Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) also known as organic listings

Before you learn how to achieve good rankings in search engines, there are a few things you need to know:

1. Your competitors are also competing to achieve top rankings.
2. Search engines use mathematical calculations to decide who goes at the top. Mathematics can’t tell whose website is the nicest looking, or who provides the best service.
3. Search engines fight a constant battle against hundreds of thousands of spammers who are very good at figuring out how to get a bad website to the top of the listings.

What factors do search engines look at when deciding who goes at the top of the list?

1. Links to your website from websites you don’t own (most important)
   If other websites link to yours, this is an indication that your website is important. If these websites are relevant to your products and services, even better.
   1. If you sell minced chicken, a link from a technology website isn’t that relevant, but is better than nothing
   2. Linking to other peoples websites from yours doesn’t help
   3. Swapping links with other websites has some value, but one way links are better
   4. Links that contain the words you want to rank for are very valuable
   5. Links from reputable sites (Government, Educational, BBC etc) are incredibly useful but hard to obtain
2. What’s on your website
   Does the text on your website (frequently and prominently) contain the words you want to rank highly for?
   1. The text that you can see / read is most important
   2. The text that you can’t see (meta tags, alt tags) is also important
   3. Don’t over-egg the cake
   4. Don’t try and hide text (i.e. white text on a white background)
3. The age of your domain
   This is very important in the early days as search engines try to figure out if you are a spammer and if people find your website relevant / offensive etc.
4. Domain name / page names
   An indication about the content of your website, but not overly important for popular or competitive search terms.
   1. A domain name that contains your favourite keyphrase is useful for providing context when people link to your site
   2. Don’t get too obsessed with this however, as long messy domain names are poor from a branding perspective
5. How frequently your site is updated
   If you don’t care about your website, why should a search engine?
6. Where your domain is hosted
   Do you share a server with pornographers and scammers?

Last thing to know:

There are two types of keyphrase

Competitive

These tend to be 1, 2 or 3 words in length, and are the first ones that spring to mind in relation to your industry. Competitive keyphrases tend to have very high volumes of traffic (lots of visitors) but relatively low conversion (visitors converting to sales/enquiries) because they are generic. If you sell cars, then “cars” or “cheap cars” or “cars for sale” would be competitive keyphrases.

Long Tail (less competitive)

These tend to be 3 words or more in length and are usually more descriptive. These keyphrases will not individually generate as many visitors, but can be better for converting visitors to customers.  If you sell cars, then “cars in Warwick” or “green ford Capri 2.0 mk II” or “best website to buy a used vintage car” would be long tail keyphrases and (hopefully) very relevant to your service.

Up to half of all searches on Google every day are unique (i.e. only searched for once that day)! This means that ‘long tail’ keyphrases are also VERY IMPORTANT.

What actions should I take to achieve good rankings for relevant keyphrases in search engines?

• Check the text on your website
  Make sure it mentions your keyphrases frequently. If it doesn’t, update it. Try to remember that ultimately your website is for humans, so don’t get too spammy.
• Get some easy links!
  • Are there any website owners amongst your contacts, friends or family that might be willing to link to your website? Take advantage.
  • Sign up to any local or industry directories, some are free. (e.g. somebody involved in car sales in warwick might type “warwick directory” or “car sales directory” into Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to find a list of directories they may appear in.
  • Get the people who built your website to write a blog post about you or link to your website in their portfolio.
• Make sure your website is optimised
  • Your web designers should have put your relevant keyphrases into your page titles, images and description tags. They can even do this with your page names if it is relevant and not too spammy.
• Start producing regular content
  • The more often the better, but just do as much as you can. You can add content in the form of news, blog, and articles. Your web design team will be able to provide you with a platform for adding content yourself to keep the ongoing cost down.
• Start producing AMAZING content!
  • The more interesting the better! If you write information that is interesting (to a specific audience) they will link to your content, refer people to your site and all the time you are demonstrating your knowledge to potential customers.
• Write content for other people
  • Why not write an interesting piece for a local or industry relevant website? If they publish it, they will almost always include a bio of the author with a LINK back to your website.
• Fire up the PR machine
  • Lots of small companies use PR to get their name in the paper by doing (or saying) amazing (or interesting) things. The same tactics work online, and most newspapers (even local) have websites too.
• Participate in blogs, forums and social media
  • However niche your industry, there is bound to be a community of people that love to talk about related stuff! Find them and engage with them. You’ll build a personal brand as part of the process and you may even get a few cheap and easy links back to your website (i.e. in your signature or in topics relevant to content on your website).

Being number 1 in a search engine implies you are the best. If you want to be the best, then you must prove it to the search engines.

Pay Per Click – instant gratification

If the principal way to acquire visitors from search engines is to achieve good rankings through link building and content strategy, then a very close second is Pay Per Click (PPC). Search engines make nearly all of their money selling PPC advertising to website owners.

Here’s how it works

• You sign up for a PPC account with each (or any) of the search engines.
• You create a list of keyphrases closely related to your product / service (start with 20-50 but you can expand that list to thousands of keyphrases).
• You group your keyphrases and create small text adverts that will appear in relation to those keyphrases.
• You set a maximum price against your keyphrases (either one price for all or individual prices for each keyphrase).
• Once approved, the search engines will start displaying your ads each time one of your keyphrases is searched for.
• Each time your advert gets clicked on and your site gets visited, your account is deducted an amount of money up to your maximum price.
• You can set daily or monthly spend limits, and set up your account to show your ads gradually or as often as possible. You can even set them to run only at certain times of the day or days of the week.
• Your ads will be displayed until your budget is depleted.
• How high your ad appears in the list depends on how high your maximum price is, and how popular your ad / site are when displayed and clicked.
• Over time you figure out which keyphrases lead to business and which ones are a waste of money.

Myths

• Nobody clicks on those ads
  Total rubbish, many companies make a fortune simply advertising on Pay Per Click. People have become conditioned to finding commercial services on the ‘right had side of the page’.
• It’s not worth doing because competitors will click all the time
  You do have to accept a certain amount of click fraud or wastage (people trying to sell you stuff) as part of the process, but search engines are VERY good at spotting people clicking on ads multiple times and won’t punish you if they identify a spammer.
• I can’t afford it
  You set your own budgets, either daily or monthly and can fix the amount you put into your account. It’s best to start small and pick just a few keyphrases with low maximum prices until you are confident you are getting good value.

Benefits

• Your new website can start working for you very quickly (within an hour!).
• You can quickly find out which keyphrases you should be targeting in the main search listings, which can take months to achieve with no other guarantee of success.
• You can switch off your advertising when you are busy, and turn it on when you need to bring in more business.

Negatives

• You can spend a lot of money very quickly if you do not set budgets and monitor regularly.
• You will always have to pay for the visitors you acquire through PPC, and therefore this strategy should be offset by an investment (time or money) in achieving good rankings in the natural listings.
• If you have a business model that takes time for enquiries to turn into hard cash, you may have to wait a while for results or fund a lot of advertising before your costs are recouped.

PPC is a very important part of most good online strategies and can provide answers and get your business moving quickly.

Other things you should be doing

• Make sure you have a stats package enabled on your website so you can see how many visitors you get, and where they come from (Google Analytics is excellent and free).
• Make sure you refer to your website in all of your printed material including your business cards, vehicle livery, newspaper ads, invoices, signage and anything else you can think of!
• Remember your website is also a tool to support, reassure and assist your existing customers. A website is a given essential for most serious businesses, and isn’t just a tool for finding new customers.

Things you should not be doing

• Buying thousands of links in one go or for an unfeasibly low price
  Search engines will spot this a mile off, and may penalise you forever.
• Spamming other people’s websites
  Participating in forums and blogs is a good way to build brand reputation (and to a certain extent some free links), but remember these people are intelligent human beings too and they won’t appreciate you trying to hawk your snake oil without putting something in first.
• Stuffing your site text full of keyphrases
  Partly because it’s not that effective, but mostly because real people will not do business with you if your website is just weird.
• Avoiding the shady operators
  The SEO industry is unregulated and has a deservedly mixed reputation. Any industry that is confusing to its customers will inevitably breed operators willing to capitalise on that confusion. Top rankings for popular keyphrases can be worth vast sums of money, and are not likely to be achieved with a small investment of money and no intellectual input from the website owner.

The internet is awesome!

For those who are willing to work on their online presence, there is a limitless opportunity to grow a business.

A website is just the beginning of an engaging, exciting and rewarding journey, and as always the first step is the most important. A good web design company can help you take that first step and show you which way to go. It’s how much walking you do after that will determine how far you go.

1)      You wish to remain anonymous

2)      You are up to no good

3)      You can’t afford one

4)      You don’t want more customers

5)      You hate computers

6)      You are scared of competitors stealing your business model

7)      You don’t want to go through the pain of getting a site built

8)      You have other priorities and are too busy

9)      Your customers don’t use the internet

Of course, each of these reasons are nonsense (except the “up to no good” one, in which case I recommend you keep a low profile).

Here’s why you do need a website

Growing your business

Your website can be great for attracting new business. People use the internet all the time for sourcing products and services. If you don’t have a website, you have no chance of winning any of this business.

Helping your existing customers

Here are some questions that your existing customers and suppliers will ask:

• “when are you open?”
• “can you help with …?”
• “what is your address?”
• “what is your availability?”
• “how does this product work?”
• “what do you charge for…?”

All of these questions can be answered on your website, and can be available 24/7/365 instantly.

Credibility

It’s just a fact that pretty much everybody uses the internet now. Customers, job applicants, partners, suppliers, journalists, competitors and pretty much everybody else expects to be able to find you online.

Caveat: The worst thing you can do is have a rubbish website.

You’ll get few / none of the benefits of having a website, with the added kick in the teeth that you look cheap, unprofessional and untrustworthy.

A rubbish website will (in any combination) look awful, be hard to navigate, contain typos, be factually incorrect, out of date and won’t work in a variety of internet browsers.

Whilst the data it provides is only relative (i.e. you don’t get a feel for market size) you do get some really interesting information related to peak interest and long term growth or decline.

So here’s the first example, and for this we’ll look at web design.

The graph below shows that interest in the phrase web design has been in steady decline since 2004. It also shows that the peak season for web design is January – February each year.

If we were planning our marketing and development strategies for the year, we’d know for sure that we’d miss a significant opportunity if we delayed until March. The graph also shows that we shouldn’t worry if things go a little quiet during the summer months.

Let’s look at some examples that effect the businesses of our customers.

The graph below shows the relative interest in wedding photography.

It’s clear that for this keyphrase there has been a stable growth in interest through the past 6 years. It’s also very clear that peak interest occurs during July August and September each year, with a very significant drop off in November and December. If I were going to spend money on advertising, clearly the three popular months would be a successful time to do it and the winter months would be a good time to think about making alterations to the website or maybe taking some time off.

The next chart shows the relative interest in landscape gardeners.

This graph shows a decline consistent with the recession, but makes very clear that peak interest months are March – June.

The final chart shows interest in funeral directors.

This graph shows strong growth in the industry (consistent with a growth in population, but also consistent I suspect with an increase in growth of the silver surfer community).

January through April are popular (?) times here, perhaps consistent with a cold winter and people “hanging on for Xmas” (sorry if that sounds a bit crass).

Now if you have worked in these industries for a long time, it is probably obvious to you when your peak months are, but if you are entering a new industry, or working with people in other industries, it certainly helps to know this sort of information.

b. e. a. utiful

Many thanks to Oliver Boakes of oliverboakesphotography.co.uk for our fabulous new commercial photography shots!

Oliver made the most of an overcast and somewhat miserable Friday afternoon in late July to provide us with a bunch of pictures we are really pleased with (anybody that has seen me in the flesh will realise how much value Oliver added!)

Our new profile and team shots are part of a series of subtle website changes we are in the process of making to show the personality of our team a little more.

The reality is that we are a fun, friendly and incredibly hard working bunch (actually it’s a bit more like a family in truth, but that always sounds so nauseating), which is a side of us that can sometimes get lost on our website.

It’s always a difficult balance deciding how much personality you should show on your website, and we spend a huge amount of time talking arguing (…remember I said we are a bit like a family!) about that concept here. Does being fun / light hearted etc betray your professionalism or are they mutually exclusive? We may never reach agreement.

Either way, thanks again to Oliver (love the website by the way Oliver!) for his efforts!

Squash is a high impact and physically tough game, it’s all about power and pace.

The old man had no pace, and very little power.

But he didn’t half make me look stupid.

I’d like to say there is a really valuable web design related metaphor hidden in the story.

But there isn’t.

Perhaps by the time my children are 12 I’ll have thought of one.

Or at least a good excuse.

Perhaps it was a nicely framed reminder to never under-estimate anyone.

Aimee, our new client manager,  joins us after a few months travelling round Asia. Prior to that she worked for RightMove, DHL, Haymarket and John Lewis.

Aimee’s job will be to ensure all your enquiries are handled as quickly as possible. She is here to advise you on package and pricing options and will remain your primary point of contact right up until we hand you over to your designer (s) on the day we begin building your website.

We always viewed this role as the missing piece in our business jigsaw*, and we’re really excited about offering our clients this enhanced level of service.

*extra cheese please.

Well that would be us.

Which web design company builds full business websites in just one day?

That’s us.

Which web design company offers single or monthly payment options?

That’s us too.

Which web design company employs genuine specialists in design, development, copy writing and marketing?

You’ve guessed it…that’s us too.

Which web design company issues contracts to protect both parties in the most simple and understandable terms?

We do.

Which web design company won the best local business provider 2010 award?

Us.

Which web design company offers a premium product at the lowest possible price?

That’s us.

Which web design company should you choose?

No brainer.

We’ve worked very hard to become the best option for small businesses in the UK, so I thought I’d do a little immodest trumpet blowing.

It’s been a period of great change, both personally and professionally.

On a personal note, my wife gave birth to the newest member of our household recently. Jack is our second child (we also have a daughter called Mia). It’s been an exhausting and rewarding couple of weeks, much easier to enjoy the second time around when everything is a bit less scary.

On a professional note, we are thrilled to announce that a new member has joined our team! Sam Orchard is a very talented web designer and we are very fortunate to have secured his services for the next 30 years (Sorry Sam, didn’t we say?…;)

This of course means we will soon have more capacity to offer our customers, who have been very patiently waiting for free slots. (I know that sounds like marketing rubbish, but it’s true!). As mentioned Sam is very talented, but design talent only represents 50% of a truly great web designer. The other 50% is the ability to understand how to make a website a ruthlessly commercial sales generation tool. We estimate in 2-3 weeks we will start booking Sam out in earnest, but one or two of you may get to work or speak with him before this date.

Anyway, enough waffling, we’ll get to work mechanically reclaiming all the good bits of Sam and reforming them into a tasty turkey twizzler of a web designer. (Ignore the negative connotation of turkey twizzlers, I like the alliteration)

Great News! It’s actually very easy to write good text for your website. You just need to follow a few simple rules:

1. Nobody Cares About You
   You get to pay for the website, but realise that it’s not actually for you…it’s for your customers. Visitors to your website don’t care about you…they care about themselves. Visitors don’t care how many years experience you’ve got, who you’ve worked with or how you started out. If they want that information they’ll click on your “About Us” page.
2. Everybody is Selfish
   Visitors do care about what you sell, how it will help them, what it costs, how soon they can get it, what guarantees they get. You know…stuff that matters.
3. Everybody is in a Rush
   It doesn’t matter to your visitors if you are not great at writing long wordy sentences full of business speak and jargon. In fact, they’d prefer it if you didn’t anyway. Our golden rule is say what you want to say in as few words as possible. Bullet points and lists are ace. Big long boring paragraphs are not, because you will be the only one reading them.
4. Don’t be Self Centred
   Try to use the words “we” and “I” as infrequently as possible. Try to use the word “you” as frequently as possible. Following this rule helps you to connect with your customers. Not following this rule means you are going to bore your visitors (potentially to death). If you struggle with this, go ahead and write your “About Us” page first. Let it all out.
5. So What?
   Remember the old marketing adage “Benefits, not Features”. Every time you talk about a feature of your product or service, try and turn that sentence into a benefit that your customer will understand. (simple example: using a particular material is a feature, a smooth finish is a benefit)
6. Take a Bullet!
   The easiest way to write any web page is just with bullet points. It makes you focus on what’s important and stops you getting distracted by wording and style. Once you have a bullet list of all the things you want to say on that page, put them in order of relevance and then you can flesh out each point into a sentence or short paragraph.

SERVICES

The best place to start writing is for the Services page*. This is where the bulk of the information needs to be, and you can focus on what your products and services are.
Writing your Services page should help you to get a good idea of the aspects of your service that you really want to focus on. Whether it’s a particular product, your style of working or your prices, identifying what makes your company different will help you with the next stage – writing your Home page.

* If you have “we & I” syndrome as per rule 4, start with your about us page.

ABOUT US

The About Us page is the place to really focus on your business, the experience, skills and qualifications you have that make you able to provide your fantastic products and services. This is the page to tell people about how long you’ve been established, the story behind your formation, or your firm’s ethos.

HOME

Think of your home page as a magazine cover or a product on a shelf in the supermarket. Use as few words as possible to articulate the MOST IMPORTANT messages about your product or service. Customers will on average spend 3 seconds reading your home page, before deciding whether to click “back” to Google or to stay on the site.

Your Home page should never have more than 1 – 4 short paragraphs (preferably sentences), ideally with headlines, which briefly explain what your company can do for your customer.

Try to structure your paragraphs a little like this:

“You need X because of Y, and our service helps you with this you because of Z”

ANY OTHER PAGES

Follow the simple rules listed above and you should be just fine to create the pages from herein.

(I should point out that our copywriter Hannah wrote most of this content!)