using my head

The alliterative title refers to my most recent client website launches: The Cognitas Group and Peppermint Giraffe.  In a strange coincidence, they both work with individuals and teams who want to achieve more, so it’s been a wonderfully invigorating and inspiring start to my 2009 working with them both.

The Cognitas Group are a newly formed leadership consultancy who wanted an online presence that supports their professional, but vibrant, way of working with clients who want their people to reach their leadership potential. The brief was to come up with something fresher and different from the typical navy-blue corporate-speak sites of so many management consultants, so we’re using bright blocks of colour and photography that makes you think throughout the site. These guys really know their stuff, so we’ve included a blog/article area where they can share their know-how, and interested parties can also sign up to get news and views on leadership. I’m also working with them on email marketing, as well as doing some print design, and it’s great to be working with an organisation in so many aspects of their communication needs. Working in this way leads to much more focused, cohesive and unified outcomes than having too many disparate parties and perspectives… which really chimes with The Cognitas Group’s aims.

Now, if it weren’t for Peppermint Giraffe, this blog – and my business – probably wouldn’t exist. Nigel Wood, the personal coach behind Peppermint Giraffe, was the person who gave me the confidence and self-belief to take the leap into the world of self-employment, and I certainly don’t think I’d be as happy or focused as I am today without his help. Nigel worked with me as a career/life coach, and I still call on him for a ‘Nigel Booster Shot’ whenever life throws me a curve. So I was more than happy to work with him when he needed to freshen up his existing website with a new design and content management system. I opted for Squarespace once again, as it’s so easy to use and comes with really great support and hosting. I can’t recommend Nigel enough, so if you’re feeling lost, confused or stuck, I can’t think of a better person to help you get your life on the right path.

The cool thing about working with clients such as these is that I have learned a lot just from handling the content for their sites/blogs/emails, so I am actually feeling a renewed sense of positivity – what a great side effect!

Last autumn, I worked with a client on an SEO audit & implementation plan for their website. They operate in the hyper-competitive travel industry, where appearing high in search results is absolutely critical to their bottom line. They aren’t one of the big players, so they don’t have the big budgets to compete on things like pay-per-click, so developing an organic search optimisation plan that they could implement and manage in-house was the best approach.

After auditing the site’s current status, benchmarking it, comparing to their main competitors, and developing a plan for improvement, it has been fairly quiet over the last few months as they simply got on with making the changes.

I was thrilled to get an email this week indicating the first fruits of our labour: a nearly 15% increase in traffic from Google, and a whopping 31% increase in visits to the pages that we targeted as priorities for first-stage optimisation. This is only 5 months in, and there are still other improvements in the pipeline. But it sure does feel nice to have happy clients… and more importantly, happy customers who are finally able to find their site much easier than before.

Purrrrrrrrrr.