Author: David

Categories
Web Marketing

Mobile marketing – how does it work?

Mobile marketing is a great way to reach a wider audience. Not only can you reach people browsing on their computer at home but also those that use their phone or other mobile devices such as a tablet.

There are many ways to do mobile marketing. Some companies have an app created to allow the user to download it on to their mobile device. The app is often a mobile optimised version on their website. It may have limited functionality but often there is everything a mobile user is looking for and most importantly it is quick and easy to navigate round.

You can also do SMS marketing where you text your customers with details of offers and updates. This again is a great way to get instant traffic to your site but can be a little costly if sending out a large number of messages on a daily / weekly basis.

 

 

Categories
Web Marketing

Bounce rate reviews

Bounce rates are extremely important when it comes to analysing an Adwords campaign. If a visitor clicks on your ad and visits your website and then leaves on the same page without clicking through or interacting with the website then they are counted as a bounce. The bounce rate is recorded as a percentage of the total visits, so for example, if the bounce rate is 50% then half of your visitors are leaving at this stage.

A High bounce rate (above 30-40%) can indicate a problem with your site or a problem with your keywords / adverts within Google Adwords. You need to have a look at the ads and keywords that have the highest bounce rate. Check that they are relevant to what you are selling and that they are going to the correct page within your site. It is often not advisable to send every ad through to the home page if there is a more relevant page.

 

Categories
Web Design

Creating visuals for your client

If you are a web designer then you will already know how important visuals are to a website creation process. Every website should be visualised prior to programming to ensure that all parties (i.e the client, designer and programmer) agree on how it should look and function. At this stage it is relatively easy to change things around but if left until it has been programmed it can take a lot longer to do incurring more costs for the client or the web management company.

Ideally present your client with a few variations of the website visual to allow them to see how it could look. I would advise showing them on a computer screen (not just printed visuals) as the colours often look different when printed.

Colourways can make a big difference to the way a website looks so you may want to experiment with these to show your client.

Categories
PPC

Cutting your costs on Adwords

Google Adwords is a great way to advertise your business or specific products and services. It allows you to create adverts that are triggered by someone doing a search for the keywords you have bid on.

Although Adwords can be very effective, it can also be very expensive, especially if you are bidding on competitive keywords and phrases and targeting generic locations. You need to be able to set the Adwords campaigns correctly to cut down on wasted clicks. If you are targeting too many generic phrases you may find that you are having clicks through to your site (that costs you money) that are never going to convert as you do not offer what the customer is looking for.

There are many ways to reduce your spend on Adwords whilst still receiving a good number of clicks, you just need to qualify the traffic to your site.

Checking bounce rates etc will help you establish which of your keywords are working and which are not.

Categories
Web Design

Creating an easy to use website

When developing a website you need to consider many points. 1) Does it look and feel how you want it to? 2) Is it user friendly and easy to use? 3) Is it SEO friendly and will rank on the search engines and? 4) Have you got all the functionality that you need?

It is worth making a note of these questions so you can note what you want under each heading. It may be that your website is ecommerce based, meaning you want people to buy online, then your focus will be different to that of a site trying to gain enquiries.

It can be easy to get carried away with adding in functionality to a site that may not be needed. The more functionality the more to go wrong, so my advice is to keep it simple to start with and then build on it once you know what your customers need and want.

Categories
Web Design

Choosing a web designer

When it comes to choosing a web designer, you need to establish what is important to you. It may be that price is the main factor and you want something for as cheap as possible, or it may be that money is not really the main concern and quality and speed are most important.

Once you have a rough idea of what you want to accomplish with your website you can start to obtain quotes from web designers. Some designers will design and program a website others will only design it in which case you would need to find a programmer too. Ideally you want to use a company or individual that can offer both otherwise you may have issues with communication between the two.

Be wary of always going with the cheapest quote you have as you may find that quality suffers because of it. Always ask to see working examples of work they have created and possibly even to speak to some of their past or current clients to get a review.