Absolute Blog

  • Posted 05/04/2019 by absolute

    Peak Performing Referrals

    peak performance seo brisbane

    Since opening our doors to Brisbane in 2005 we have always had a healthy proportion of clients pointed in our direction.

    And we are pleased to welcome two more. The new start-up ‘A Happier Life’ and the longstanding ‘Moorooka Sports & Community Club’ have recently joined Absolute Media’s client roster. Both businesses were referred to us for our hugely competitive and very effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) capabilities.

    A Happier Life is a hypnosis service owned and operated by former Australian test cricketer Gary Cosier. By utilising Psychotherapy and Hypnosis Brisbane clients can benefit from their range of traditional solutions to help them quit smoking and lose weight, through to more forward-thinking areas such as life coaching and peak sports performance.

    Mookrooka Sports is a traditional bowling club that has undergone subtle modernisation in recent years. This has seen the extension of the club’s facilities to include a new bistro, and to offer its facilities as venues for weddings, social functions and business. Additionally, to appeal to the very popular demand for barefoot bowls in Brisbane food trucks now regularly rock-up to serve hungry punters and craft beers have been introduced to the bar.

    Absolute have been providing SEO services since 2011. The increasing level of competition to get companies listed on page one, and our approach of working smarter rather than harder in order to retain our competitive edge, means that we’ve seen a recent surge for this part of our business marketing offering. Many big SEO businesses seem to bombard their clients with the appliance of science and in-depth analyses of algorithm updates, but it’s not as complicated as they make it out to be, and our results clearly demonstrate that fact.

    If you’re interested in getting your website to feature in the page one results for a specific, search term or keyphrase, call us on 07 3300 6308 to find out more.

  • Posted 15/03/2019 by absolute

    Seeing a ‘Not Secure’ warning in Chrome?

    Website technology advances continuously, but rarely does it force us to upgrade older websites.

    Since July last year, web browser software (Chrome, Mozilla, MS Edge +++) started labelling websites using HTTP as ‘not secure’ in the address bar. More info here: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/

    Whilst not initially problematic, Google has recently raised the prominence of the warnings. Before loading an HTTP page, it is now also displays a prominent ‘site not safe’ page. The net result is that this is deterring visitors and prospects from viewing HTTP websites, who incorrectly assume that the site contains malicious content, which isn’t necessarily the case.

    For clients whose sites are hosted on our web servers, we have purchased SSL certificates for those servers which means that you don’t need to purchase one for your own domain. These alone average between $80-200+.

    However, to convert your website to HTTPS and achieve secure SSL encryption (showing a padlock in the address bar), we essentially need to locate and change all coded content links on for menus, images, hyperlinks, stylesheets, script libraries and videos, and setup the necessary page re-directions to make sure that all traffic looking for the old content successfully reaches the correct, secure content.

    If you'd like your site upgrading to HTTPS, whether you are an existing client or not, we can help. Please contact us and we'll gladly provide an estimate.

  • Posted 21/09/2018 by absolute

    Absolute spark life into new business growth

    mchardy logo design

    Absolute Media are chuffed to announce our latest new client - the McHardy Group - a team of electricians servicing the Brisbane western suburbs region.

    With plenty of years of experience, owners Chris and Brett McHardy both previously worked for a large Brisbane electrical business, opting to go it alone when the parent business was carved-up and sold off.

    Like many relatively new businesses they’d got the essentials in place – a logo and a basic website – and crossed their fingers that they’d achieve a high Google ranking for anyone searching with the keyphrase ‘Electrician The Gap’.

    Whilst turnover has been consistent and job opportunities have been coming in for residential, commercial and industrial electrical work, they’ve quickly realised that they’ll need to get their small business marketing to be far more effective in order to grow and evolve their client base into the areas that they really want to focus on and develop into.

    Following a competitive pitch against a large Melbourne-based digital agency, Absolute Media have been successfully chosen to provide the McHardy Group with marketing planning, create a new logo design and branding, and to overhaul their website design to be more effective - both as a site attracting demand from the western suburbs, and converting interest into enquiries – and to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO) activities.

    It sounds like we nailed it with our straightforward, no BS pitch for their work because Chris went on to explain “We both agreed that your proposals, ideas, and suggested approach to our business were spot on, and wanted to tell you that you’d got the gig during the meeting!”

    We are now well underway with the site redesign, which is going to now have a far stronger and clearer customer benefit focus, and therefore relish the opportunity to post future news about our work for them and – most importantly – about the results that we achieve.

    The appointment follows a string of month on month wins for us, which includes also the likes of Xennox Diamonds, Forme Fitness, The Tender Lawyer, and photographer James P. O’Hare.

  • Posted 28/11/2017 by Will.N

    Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

    Regular clients will know that professional marketing advice is an inherent part of our service. We use it in almost every meeting and phonecall to better understand what we’re being asked to do, who we’re targeting and what outcome you plan to achieve.

    There are of course many specialist marketing businesses around that charge handsomely for the privilege of their advice and know how. Cynical I know, but this is regularly focussed to help spend your marketing dollars on things they make the most money out of.

    Postgrad qualified by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and offering marketing management experience at the highest level having previously worked for a US fortune 500 business, Absolute’s marketing know-how means that we produce fantastic results for you, and that you achieve more effective expenditure on the materials and initiatives that you use to promote increased sales:

    • Our research can help you to identify opportunities that you didn’t know existed
    • Our planning and strategic thinking can give you a very strong competitive edge, finding ways to help you get your message to your desired target audience and make it stand out from the crowd. By making it memorable and prompting them into action (continue)
    • Our results will make your business to look strong and be individual in the marketplace, with the added bonus of creating big pride amongst your team.

    Like it or not there are lots of pretenders to the throne out there … “Yes we do marketing, would you like some new pens or mousemats?!” There are also many digital savvy businesses that’ll take your money in return for a great social media presence, but what do they achieve? Do they support your business goals, and are they measurable?

    One of the most overused quotes about marketing, attributed to the American John Wanamaker, illustrates just how difficult it can be to quantify a response to marketing expenditure. His comment "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half” still rings very true to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing with their marketing budget.

    The good news is that we do!

    Even greater news is that unless we’re specifically commissioned to help a business plan out its marketing, then usually our clients get the benefit of our marketing experience for free.

    And with one eye already on 2018, we are now offering FREE one and a half hour marketing consultations to recipients of this email. This includes clients on our emailing list and any of your direct contacts that this emailer is forwarded to. So, if you’re interested drop us a line. If you’re feeling charitable, you like what we do, and you know another business who might benefit from a small business marketing consult, please forward it to them.

  • Posted 28/11/2017 by Will.N

    Production quality video – no cameras required

    Corporate video has long held its position of stature in the library of marketing materials that an established business is expected to have. In recent years video has proven doubly important as both a unique source of moving web content for landing pages and homepages, and as a mechanism that boosts Search Engine Optimisation rankings in the eyes of Google, Bing and Yahoo because it is considered as an indicator of ‘quality content’.

    In the past 15 years Absolute Media has been involved in the production of high-end video content for Queensland Health, DIAGEO and the University of Queensland amongst others. However, with an increasing thirst for video content, and the means to film great quality video by anyone with a smartphone, there is now an acceptance that corporate video itself doesn’t need to be as slick, production polished, and interspersed with flash motion graphics as it used to be. Lower quality web video expectations have steadily eroded the demand for slick high-end video. When an estimate lands complete with the cost of directors, cameras, audio, props, pre-production and post-production, motion graphics (and the rest) it’s often initially perceived as overly expensive, especially when a person can record something to their phone, edit it themselves on PC or Mac, then upload it themselves and have it embedded on a website, essentially for a few bucks and a bit of their own time.

    That said, budget video doesn’t have to equate to cr*p quality. It’s definitely possible to not use a camera at all, by doing so keep the cost to a minimum, and yet still produce a slick corporate video production. One recent point in case was for our client Forklift Action who were attending a large international exhibition in Germany, and who needed video content to use at the centre of their stand on a large LCD display screen.

    With a basic script, some still images and the purchase of a few stock video segments from popular libraries such as iStockphoto.com, we had everything we needed to create the following video.

    Also in-terms of additional benefits of having and integrating video to your website, please also consider … Google owns YouTube, so video hosted on YouTube will of course be ranked even more favourably than on other platforms such as Wistia or Vimeo!

    If there’s a hole in your website where some custom video content would be a great addition, call us today to discuss what we can do for you.