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Web Marketing

Make sure you don’t make these mistakes when it comes to SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is effectively optimising your site in such a way to improve its rankings on sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Every website should be built with SEO in mind but often, especially older sites are lacking some of the basic elements let alone the advanced SEO techniques.  If your website seems to be lacking in traffic and you cannot find your site on the first page or so on Google for your mains search terms, you need to start looking at your SEO.

If when you had your site built, you did ensure it was SEO friendly, that may have been great to start with, but over time this will need to be tweaked and new pages optimised to allow your SEO to build.

Getting SEO wrong can be worse than not doing it at all as you can find your site penalised and therefore removed from the search engine listings entirely. Simple mistakes such as putting text in white on a white background or having duplicate pages with the same content on can get your site blacklisted. When doing SEO be sure to use a company or individual that has the relevant experience to carry out the work.

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Web Marketing

Building up your business through referrals

As a business owner, it is important to constantly be thinking of ways in which you can grow your business. You may decide to do a Pay per Click advertising campaign, invest your time and money in SEO to improve your organic rankings and therefore increase traffic to your website, or to get your existing customers to help.

If you are confident that you offer a good level of customer service and your customers are happy with the products or services you sell, then you can use this to boost your business. Offering existing customers a referral process where they get rewarded will undoubtedly help bring in more customers. You need to make sure that the referral process is quick and easy. Making people wait months for their reward can put some people off. If you have an ecommerce website then you can automatically send people a voucher as soon as the person they referred places an order. This may be money off voucher, free delivery or free gift.

You may also want to give the new customer a special offer too as this will entice the refer and the new customer into completing a sale. Be sure you have a way of tracking the referrals effectively to ensure everyone gets the reward they should.

 

 

 

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Social Media Marketing

Free marketing through social media channels

If you keep in touch with what is happening in the world of business then you will quickly start to realise the impact that marketing can have on a product or an entire company. You may have an amazing idea for a product or a service but without the correct sort of marketing, it is hard to let people know that your business or product even exists.

There are numerous ways of marketing and some avenues work better for some businesses that for others. Doing little or no marketing will make it virtually impossible to gain success and in turns sales and this is often the reason why many companies fail.

Marketing can turn out to be expensive and you need to insure that before you commit to spending a huge chunk of your budget, it is going to get you results. You may want to start off with social media marketing which is a great platform for all types of businesses. You can often do this for free, just investing a bit of time each day or week to manage the accounts. Even just having a presence on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter for example can gain you a few enquiries and if nothing else, will give you a place to showcase what your company offers and give your customers a way of contacting you other that the usual.

 

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Web Design

What to include in your first website

If you have not got a website at present and are looking to have one created, it can be easy to get carried away with the amount of functions and gadgets you can add in to it. Each time you add something new to your site, it will most likely incur and additional cost. If budget is limited then you may want to create a list of the essential items you need to have on the site and then the additional ones that you would like to have if budget allows.

When taking to your designer and programmer, be honest about the money you have to spend and explain to them what the main purpose of the site is. If it is to sell products online then the checkout process will need to be straight forward and easy to use. If it is to gain enquiries then you need to make sure you have plenty of opportunities to add in call to action banners and buttons.

Always ask the designer to create a visual of a few of the pages so you can see what it is going to look like before they start to build it for you. This will allow you to make any changes at an early stage hopefully without creating too many additional costs.

 

 

Categories
Web Design

Website navigation tips and mistakes to avoid

Your navigation bar on your website is of utmost importance. It is the place most people will go to when looking for something on your site. It is often positioned along the top of the site so people can quickly go from page to page to find what they are looking for. Moving the navigation to a different position can be potentially damaging to your website visits as you may find that people struggle to know where to go on the site and end up leaving.

If you find you have far too many buttons that need to go on the navigation, rather than splitting it on to two lines which can look messy and may not display well on all devices, think about how you can group them. If you have a tab for each of your services, then see if you can split them into one or more group to shrink the space needed on the nav bar. It may be that some of your services are for businesses and other consumers. If this is the case then you may have the main business and consumer buttons with dropdowns for the services within those categories.

Having the navigation move down the page as you scroll can be another relatively simple but effective technique. It allows visitors to navigate quickly without having to keep scrolling back up. This is ideal for sites with longer pages.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Web Marketing

Deciding who to use for your marketing of your business

Marketing can eat up a large amount of the budget for a business, but if done correctly, should eventually start to pay for itself. You should get back more than you invest in marketing to make it worthwhile, although some results may take some time to come through. Online marketing is vast and there are many areas that you can invest in. Social media marketing, search engine optimisation and pay per click are all forms of marketing that require time and possibly a budget to implement.

You can choose to use internal staff, third party individual or marketing agency. All forms of marketing have advantages and disadvantages and who you choose to use is often dependant on the budget as a marketing agency will offer you great service but it will usually cost more than a using a freelancer.

If you chose to keep the marketing of your business in-house, then you should look to employ someone who has experience and knowledge in this area. The role may not need to be full time to start with but as your business grows you can look to grow your marketing into a department should you need to.