2014 State of the Group

Hawaii Web Group’s year in review – By Chris Norberg, Project Manager

What a mind blowing year! When we compiled the State of the Group 2013 report, we thought that was a big year. But this year has surpassed the last in so many ways. Some of the more notable changes include:

• The addition of 2 fantastic workers to our crew (Kelsey and Jesse, of whom are absolute rock stars.)
• The solidifying of a new office in the heart of Paia Town (opened in late 2013).
• Google gave back traffic it’d taken away from us in 2013 (see below.)
• 6 new monthly clients
• A bunch of viral content that has blown up the web.
• The creation of a few new websites including LahainaTown.com, IaoValleyInn.com, MauiCar-Rentals.com (rebuild), the rebuild of this website, and MauiExecutiveCatering.com (rebuild that is not quite ready to launch. Give us another week.)

What kind of traffic are our sites bringing in?

An overview of the past and present annual absolute unique visitors (now referred to as “users” by Google Analytics.)

As you can see, year after year, we have grown in traffic… except for last year. Let us explain: the last 1/2 of 2012 and much of 2013 was devoted to rebuilding our huge site MauiInformationGuide.com. In doing this, we neglected new article creation as well as web outreach. Our time was also spent creating some very important websites (including MolokiniCrater.com and RoadToHana.com) and building on our already strong social media profiles.

Because of our laser focus in 2013, we lost some ranking in Google’s organic search results. This hurt our sites a bit. We are now back on top with excellent rankings and a ton of traffic from social media and viral posts. It’s been a fun year with a lot of opportunities to learn. We’ve been fortunate enough to grow, but there’s a lot more we intend to do.

Hawaii Social Media

Hawaii Web Group’s social media following and current reach.

We dove head first into social media before many people recognized it as a potentially important tool. Since 2013, our efforts have quadrupled. As you may know, social media is probably the most challenging and dynamic element to the web, so we’ve been busy (to put it mildly.) We’ve continued doing social media management for a few select clients, and we’ve explored the power of well built, deep-strategy viral content.

It’s been incredibly challenging staying ahead of the curve, and almost everything we’ve learned is probably already obsolete. As is the world of the web (especially social media.) So, you’ll see us continue to learn and grow socially in 2014.

Our Audience

Hawaii Web Group websites’ audience by gender, age, location, device, and socially.

Our websites’ audience has been primarily visitor traffic interested in the island of Maui, Hawaii. This focus will be changing in 2015 as we make more of an effort to reach all island visitors (not just those that love our wonderful island.) You’ll begin to see more sites and social media activity for the other islands.

2015 Goals

Hawaii Web Group continues viral blogging and gets back into web design

Viral blogging has taken most of our time in the last few years. We’ve really only been building a handful of websites per year (and mostly for our own purposes), but in 2015, we’re looking to change that. You’ll hear from us soon about an inexpensive alternative to regular web design, only with the kind of service you can’t get from the do-it-yourself websites.

Our goal is to give Hawaii businesses the option of updating their sites themselves, pay for quality help if needed, and retain 100% ownership of their sites.

If this sounds interesting to you, give us a shout!