Author: David

Categories
Web Marketing

A drop in rankings

If you or your web marketing company track your website rankings then you may become aware of a sudden drop at times in some of your main key phrases. This can happen for a number of reasons and often requires some in depth investigating to find out what has caused the change.

It may be that the search engine such as Google has introduced a new part or update to their ranking algorithm with has caused your site to drop. If not, then it is possible that your competitors have up’ed their game recently leaving your trailing behind.

All rankings do go up and down daily and also can vary dependant on what device you are using, if you are logged in to a Google account, your browsing history and also your geographical location, so when comparing rankings week by week you need to ensure that the results are accurate.

 

Categories
Web Marketing

Competitor analysis

Sometimes it can be frustrating to see that one of your competitors are constantly ranking above you for some of your major search phrases. It may be that they are a relatively new business or that they have no other employees and are smaller than your company, but somehow they are still able to appear above you.

Carrying out competitor analysis is very important in marketing as not only will you be able to see what they are offering their customers on the front end of the website, but if you know where to look and have the right tools, you can also see how they are competing in terms of search engine optimisation etc. It may be that they are building up a huge number of quality, relevant links that is helping them or that they have micro sites for their main products or services. With this information, you can then compare the sites and marketing to see how you may be able to improve yours.

 

Categories
Web Design

Give your website a facelift

Construction site crane building a blue 3D text. Part of a series.

As with most things, over time they become dated and need to be updated. A website is no different and often with technology moving so fast, a website will need updating on quite a regular basis.

If your website is over 12 months old and you have not really changed much apart from adding a bit of new content to the site then you should seriously consider carry out an update. It may be that you just update the design, changing the way the content is delivered or adding in scrolling images etc. You may decide to add videos to the home page or change the way the navigation displays. You may also want to update the functionality of the site by introducing calculators or little widgets that tell the customer information that is useful to their visit. For a holiday website this may be the current exchange rate or weather predictions for this time of year.

 

Categories
Social Media Marketing

Using Twitter to market your business

Many businesses are now coming on board with social media marketing. Social media marketing is a fairly new concept where companies promote their products and services to customers through sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Twitter is often harder to use for marketing than Facebook for the average business and some people simply do not understand how it works. Twitter has grown more in the last nine months than in the previous five years and this growth is expected to continue.

When creating a tweet, make sure that the voice is your own and that you bring a bit or your personality or brand in to it. This will make people more likely to click on your links and retweet your posts.

Try and use keywords in your tweets as keywords are key when it comes to online marketing. Make a list of keywords and use them in your tweets. You only have a limited number of characters so chose your word carefully.

Categories
Web Marketing

Analysing time spent on your site

There are many different stats packages out there that will help you understand how visitors find your site and what they do when they are on it. Google Analytics is by far the most popular stats package and best of all it is free to use.

When you have your website set up on Google Analytics you can start to track the progress of a visitor through your site. You can find out how they found you, which page they landed on first and where they went from there onwards. You can also see how long they spent on one page. If you find that people are not spending very long on a page then leaving the site altogether it may be that you are attracting visitors that are looking for something you do not sell or offer or that your site is too hard for them to navigate round.

 

Categories
Web Design

Checking your mobile device stats

All websites should be compatible with mobile phones and tablets and there are a number of ways to do this. Some businesses have a mobile version of the website created, the site will automatically detect if you are using a mobile device and often switch you to the mobile version. You may opt for an app to be built for you to allow your users access to a more mobile based version of your site, if you do this you should still ensure that your main website is compatible too.

There are a large number of people using their mobile devices to view websites and this number is growing year upon year. You need to ensure that you are checking the statistics for your mobile version of the site to see if there are any pages that have a particularly high bounce rate. If they do then you may need to revisit that page and check it is displaying correctly and functioning as it should.