.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a development in computer science which creates machines that are capable of intelligent behaviour.
The difference between ML and AI is that artificial intelligence is the broader base of a smart machine, however it is the machine learning capabilities which gives the machine its intelligence.

How does RankBrain work?

RankBrain is designed to understand what a user is searching for, even if they are not using the exact words needed for that search query as well as use other aspects such as user location and context to ultimately provide relevant search results.
In other words, it helps to understand the intent of a users search and provide results based on this. To do this, Google feeds RankBrain endless quantities of data, which include users’ locations, history and device, in order for the system to teach itself what search results to provide.

RankBrain Examples:

If a user types in the search query ‘world cup location’ into Google, the system first tries to identify the true intent of the search. For this search term, it would consider factors such as the user’s location and history as well as considering if they are searching for the location of the most recent World Cup or the upcoming one.

As well as taking factors of the individual users into account, RankBrain also considers patterns it has picked up through users searches. Therefore when requesting the ‘world cup location’ RankBrain will look into its database and provide you with the result below.
This result, therefore, caters for all users as it not only provides them with the next world cup location but also previous ones. This result may vary however depending on where the user is searching from, i.e. if they are in the city of the world cup, it may provide them driving directions to the event.

Another example of the Google RankBrain algorithm is when a user searches for ‘Where should I go for dinner?’. Using its intelligence, RankBrain understands that you are looking for a restaurant to eat at and takes factors such as your location into consideration to provide you with relevant results that are local to you.

The above shows how RankBrain has used our location and in turn, provided us with results relevant to us.

How does RankBrain decide what to rank?

RankBrain decides how to rank results simply by recording how satisfied they believe Google users are by the pages they land on as well as the importance of backlinks linking to a page, the content freshness and domain authority.

For example, a Google user searches

Firstly, Google presents you with a result positioned at what is referred to as ‘Position Zero’. RankBrain will have positioned this result here as it has noted user’s behaviour towards this website. Factors the Google algorithm takes into consideration are the website chosen by the user and the time the user spends on the website.

The above shows how Google has ranked websites in accordance to the search query ‘berry smoothie’.

It ranks these websites again by looking at user behaviour. If a user chooses a website but bounces straight off it, the algorithm will take a note of this and presume the website wasn’t very useful and in turn rank it lower. When the Google RankBrain algorithm records people bouncing from site to site, they call this ‘pogo-sticking’. However, if a user spends a sufficient amount of time on the website, it will know that the content on this website was useful and therefore rank it higher in the future.

What did Google do before RankBrain?

Before RankBrain, Google was capable of finding pages beyond the exact terms a user used in a searching query. Previous to the Google RankBrain algorithm, Google developed itself so it could recognise variations of the same search queries in order to provide relevant results to their users. It also understood words had synonyms so if someone searched for ‘workout clothes’ it understood the user was looking for ‘gym wear’.
Now RankBrain is in place, it allows Google to understand more complex search terms and interpret them effectively. In 2013, Google stated that 15% of the search queries they found had never been seen before, which was a reduction from the 20-25% in 2007. RankBrain helps to link search queries together so they can provide users with the results they were looking for.

RankBrain in SEO

Dwell Time and Bounce Rate

Dwell time refers to the amount of time a user spends on a website after clicking on it from the results they were provided.
In simple terms, the longer a user spends on a website the more likely it is to be ranked higher by Google.
There are a number of techniques you can practice to boost your dwell time. These include:
Content Length – In short, longer content leads to a better dwell time. If you can create a piece of content which answers all the questions a user may ask, then it decreases the probability that the user will bounce of your website and find another to answer their questions.

For example:

It’s the start of the new year and your resolution is to get fitter, so you search for ‘how to start the gym’. The first article you may come across is a short 350-word article that starts to answer your questions but doesn’t totally fulfil what you’re looking for. So you bounce of this website and look for one with more content to further answer your questions.
Then, you find the website you’ve been looking for. An online guide with work outs for beginners, dietary advice and even tutorials showing how to perform certain exercises. So you spend a significant amount of time looking through this guide, re-reading some parts and taking in all the information it has to offer.
This increases the dwell time on this site compared to the first one you selected and in turn shows Google that the second website should be ranked higher.

Importance of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is an important factor when increasing your click through rate (CTR). If people recognise your brand it immediately increases the probability of a user clicking onto your website. Seeing a brand they know will increase the trust in a website and make the user more comfortable when using the website.

What Factors Apply to Your Content?

An important thing to bear in mind is that RankBrain has a collection of factors it takes into account when ranking search results. It is important to identify what which of these factors best apply to your content and optimise your content accordingly. Some of the ranking factors include:

• Content depth
• Freshness of content
• Diversity of backlinks
• User engagement (dwell time and bounce rate)
• User location
• The user’s device

The best way to optimise your content in accordance to these factors is to review the topic your covering and its urgency.

For example:

If your uploading an article in relation to a recent crime in an area, the content freshness is a key factor as well as the sure engagement. However, if your writing content on the history of the Black Country, the depth of this content will be more important to the user and Rank Brain.

Thorough Content is Key

In the past, a common SEO technique was to have individual pages for each keyword. So if you was selling security cameras there would be an individual page created for ‘CCTV cameras’, ‘CCTV camera’, ‘Security cameras’ and all the other commonly searched terms surrounding the service.
SEO has since moved on from this and Google is now favouring pages with longer content containing everything the user is searching for. This means incorporating all key words and phrases in one in depth piece of content that speaks to the user in a natural tone.

Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’

February 22, 2019/in Google, Google Advice, Google Search, HELP, How To, London SEO, SEO, SEO Birmingham, SEO PR /by chameleon

If you have received the message in Google Search Console or for the well-weathered SEO guys Google Webmaster Tools then you need to read this:-

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203#submitted_but_noindex

Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’: You submitted this page for indexing, but the page has a ‘noindex’ directive either in a meta tag or HTTP header. If you want this page to be indexed, you must remove the tag or HTTP header.

The Message Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ is distressing to read.

The issue in the above example is small but what if you get:-

Well we have spent a few hours looking different sites with different plugins for in WordPress when companies have asked for our help and always achieved success in fixing this problem.

The problem is that each time the issue has slightly different:-

If you see this message and need help contact us via our contact form or call +44 121 663 0456

SEO Search Terms

January 1, 2019/in Birmingham SEO, Google Search, SEO, SEO Birmingham, SEO Company Review, SEO PR, SEO Service /by chameleon

SEO keywords should be the most competitive keywords to achieve when carrying out search engine optimisation. Here is a list of keywords related to SEO showing search volumes:-

Keyword	Volume	Results	SERP Features
seo	33100	771000000	Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews, Featured Snippet
brighton seo	3600	10200000	Top Stories, Images, Site Links, Reviews, Tweet
majestic seo	3600	7180000	Top Stories, Site Links, Reviews, Video
seo agency london	3600	18100000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo services	3600	597000000	Knowledge Panel, Local Pack, Reviews, Featured Snippet
what is seo	3600	760000000	Instant Answer, Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews
seo agency	2900	204000000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo checker	2900	15100000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo company	2900	506000000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo london	2900	88300000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Images, Site Links, Reviews
seo services london	2900	47400000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo meaning	2400	78500000	Instant Answer, Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews
seo tools	2400	266000000	Top Stories, Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo in guk	1900	5910000	Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews
seo kang joon	1900	10900000	Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews, Video
seo manchester	1900	23100000	Local Pack, Reviews
yoast seo	1900	8940000	Top Stories, Reviews
google seo	1600	784000000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo consultant	1600	75600000	Reviews
seo definition	1600	252000000	Instant Answer, Knowledge Panel, Reviews
seo analysis	1300	0
seo audit	1300	41700000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo birmingham	1300	11500000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo company london	1300	44800000	Local Pack, Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo hero	1300	54500000	Top Stories, Images, Reviews
seo uk	1300	154000000	Reviews
seo agency uk	1000	38600000	Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo analyzer	1000	12800000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo company uk	1000	87300000	Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo consultant london	1000	10400000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo course	1000	135000000	Reviews
seo expert	1000	97900000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Images, Reviews
seo liverpool	1000	14900000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Images, Reviews
seo marketing	1000	477000000	Knowledge Panel, Local Pack, Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo news	1000	516000000	Top Stories
seo report	1000	261000000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo website	1000	752000000	Reviews
wordpress seo	1000	229000000	Top Stories, Reviews
local seo	880	297000000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Reviews
london seo	880	89100000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo bristol	880	9180000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo glasgow	880	8320000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Images, Reviews
seo leeds	880	7780000	Local Pack, Reviews
seo michael kodi	880	569000	Top Stories, Site Links, Video
seo specialist	880	66900000	Top Stories
free seo audit	720	21100000	Top Stories, Reviews
free seo tools	720	210000000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo blog	720	581000000
seo cardiff	720	5870000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Images, Reviews
seo keywords	720	154000000	Top Stories, Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo packages	720	57400000	Images, Reviews
seo services uk	720	102000000	Reviews, Featured Snippet
seo test	720	272000000	Top Stories, Reviews
seo training	720	188000000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Reviews
website seo checker	720	8130000	Reviews, Video
what does seo stand for	720	45600000	Instant Answer, Top Stories, Reviews
free seo checker	590	9240000	Reviews
london seo consultant	590	0
seo check	590	309000000	Reviews
seo essex	590	6000000	Knowledge Panel, Top Stories, Reviews
seo expert london	590	20200000	Local Pack, Top Stories, Reviews
seo freelancer	590	21600000	Top Stories, Reviews, Video

SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of improving a website to make it easier to understand when search engine spiders crawl the site. If the search engine can understand the content it will be included in the SERP results.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

November 3, 2018/in DIY SEO, Google Search, HELP, How To, SEO, SEO Birmingham, SEO Company Review /by chameleon

With the SEO industry being difficult to understand for business owners we thought we would help by writing this blog post about “How Much Does SEO Cost?“.

How Much Is SEO Per Month?

With every SEO campaign, we work on we will face different obstacles and different competitors. This is important to understand at the start of the SEO journey. If we are working on local SEO for a relatively uncompetitive industry sector it should be easy to achieve rankings with a decent website built on a good platform providing the content is unique and well written. So in this instance, SEO per month may be relatively low cost covering basic hours of labour and resources.

When you then look at national or a global SEO campaign in a highly competitive sector, this will require a huge amount of work to achieve success and as a result this SEO campaign will require much more labour to achieve the SEO goal.

Due to this we would recommend steering clear of SEO companies who can price an SEO campaign for you instantly as this suggests they do not understand the tasks ahead of them. Also it is important to note that every website has a different past and if a website has been worked on by a less than decent SEO company you may find when you carry out a health check that the website backlink profile is a mess and require a lot of work to fix things before you can start moving a website forwards in the search engines.

It might be the case that the website domain name is also brand new with no historical past, so why would Google trust this website. New domains need more external work than historical domains so as a result of this we would question any SEO company able to price a campaign without researching into the domain historical past.

The cost of SEO will vary as a result of the research and also the country in which the work is being carried out. In the UK you need to spend on average for a decent SEO Consultant £35.00 to £110.00 per hour, so if you work on this factor you can see that a company quoting £50 per month simply isn’t going to be doing the job.

It is also important to note that the cost of the software used by SEO consultants is often paid for a monthly basis and the more the tools are used the more they cost. Without the core SEO tools it is difficult to carry out SEO services and this means the majority of SEO companies will be using the core software available and spending over £1,000 per month as a minimum.

If we then look at SEO products offered by companies like GoDaddy we wonder what exactly is being purchased here. This might be great and achieving results and we wish clients using the service success.

So officially you need to look at the spend on SEO per month and think does this give an SEO consultant enough time to achieve your success which leads us to the question…

How Much Should I Spend On SEO Per Month?

The question of how much you should spend on SEO per month should be looked at in terms of the value it can add to your business. For example, if you sell products or services that cost £10,000 with a £2,000 markup then being number one in Google could bring sales that if you sold only five products or services in one month you will have £10,000 profit per month and this could be as a result of this spending £1,000 per month on SEO to achieve this, which would be a great ROI.

Another example, if you are a CCTV company paying £1,000 per month for SEO and you get 10 to 30 leads per month from commercial clients looking at spending £5,000 to £80,000 on CCTV and security with on-going maintenance and support then the £1,000 per month SEO would be a good investment and grow the business each month with new clients.

If you then factor in that you could be using Google Adwords and using just one keyword “CCTV systems” which Google suggests achieves 18,100 searches per month in the UK, you would need to spend a minimum of $1.14 per click, if you do the maths you need a huge budget per day to achieve 24 hour a day adverts to be shown.

Organic SEO would be showing 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no budget constraints and also there is a large majority of Internet users who simply do not click on Google Adwords and will bypass the ads looking for Google Maps listing to find local companies or the top organic search results to find what it is they are looking for.

It is clear that the value of SEO is huge to any business, so the question should be “Are we spending enough on SEO” not “how much should I spend on SEO per month”…

HOS – House Of Sparkles Website

Mandy Hale’s quote is great here “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.”

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website SEO Report