Roberto Popolizio, Interviewed Aaron Cowan from Full Circle Design, an Irish digital agency specialized in web design and
SEO.
After looking at their story and services, we asked Aaron to give his thoughts about the recent trends in the SEO industry, and his expert advice on how to tackle online marketing in 2023.
Please Present Full Circle Design To Our Audience. What Services Do You Offer, And What Makes You Stand Out?
Full Circle Design is a digital design agency based in Ireland. We pride ourselves in customer experience and our goal is to help B2B businesses reach their ideal customers.
Our main service solutions include website design, website management, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media management.
We like to let our results speak for themselves and on average increase our client website engagement by over 220%.
What is Your Story And Mission?
Full Circle Design was started amidst the pandemic in 2020. Over two years in, we have worked with some great businesses in all industries included start-ups, SME’s and global enterprises.
As the world seemed to come to a halt during the pandemic a lot of businesses found the need to have an online presence. We helped a lot of businesses during this time to offer their products and services online, and more importantly continue to bring in revenue for their business.
Our mission is to provide value for our clients. We design for your customers, because at the end of the day, its the customers that pay the bills. Doing this allow us to design amazing websites that perform and provide a great return on investment.
Who Are Your Clients, And What Are The Pain Points You Solve For Them?
Our clients are primarily B2B but we also have some B2C clients. The problems our clients face is effectively promoting to their ideal customers.
In traditional marketing and sales our clients understand who their customer is and where they are but this can differ online. We help them to identify their online market and access new areas for growth.
Overall, we provide the experience needed to design and develop your business online to increase awareness, customer retention and sales.
And What Are The Most Common Mistakes You See Them Doing?
Consistency! The lack of consistency for business (especially in Ireland) is an apparent one. Their social media look greats but then you head to their website and it 1. Looks completely different and 2. Doesn’t match their social branding.
One tip we would give any business is to be consistent across all channels. From your business cards and logo to your social media and website even to how you speak to your customers. Keeping your business branding consistent offers trust, legitimacy and professionalism to your customers.
What Does Your Web Design Process Look Like?
Our web design process can be broken down into 10 main steps which I won’t go into in full today but is featured on our website blog if you want to check it out.
To be completely transparent, our process sometimes changes depending on the website but we do our best to stick to the process as it makes it easier and faster for us to develop our websites. We always start of with our research phase. Before we take on any project we make sure we can offer the right solution for our clients. Then we will craft an initial design to share with our clients, this can come as a wireframe design or a more hashed out design depending on the timeframe, budget etc.
We always like to keep our clients involved in our process and will regularly share updates in our process. This helps to keep everyone on the same page and in working in the right direction.
Once we have a final design that everyone is happy with we jump in to developing the website. For our development stage we use Editor X or Webflow. These are great tools are they allow us to build whatever site we want and to provide responsive and immersive website for our clients customers.
Before we launch a site we run rigorous testing to make sure everything works as it should and there are no errors or silly spelling mistakes … it has happened in the past but we’ve learned from our mistakes.
Once the website is launched we don’t just jump ship, we stick around to test and analyse how the site is performing. If we see something that isn’t performing as intending we look to revise this to get the most out of every website page.
One of the best things about working with us is there is very little work to do after your site is launched. We won’t charge crazy management fee’s or unnecessary add ons. Our websites are developed without the need for constant updates or maintenance.
How Do You Think AI Will Change SEO, And How Do You Plan To Take Advantage Of It?
I think it will, but I don’t think AI will replace or kill SEO. AI tools such as ChatGPT and others are great for analysing content and generating ideas and have huge potential when used correctly. What I believe will happen is the SEO’s that use these AI tools will become far more valuable than those that stick to traditional practices.
Implementing these AI tools as part of your SEO strategy will help to gather new areas to create content and help you grow as an SEO.
Google Has Also Released Some Big Changes And Countless Updates This Year. How Has This Impacted Your SEO Strategies?
I’d like to address this question by building upon the previous discussion. As Google and other search engines progress, they will increasingly detect AI writers and content generated by AI. Consider Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ update from last year, in which they highlighted the advantages of prioritizing content for human readers and offering informative and educational articles to your users.
Using AI tools to write articles is great but it creates a disconnect from your audience. They are great to form ideas and topics but keeping it human will keep the Google bots happy.
At Full Circle Design, we have always developed SEO content to be readable and informative and tried to stay away from areas or trends like keyword spamming. We research industry topics, trending articles and develop content that people are actually interested in and searching for. If you’re new to SEO or looking to grow your blog, doing this will yield the best results starting off.
Now, saying this, we have to continue to change and move with the times and our SEO strategies are no different. One thing we have focused on over this past year that has yielded some great results for our clients is user experience. I believe every SEO should have UX included in their strategy arsenal.
As the Google bots continue to get smarter and more advanced, they will have the ability to review such tools like heatmaps and user clicks and a strong user experience will not only turn over more customers for your business but also help your website grow on the rankings.
